I am not sure how to work with the way you frame this

When civilisations fail as systems - as gandhi used to say about British Imperialism - the people at the top are fine fellows they just dont understand what the system is compounding. This is also why einstein discussed in length how hard it is to move above a system you are stuck in. He foresaw technology's converging world as exactly such a crisis. Perhaps, the simplest quick read on this is ackoff - where he gets to defing a faied system as one where teh harder each profession tries the more it makes the system worse

http://www.acasa.upenn.edu/RLACo nfPaper.pdf from http://valuesystem.blogspot.com