How we Inoculate The Social Nervous System Against Toxic Blame

Blame contagion is a relational collapse

As agency collapses, blame becomes the primary social tool for meaning-making.
Projection becomes: “Someone or something is the cause of our suffering .”
Trust evaporates. Polarization turns malignant.

What Actually Collapses

Predictive norms — social expectations become unstable

Coherence — shared models of reality splinter

Coordination affordances — fewer ways to work together

Institutional legitimacy — nothing feels trustworthy

Somatic integrity — bodies detect threat everywhere

Collective imagination — futures cannot be pictured

The result: chaos in the cultural nervous system.

The keys to restoring the collective human capacity to generate viable adaptive solutions—through affordance acuity, somatic integrity, and reconfigurable collective sensemaking may be hidden in plain sight.