Some of the key concepts of our society are badly understood. Capitalism, money, corporations, human nature..

Capital is in its origin the capacity to increase "head" (cap) of cattle.

Modern society has split up society into pieces that can owned. Ownership and property are key concepts also poorly understood. Capital is part of a larger process of flow and belief as a society reproduces itself. The separation of capital ownership from the whole leads to strategies of sub-optimization: optimizing capital ownership rather than societal well-being, for example.

Capitalism has gone through a development ever more abstract , such as  the shift from industrial to finance capitalism (capital is invested in capital, not industry or service)we have been living through. What next? (see Wealth).

Jarred Diamond's Collapse shows the natural tendency of capital to over extract and over pollute.

Joseph Tainter's The Collpase of Complex Societies shows that elites over spend on social infrastructure, because they own it and use it to extract wealth- till collapse.