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Defenses Against Cascade

The best defense against a cascade that I have discovered is having a monolithic alliance structure, where the 'alliance' amounts to one corporation. It is much harder to put a corporation into a cascade than it is an alliance, because CCP has structured corporations as dictatorships with one absolute authority. Alliances have competing CEOs and a variety of different interests; the monolithic corporation may still have some amount of infighting and scheming, but much less than the more common oligarchy. The only example of a monolithic alliance that I know of is Goonswarm, which is the Goonfleet corporation, plus several much smaller member corporations. Rather than having an oligarchy and shared power between a number of member corporation CEOs, the monolithic alliance has only one leader, and the consent or membership the ancillary corporations (while helpful) is not strategically necessary.

It is also helpful to have an ethnic, national or cultural identity outside of EVE to bind the pilots to identifying with the alliance. There are a number of ethnic organizations in EVE, and these tend to be more resistant to cascade than non-ethnic organizations. The smaller the ethnic group or more isolated the language, the better a defense against cascade there is. Right now, Russian and German players have a number of alliances which they could join, so the need to stick to a particular alliance is minimal. There is only one Polish alliance, by contrast, and perhaps two Hungarian alliances. Those pilots are very invested in their alliance's health. 

In practice, this means that a monolithic or ethnic/national/cultural alliance can be repeatedly brought to a state of helplessness, but it is very hard to shift pilot identification and induce collapse.

What the Hell is All This Psychology Crap

Does this all sound like unscientific bullshit? It is! This is a purely anecdotal theory that I've pulled out of my ass based purely on extensive observation, and you might wish to discredit it merely because I'm an obviously biased Goonswarm partisan. That said, everything else I included about learned helplessness, rationalization, failures in cognition and the inability of humans to predict their future states accurately has been tested rigorously and is taken from behavioral economics or psychology. Here's some links about this kind of research to help you waste time at work and/or avoid common errors, such as a persistent belief in classical economics and/or libertarianism.   

Dan Ariely wrote Predictably Irrational and gives a pair of very cool talks at TED.com. Watch them.

Dan Gilbert wrote Stumbling on Happiness and hey, wow, he also gives a couple of amazing talks.

Martin Seligman wrote a crapton of books, uncovered the theory of learned helplessness, and coincidentally enough also has given a talk.

While this has nothing explicitly to do with the theory of the failure cascade, if you're interested in psychology or espionage or just really enjoy manipulating people, you should probably read Robert Cialdini's Influence.