Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist who used this diagram to illustrate the inheret cycle of global and societal disasters. As we go through each of the inner circles, it shows one phase feeding in to the next. The egotism of hubris drives the acceleration of technology; the benefits of which promote the population; creating an improved state, susceptible to changing back into hubris. The outer circles represent consequences for each state’s instability.

Conversely, Bateson believed that a healthy balanced state should sound something like this:

A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.