Living in Entropy: System Decay and Psyches Under Late-Stage Capitalism (E2 of 5 in Series)

Navigating System Decay: Understanding Institutional Betrayal and Capitalist Realism

In this episode of PsyberSpace, host Leslie Poston digs into the concept of the 'Entropy Age' and its impact on mental health. The discussion covers how the decay of institutions like governments, healthcare, education, and information systems affects people's mental models and trust. Key topics include collective trauma, institutional betrayal, and capitalist realism. The episode explains how layered systems' failures and short-term survival thinking contribute to psychological stress, influencing individuals' perceptions of stability and future possibilities.

00:00 Introduction to the Entropy Age Series
00:51 Understanding Institutional and Economic Decay
02:15 Nested Systems and Digital Worlds
03:42 The Impact of System Decay on Daily Life
07:28 Collective Trauma and Institutional Betrayal
10:36 Capitalist Realism and Its Psychological Effects
12:37 Temporal Discounting and Short-Term Thinking
13:59 Recognizing Patterns and Moving Forward
15:44 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

Resources:

Navarro, J. & Tudge, J.R.H. (2022) Technologizing Bronfenbrenner: Neo-Ecological Theory. Current Psychology. 21:1-17
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Ribeiro, W. S., Bauer, A., Andrade, M. C. R., York-Smith, M., Pan, P. M., et al. (2017). Income inequality and mental illness-related morbidity and resilience: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 4(7), 554–562.
Hirschberger, G. (2018). Collective trauma and the social construction of meaning. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1441.
Irvine, A., & Rose, N. (2024). How does precarious employment affect mental health? A scoping review and thematic synthesis of qualitative evidence from Western economies. Work, Employment and Society, 38(2), 418–441.
Rakesh, D., Shiba, K., Lamont, M., Lund, C., Pickett, K. E., VanderWeele, T. J., & Patel, V. (2025). Economic inequality and mental health: Causality, mechanisms, and interventions. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 21, 353–377.
Rakesh, D., et al. (2025). Macroeconomic income inequality, brain structure and function, and mental health. Nature Mental Health. Advance online publication.
Li, M., Leidner, B., Hirschberger, G., & Park, J. (2023). From threat to challenge: Understanding the impact of historical collective trauma on contemporary intergroup conflict. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(1), 190–209.
Patel, V., Burns, J. K., Dhingra, M., Tarver, L., Kohrt, B. A., & Lund, C. (2018). Income inequality and depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the association and a scoping review of mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 76–89.
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2013). Dangerous safe havens: Institutional betrayal exacerbates sexual trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 26(1), 119–124.
Rönnblad, T., Grönholm, E., Jonsson, J., Koranyi, I., Orellana, C., Kreshpaj, B., Chen, L., Stockfelt, L., & Bodin, T. (2019). Precarious employment and mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 45(5), 429–443.
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587.

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Episode Transcript

Leslie Poston (00:12):
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host,
Leslie Poston. If you're newhere, this is the show where we
look at how psychology, media,culture, and technology shape
the way you think, feel, work,and live. This week, we're doing
a five episode short seriesabout what I'm calling the
Entropy Age. In the firstepisode, we stayed close to your

(00:35):
internal experience.
We talked about emotionalentropy, existential anxiety,
ontological insecurity, andanticipatory grief, and how
those show up when the futurestops feeling solid. Today,
we're going a little deeper intohow institutional and economic

(00:55):
decay shows up in people'smental models of the world,
certainly as less trust andsafety, but also less people
believing that any change ispossible. In this episode,
instead of focusing just onindividual feelings, we'll talk
about what happens when thelarger structures that are

(01:16):
supposed to help us, things likegovernments, health care,
education, workplaces, andinformation systems, start to
feel unstable, unfair, orhollowed out. You might already
feel this in an everyday way.Trying to get medical care feels
like a maze now.
Dealing with a landlord or amortgage company feels like

(01:38):
endlessly arguing with bots.Elections come and go, but
material conditions do not matchthe promises. Tech companies
roll out changes that reshapeyour job, social life, and sense
of privacy without asking. Itcan be tempting to treat each of
those as separate annoyances orseparate problems to solve. But

(02:01):
today, we're going to look atthem as signs and signals of
something broader.
The entropy of system decayunder late stage capitalism, and
what that does to the humanmind. Psychologists like Yuri
Bronfenbrenner have describedhuman life as a nested system,

(02:22):
where you have the close endlayer of family, friends, and
daily routine, and around that,you have workplace, school, and
local services. Outside of that,you have larger economic,
political, and culturalstructures. More recently,
though, researchers who build onBronfenbrenner have argued that

(02:43):
this picture needs to accountfor the digital world you move
through every day as well. Intheir neo ecological update,
Navarro and Tudge suggest thatyour closest environments now

come in at least two forms (02:55):
the physical places you inhabit and
the virtual spaces you spendtime in, like platforms,
portals, and apps.
These aren't just screens in thebackground. They act like real
settings in your life with theirown rules, relationships, and
risks. So if you think aboutyour nested systems now, it's

(03:17):
not just homeschool, work, andneighborhood. It's also the
group chat that keeps youinformed, the patient portal you
fight with to get care, thescheduling app that controls
your shifts, the social feedsthat carry news and
misinformation at the same time,And farther out, the bigger
cultural layer now includesthings like platform capitalism,

(03:40):
data extraction, and algorithmicsorting as part of how society
works. When things are goingreasonably well, you can count
on at least a few of thoselayers, offline and online, to
feel steady.
You might have a stressful jobbut a solid local community. You
might have a complicated familybut reliable public services and

(04:02):
an online support group thatactually helps. This system
hasn't been perfect over time,but previously there's been at
least enough structure that youcan plan ahead, adapt, and feel
like your efforts in lifematter. Under late stage
capitalism, however, many ofthose layers feel strained at
the same time. At the close inlevel, your family and your

(04:26):
household are stretched byrising costs, caregiving
responsibilities, and schedulesthat leave no time for rest or
connection.
On top of that, the digitaltools that are supposed to make
your life easier school apps,medical portals, banking sites,
etc often feel like extra jobsyou didn't apply for, especially

(04:47):
as AI gets shoved into everynook and cranny, regardless of
if it's actually helpful or not.At the workplace level, many
people are dealing with unstableemployment, algorithmic
management, performancesurveillance, or the do more
with less scrappy culture thattreats burnout as normal. At an

(05:09):
institutional level, you seeunderfunded schools, healthcare
systems that feel more and morelike billing systems than care
systems, and public agenciesthat are not only under attack,
they were already struggling tomeet basic needs. Their online
front doors can feel like walls.Phone trees that don't reach a
human, websites that crash, orchatbots that go on an endless

(05:32):
loop.
At the broadest level, you seeeconomic policy and political
choices that prioritize markets,investors, and donors over long
term social stability, whiletech policy is tilting more and
more toward large platforms andauthoritarian regimes rather
than users and workers. When theentropy age hits and several of

(05:56):
these layers weaken at once,people are feeling it. Small
problems that would once havebeen a bump in the road have
started to feel like cliffsbecause there's no safety net
above or below. Endless layoffshit harder when health care,
housing, and retirement alldepend on that job and when

(06:16):
applying for benefits meanswrestling with confusing digital
systems. A local climate eventhits you harder when
infrastructure maintenance wasdelayed.
A policy change harms morepeople when we already feel
close to the edge. From apsychological point of view,
this layered stress isn't just,more stress. It's changing how

(06:40):
your mind maps reality. You arelearning over time that the
structures around you may notfunction as advertised. You
learn that rules are flexiblefor those with power and money
and rigid for everyone else.
You learn that help, if itcomes, may arrive late, be
routed through a hostile system,or come with more strings

(07:02):
attached than you can manage.That learning is shaping your
expectations. It feeds theemotional entropy we talked
about in episode one, but nowyou can see that it's not
emerging from nowhere. It's aresponse to repeated encounters
with systems, both on the groundand on the screen, that feel

(07:22):
unreliable and oftenindifferent. When we think about
trauma, we usually think aboutindividual events like an
accident, assault, or a loss.
There's another level thatsociologists and psychologists
have written about, which iscollective trauma. This happens

(07:43):
when whole communities orpopulations go through events
that disrupt shared life in alasting way. We see this writ
large in The Ukraine andPalestine right now, but we also
are experiencing this right herein The United States. Examples
include natural disasters, wars,pandemics, forced displacement,

(08:04):
or long periods of economiccollapse. These events alter not
just individual nervous systems,but also the stories people
tell, the ways our communitiesorganize, and the level of trust
people place in each other andin institutions.
Over the past couple of decades,many people have lived through
repeated events that fit thisdescription. Some have lost

(08:27):
family and friends to publichealth failure. Others have seen
their neighborhoods reshaped byclimate crisis, policing,
gentrification, or industrialdisasters. Many have watched
financial crises, housingcrises, and political crises
follow one another withoutfeeling that any lessons were
learned by the people in charge.A related concept here is

(08:49):
institutional betrayal.
This describes the harm thatoccurs when institutions that
are supposed to protect orsupport you either cause harm,
dismiss harm, or ignore harm.Examples can include hospitals
that downplay safety concerns,universities that mishandle
abuse reports, governments thatminimize preventable deaths, or

(09:12):
corporations that endangerworkers while emphasizing
branding campaigns about care.When people experience
institutional betrayal on top ofcollective stress, the
psychological imp is deeper.You're not just dealing with one
difficult event. You're dealingwith the sense that entities you
relied on have been absent,negligent, or self protective in

(09:35):
a moment when you need them themost.
This can show up as a sharp dropin trust. You start to assume
that official statements areincomplete at best. You might
hesitate to report problems,seek help, or engage with
systems because you expect to beignored, blamed, or treated as a
liability. It can also show upas anger that has nowhere

(09:57):
obvious to go becauseresponsibility is spread across
so many actors. Collectivetrauma and institutional
betrayal tie directly into thefeeling that we're living in an
entropy age.
The very frame that is supposedto hold shared life no longer
feels solid. Rules and rightsfeel conditional. And that sense

(10:21):
of conditionality is feedingback into your inner life. If
nothing feels reliable, itbecomes harder to plan, harder
to trust, and harder to imaginea future that's not just more of
the same. Cultural critic MarkFisher used the phrase
capitalist realism to describe aparticular mood, the sense that

(10:44):
it's easier to imagine the endof everything than to imagine
the end of our current economicsystem.
The idea is that capitalism isno longer presented as one
option among many, but ispresented as the only plausible
way to organize society. You cansee this in the way policy
debates are framed. Proposalsfor strong social safety nets,

(11:08):
public health care, or robustlabor protections are often
treated as unrealistic or naive,even when versions of those
systems function very wellelsewhere. Meanwhile, high
levels of inequality, corporatesubsidies, and precarious work
are treated as unfortunate butnatural, like the weather.

(11:29):
Psychologically, capitalistrealism does something subtle.
It narrows the field ofthinkable futures. If you've
been told, implicitly orexplicitly, oh, this is just how
things are now, then any realdistress that you feel about
system decay gets redirectedinward. So instead of asking,

(11:51):
why is this structure designedlike this? People end up asking,
why can't I handle it better?It's very individualistic and
very American.
This interacts with the sense ofontological insecurity we talked
about in episode one. If theground rules are unstable, but
also described as inevitable,you're left with contradiction.

(12:13):
You know at some level that thesystem is not working for many
people, and at the same time youhear again and again there's no
real alternative. This tensioncan produce cynicism,
resignation, or a chronic lowgrade despair. Three things that
help authoritarian systems cometo power and thrive.

(12:35):
So there are three things wewant to deal with. Another piece
of this impact is temporaldiscounting, which is a term
researchers use to describe ourtendency as people to value
immediate rewards more thanfuture. Under conditions of
entropy like system decay,temporal discounting is not just
a bias. It can be adaptive. Whenyou can't trust that pensions,

(12:59):
housing markets, or even basichuman rights will exist in the
same form in twenty years orheck, even five or ten years,
focusing on the short termstarts to make sense to your
brain.
However, when many people arepushed into short term survival
thinking at the same time, itbecomes harder to organize for

(13:19):
long term change. Not becausepeople are inherently selfish or
shortsighted, but because thestructures around them keep
raising the stakes of eachimmediate decision while
obscuring longer term options.The result is a psychological
loop. System decay feeds shortterm thinking. Short term

(13:40):
thinking makes it easier forthose systems to stay in place
because long term organizingfeels out of reach.
Over time, this can reinforcethe feeling that nothing can
really change, which is one ofthe core emotional tenets of
capitalist realism. All of thistheory matters because it shows

(14:01):
up in our daily life in quietways. If you notice you treat
every interaction with a largeinstitution as a potential
fight, that might be a sign ofaccumulated institutional
betrayal. If you find yourselfassuming that new policies,
apps, or products will make yourlife more complex without giving
you any real say, that might bea response to repeated

(14:24):
experience with top downdecisions. If you catch yourself
thinking, this feelsunsustainable, but what else is
there?
That may be capitalist realismspeaking through you. If you
find it hard to picture anyversion of shared life that
looks more humane than the oneyou see now, even in
imagination, that tells yousomething about how deeply these

(14:47):
narratives have sunk into yourpsyche. Seeing the pattern
doesn't fix the conditions, butit does give you a way to
understand why your mind isfeeling the way it does right
now. You're not simply bad atadulting. If you feel worn down
by repeated encounters withdecaying systems, you are
registering that layers ofsupport and fairness that should

(15:10):
exist either don't exist orexist only for some.
Naming that can be a first steptoward not internalizing all of
the blame. It can also open upmore grounded conversations with
other people. Instead of saying,I'm just burned out, you might
say, I am tired of having tofight every system I interact

(15:30):
with. Instead of asking, Why amI so cynical? You might ask
instead, What have I learnedfrom my experiences with
institutions?
And what does that mean for howI move through them in the
future? In the next episode,we'll look at another piece of
the Entropy Age, how informationsystems and media ecosystems

(15:51):
contribute to this sense ofepistemic chaos, and what that
does to your ability to knowwhat's true and who to trust. In
this second episode on theEntropy series, we shifted from
the inner landscape to the outerstructures, and we talked about
nested systems under stress,collective trauma, institutional
betrayal, capitalist realism,and the way system decay nudges

(16:15):
people towards short termsurvival thinking and quiet
resignation. If any of thismatches your experience of
dealing with jobs, agencies,platforms, or public
institutions, I hope it givesyou a way to see your reactions
as understandable responses tothe structures around you and
not as proof that you arefailing at adulting. If this

(16:38):
episode helped, share it withsomeone who's been saying, I
feel like everything I interactwith is held together with duct
tape, and I don't know how tofeel during this collapse or how
to plan around The show noteswill include research and
resources if you want to explorethese ideas more deeply.
Next time in this series, we'lltalk about information and truth
under entropy, how it feels whenyour feeds, news sources, and

(17:02):
conversations are making realityfeel unstable, and how your
brain tries to cope with that.Thanks for listening to
PsyberSpace. This is your host,Leslie Poston, signing off.
Remember to stay curious, andtune in tomorrow for the next
episode and the series onEntropy.