The interesting question is not that a society may have failed, but that it avoided failure

From Doomsday Scenarios Make Better Fiction Than Science, Says Researcher Karl Butzer by David Ochsner.

Collapse becomes possible when people cannot collaborate to find solutions, and that is rare. In most situations, disasters are avoided because people succeed in pulling together to confront crises. The interesting question is not that a society may have failed, but that it avoided failure. That is the lesson.