On culture.................

 When a culture is working wholesomely, beneficent pendulum swings—effective feedback—do occur.  Corrective stabilization is one of the great services of democracy, with its feedback to rulers from the protesting and voting public. . . .

     But powerful persons and groups that find it in their interest to prevent adaptive corrections have many ways of thwarting self-organizing stabilizers—through deliberately contrived subsidies and monopolies, for example.  Or circumstances may have allowed cultural destruction to drift to a point where the jolts of correction appear more menacing than downward drift. . . .

     The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, making it more likely that others will give way.  With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.  Beneficent corrections of deterioration are not guaranteed.

-Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (2004)