Underlying the asset bubble, the housing bubble, the commodities bubble, is the Lie bubble, or the dishonesty bubble, the Big Disconnect, call it what you will.
I think the sad truth about human nature is that people lull each other into a culture of mutually accepted lying: it becomes so familiar that we barely notice. Young adolescents often notice it, but then as they grow up they learn to live with the lies. "Lies" not necessarily in the sense of deliberately told untruths, but the unspoken acknowledgement that society somehow operates better if we all agree to ignore certain profound contradictions.
For example, the lie that we can just grow our economy on into the future without despoiling the earth. That we can go on enriching ourselves while vast swaths of the third world starve in squalor. That the social darwinism that constitutes fundamentalist capitalism can be reconciled with a benevolent civilized self image. That greed is good. That an unregulated marketplace is somehow "fair". That debt is an asset, and that repackaging it is a productive enterprise. That, on God's green earth, there could possibly be such a thing as "pollution credits".
We ignore these contradictions because this is how we can be players in the economic game. To embrace these contradictions is to risk being ridiculed, being ostracized, to become an economic outcast, to risk going broke.
An economic collapse will cause much suffering, but the silver lining may be that people see that there is no further benefit in ignoring these contradictions. The belated realization that the world is now too small for zero sum games, and that this one is collectively killing us.