I think it's that we are quite good at fashioning our external environment to suit our needs (although not quite good at assessing the longer term impacts that could well defeat the purpose -- more on that later), but we've just begun to attempt self-referential fashioning or management. Democracy is the first attempt at that in all human history. Autocracy, authoritarianism and the like are still in the genre of external manipulation, wherein the direction of manipulative force is mostly outward towards those ruled upon. This is the natural, lower energy, higher entropy state of things, as it was in the earlier stages of biological evolution, so there is always a natural tendency of reversion back towards that state in any system.
Now, with that being said, there was a point in the evolution of life where it changed from just complex molecules influencing their external environment to a setup where *information* was encapsulated to transmit an optimal setup down the line, and, further, with the ability to improve the information as conditions change and/or new discoveries of optimality were happened upon.
With governance, we're now at that pivot point enabling the gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing it or destroying it and falling back (e.g. U.S. Constitution as an instance of this kind of thing). We've certainly recognized and stated the problem, which is a good start in an n-step process, but moving to the next step is tricky and we can easily fall back instead.
Good news is that much of our recent technology is akin to a vehicle for societal DNA, enabling all those things mentioned above -- gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing or destroying it -- enabling us to go way beyond near-time and near-space predictions of where our actions can go, what they could do (good or bad), and enabling us to choose a flexible best path. We can for the first time measure and forecast on fairly grand scales. That's the good news, but not all "molecules", per se, have accepted it, and fight hard to keep ignoring it, as it will require some change in their form, so resistance to change is another property to be assimilated into this kind of evolution.
These are the forces at play at this critical inflection point, definitely on par with all the other "threshold moments" in the overall evolution of the universe, to invoke some big history parlance.
-Greg
