Most Westerners hold mass society as the self evident highest virtue.
Yet mass society is a force of nature independent of human needs and desires.
Mass society can be considered independent from these human desires in part because of what I call ‘redundancy cushioning‘.
That is:
Any mass society is protected from deliberate human implemented change because against millions, a single person or handful of people can make no significant impact. In other words, the system is massively backed up; social protocols are proliferated across gigantic populations. A reigning social system persists not because of any inherent virtue but because it is impossible for any one person or group to cause meaningful change. Like collective checkmate, it is a phenomenon that arises from community in aggregate; a situation in which each individual ironically holds every other individual prisoner.
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I can relate to this theory, but I would accord more value to the potential of the individual to effect social change. One of the main problems with structural theories such as the one you present is the difficulty in understanding how change is possible. If it is “impossible for any one person or group to cause meaningful change”, then how are we to account for the fact that mass societies do undergo meaningful change?
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