Most political and economic commentaries assume we know the proper structures and relationships for morally ordering various sorts of human communities. If things look bad, we can just fix up our governments and our religious institutions and our various private organizations with technical changes and choices of leaders with better moral character. I’d say that we still have some problems even with nuclear and extended families — or tribes or whatever — and those are somewhat natural to us, that is, they arise out of the behaviors ‘built into’ our bodies, from genes and epigenetic effects and so forth.
We do not know how to order the sorts of complex communities which have grown up as our population densities have increased, our technology has developed, and our general capacity to do good or harm to each other has greatly increased.
And, yet, so many blab on, talking about how we can reform our existing systems, our systems I claim to be the products of minds from earlier centuries of human history when our complex situation could not be anticipated, our systems which are maintained now only because we’ve decayed into barbarian children, incompetent and illiterate and incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning necessary to solve our problems.
For the historical background to this decay of the Western mind in recent centuries, start with Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. You can also read Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation of How We Think and Ortega Y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses. Once you read such books, you can follow the references and recommendations to other good books which show how we got into this mess and, at least implicitly, how we can get out.