An excellent article. I’m in full agreement with your statement that ordinary people have no idea about the meta-trends that pass through society, especially when the superficial forms remain seemingly unchanged. Our brains aren’t adapted to cope with phenomenon that occur over longer time-spans and our intellects aren’t adapted to deal with systemic considerations. Provided people are fed with simple stories, they will entirely fail to notice huge significant meta-changes. Today the USA is well on the way to becoming a far-right totalitarian regime in which the “rule of law” is merely whatever happens to serve the Republican Party, yet the average US citizen remains utterly clueless and continues to imagine they live in “democracy and freedom.” Historians have the benefit of hindsight, and we must not be too critical of the desire to identify moments in time when in retrospect it seems a major systemic change occurred. After all, even historians prefer simple stories, not least because that’s the way to secure some sort of attention from ordinary people.