Because of this, much of the more gradual and greater scale changes - their effects not immediately observable or even fully comprehensible - need to be organized in relations of abstractions in service of speculative and comparative analyses, which requires a guiding ideology, which is built on very personal and subjective values, which is why you have such a variety of very strong opinions and approaches. This is also the simple structural nature of making judgments on a massive complex of judgments, but anyways.
You can run the political gamut of what constitutes "damage," such as moral degradation and the loosening of cultural mores, cultural changes from technological growth, demographic change, and immigration, political and economic corruption, concentration of wealth, the ballooning of debt, and so on. Depending on the person you talk to, one or the other of these issues could be a dire threat, or progress and a social good, or unavoidable functions of large scale change, or whatever else, and there are wildly differing ideas about what to do about them. Just as many ideas as there are about the very nature of the issues in question of course.
Taking into consideration too that a given society is based upon a set of collectively held values about what is good and right in the first place, and whether damaging that thing - or to use less loaded terminology, radically changing it or bringing it to an end altogether - would actually be a good thing, it is easy enough to veer off into the weeds pretty quickly and get bogged down in question begging. One is tempted to simply wave away such questions as "natural forces" that one can speculate about but not do a whole lot about to alter their directions on an individual level, and that such personal and subjective questions are largely relative anyway.
But I do want to take these questions quite seriously. As gradual and even abstract as so-called "damage" could be, given the structure that that damage is a part of makes it all too real in the sense that the structure those "damages" are affecting will eventually radically change, which involves objective and consequential facts that affect everyone in an unambiguous way. A capitalist world system for example is only one of many possible iterations of human organization and one can imagine all sorts of alternatives, but embedded within a historical moment as a global phenomenon, that particular iteration is for all practical purposes there to stay, and it is important to understand how everything is interacting, and the directions those interactions will take, whether or not one has the power to change anything substantial.
One analogy that comes to mind is the 2021 Surfside building collapse in Miami. That structure underwent a form of damage for years that was largely invisible and seemingly inconsequential to a naive observer, though plenty of people who knew better were warning about it the entire time: the fresh and salt water infiltration that ate away at major structural elements and eventually corroded the rebar within seems like a very slow and natural process on its own, but taken in relation with the immense amount of weight sitting above it, resting upon and depending on the full chemical and physical integrity of those elements, this was indeed a dire problem, which made its objective conditions known outside of any sort of technical knowledge or professional opinion when the structure collapsed, killing a lot of people inside.
So the seemingly minor and gradual infiltration of sea water and associated corrosion has to be put in relation to the collapse itself. The location of that damage, in relation to the greater structure, where something small and gradual is taking place at a crucial location at the base of an immense amount of weight makes that damage quite dire and serious, and as a result, massive. And of course the people who understood the issue and who knew better were right all along about what would happen, but they weren't listened to, or else half-measures were taken and can-kicking was done.
Not a lot of people would argue that a building full of living people going down - which could have been built any number of ways, or even evacuated and demolished and rebuilt at many different points of time - is a good thing for society, yet before the building actually went down, there was all sorts of hand wringing and feet dragging and waving away about that reality, with much of that behavior centralized within concentrated wealth, comprised of the owners and financial interests in the building, renter and unit ownership law structures which constrain collective decision making, and so on.
And that disaster was able to take place because the much more gradual problem affecting the eventual collapse was a more technical issue, understood with specialized scientific and engineering knowledge and building experience. Further, this issue was connected to many other issues, all of which could be construed as gradual "damage": the weakening of the surrounding land and sea level rise, the weakening of the construction industry and associated corruption, the weakening of a particular building's finances and the reluctance of management to spend money on expensive maintenance, the weakening of political organization and efficacy, the weakening in public trust and communication, the corruption of technical professions and the public's growing distrust of them, and so on. All of this knowledge has to be integrated and synthesized for a more broad understanding.
This simpler, material example was bad enough. but the problems are even more difficult with the social damages we are concerned with at the scale and time frame that our analysis is interested in.
Isolated issues like the concentrating wealth, or the wide ranging and cumulative damage wrought by Covid, or the ongoing abuses of the many forms of labor, or the environmental degradation, or whatever are all serious problems in their own right, but they have to be taken together as they all exist in relation to each other and advance together. Plenty interesting, as at greater and greater scales, these issues directly affect the lives of everyone living on the earth.
