rationalists-out-of-context:

this is just the natural way of things, a new space opens up, strange and creative things happen for a while, but eventually it falls into the attractor of drooling idiots getting milked by sociopaths

As a reminder this was one of the big arguments for aristocracy coming out of pre-WWI conservative traditions, that it reserved Culture as a playing field for the strange and creative avant-garde and kept the drooling idiots (and thus their sociopath predators) out

(This does require a worldview where “aristocrats” and “sociopaths organizing the world to draw power by feeding on the masses” are conceived as distinct categories)

((You know what’s a good exploration of that tension? Vampire fiction.)