das monde:

Arnold Toynbee [...] has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history.

One of the consequences of 'Western Civilization' haven risen so far and so fast is that it has also almost certainly evolved capabilities that will allow it to reconfigure itself in ways that can both be more personally satisfying to the entire population and more energy efficient at the same time. Propaganda has proven such a powerful tool that it is quite conceivable that a society could be converted to an orientation that favors reduced material and energy consumption in return for more equality and opprotunity for all.

What we need is a leader and a movement that can do for capitalism what Gorbechev did for Soviet Communism, but with better control of the direction that the transformation takes. Social orders are entirely human creations and no social order is but that the thinking of the population makes it so. It only took a little more than a quarter century for US wealthy elites to transform US society from one with a powerful central government and increasing equality to one where the central government has become the creature of elites and is being used to despoil the masses in the interests of the elites. (~1950 - 1980) It would seem that it should be possible to reverse that process even quicker that the time it took to create and put it to work.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."