Decay and default: "The imposition of societal breakdown over a lengthy period, but without the application of massive destruction."

After each battle there was increased economic chaos and societal breakdown.

If it is not done voluntarily in a timely manner, then it will be done driven by hunger and societal breakdown.

A goal of economic reconstruction is to show the need for multiple, yet integrated solutions to societal breakdown.

But to make staggering onstage a metaphor for societal breakdown takes some doing.

Battlestar Galactica is a great example of this, with it's themes of societal breakdown against an inscrutable enemy.

Some alarmists scoff at the notion that such organizing will stave off the societal breakdown they see coming from large-scale computer failures.

Forced to go elsewhere, other men repeat the scenario, eventually leading to complete societal breakdown.

Irksome, surely, but as an emblem of societal breakdown in this year of Kosovo, so what?

However serious the immediate crisis in 1958 might have been, it was not the same kind of international and societal breakdown that had taken place in 1940.