This was brought home by a viewing of Gosford Park's depiction of a swarm of servants beavering away to enable 16, or so, upper class twits to live their vacuous "lifestyle."   I found the shooting scene particularly appalling.  Beaters driving the game, re-loaders, dogs fetching the downed birds, twits standing in one place and pulling the triggers as fast as they could.  The whole thing made my fists itch and long for the evolution of wing mounted, pheasant deployed, Air-to-Ground Anti-Bozo missiles.

What made the whole thing possible was a fortune made supplying the British Army with the "tools of the trade" during World War One.  Altman, with his usual wit, showed this war profiteer as the only one of the twits who did anything.  The rest of the upper-class mob could have been strangled at birth with no loss to anybody of anything.  

In an Over-the-Top kind of way, this is the situation most of us in the First World find ourselves in.  Our lifestyle depends (1) the cheap production of oil, (2) the cheap products cheap oil creates and (3) on cheap money being provided to Money Market Banks to provide cheap credit to purchase the cheap products.  Both the war profiteers profits and oil-in-the-ground are non-renewable, finite resources.  As both run out the lifestyles become harder to maintain until they become impossible to maintain.  

The psychological addiction to the lifestyle does not run out, however.  In the film people go to absurd lengths to create the illusion they are living the lifestyle and are desperate to hide the truth from other people who are also creating the illusion they live the lifestyle while hiding the truth.  

One can continue the analysis by the way the producing class (the servants) re-create the social hierarchy 'downstairs' with greater rigidity and pickle-sniffing while they know their world, as the world upstairs, is a dream.  They even have a discussion around the dining table, IIRC, about how the time of the Great House is ending.  Yet they spend their time doing (essentially) useless tasks for (evidently) illusionary purposes.

For my money this is the great problem to be solved:  How to make productive work prestigious, desired, worthy.  Once that is done moving to sustainability is a matter of technique, doing this way rather than that way kind of discussion.