Comment by ANewFormation

You're not going crazy, they are. But even once things start falling apart, inertia alone can give the appearance of productive movement for years to come.

This is probably why when somebody looks to try to find the cause for e.g. the collapse of the Roman Empire there were a surprisingly large number of potentially serious issues all happening simultaneously.

The reason is that the empire probably collapsed decades before its fall and so the stupid decisions and actions all continued to pile up, seemingly without consequence. All until the inertia finally ran out and suddenly the entire house of cards came crashing down.