The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.
First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.
Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.
Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.
Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.
Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.
In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).
Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.
In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.
It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.