Perhaps: The prosperity from the postwar mechanisms of industrial development in the West are essentially idiot-proof -- their greatest-generation architects knew their own children rather well. But as a result the basic character of society is no longer attuned to the production for the common good. Although sustained by the baseline prosperity of the industrial mechanisms, its sense of phenomenological and social reality largely comes from mediated forms, such as television.
So the pillars of society are strong, but the fabric is weak. The mechanisms of this industrial prosperity can be populated with some fraction of the population, and there's no need to make it a meritocratic selection. Those not incorporated into the mechanism are simply surplus, in the society's view.
The fundamental reversal that must happen to avert the emergent technological-industrial dystopia is perhaps that we need to shift from thinking of the shared life as the population of set industrial forms to the more basic awareness that the social perspective necessarily implies the totality. The proper question: What are all of us going to do now? And with the robustness of the industrial forms, that question can be answered as boldly as possible. Otherwise, I doubt that humanity will be the most salient aspect of the coming world.
Perhaps.