So how do we move society forward?
How do we, on the one hand, generate an alternative vision ... not of a desirable society ... but of how to move forward ... a theory of public management which billions of people could use to formulate strategies to intervene in systems processes instead of inveighing against baddies (or, worse, shouting at the baddies in the hope and expectation that they will "do something").
How do we think about, map, and measure these social forces in a manner analogous to the way in which Newton first elucidated the concept of force, demonstrated, for the first time, that it could be measured (using the ingenious idea of measuring how far he could jump into the wind and away from the wind and subtracting one from the other), asserting that the same things controlled the movements of sailing boats, falling apples and the movements of the planets, and then mapping all those forces.
From that one learned, among other things, to put keels on sailing boats. But ... yeah and now what about that climate for innovation ... one also needed chronometers, lighthouses, charts of the seas, means of paying lighthouse keepers etc etc. None of these could be envisaged by politiicians (although some were indeed prepared to be persuaded to pay for eg the development of chronometers).
So now we need to make explicit our theories of funding research ... not merely to understand how the universities have been "deliberately" destroyed to stop them encouraging people to think and to make sure that no one can do any adventurous research or publicise the results (although it would do no harm to publicise what is actually going on ... but, as Chomsky has so often pointed out, ignorance of these matters is largely a function of the role the media play in perpetuating our destructive system.)