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A society, taken as a collective, is like a privileged but lazy person. Because he is lazy, he doesn't do work that he knows ought to be done until the last minute, and sometimes when it's already too late. Most of these stupid self-caused mistakes are non-fatal, but even what he does accomplish cannot be called "efficient" by any reasonable measure of the word. Sometimes he becomes depressed and falls into a slump, during which more resources (mostly time) go to waste. Perhaps a shift in his working environment or some personal epiphany will infuse him with renewed optimism and hope, allowing him to achieve some modicum of temporary efficiency. Both nostalgia from the past and visions of the future will induce in him conflicting motivations, further undermining his ability to work and live along a straight, efficiency-maximizing path. All the while, some part of him is increasingly intellectually aware of this predicament, yet cannot bring himself to truly change.
In the same way, a society has its history and inherited legacy from the past. Great men rise to power with the hope that they can change the people through various means, such as law or revolution. However, conflicting interpretations of the past and future lead to contradictions in deciding what is to be done about the present. In the course of these conflicts we see that society may experience temporary spurts of revolutionary or cultural motivation, but they are never successful in their articulated aims. The result is that the legacy of revolution ends up normalized in the existing societal character, which in turn has been shaped by a multitude of both knowable and unknowable factors that cannot be overcome simply by any clear set of progressive standards.
The privileged but lazy person from above who truly changes for the better cannot simply throw away his entire past identity and expect to make progress; he has to build from his existing base, good or bad, and morph himself. Likewise, the best sort of revolution is not one that tries to unify the society and force it along any one path, but one that attempts to rejuvenate its existing character. Through this perennial renewal of nebulous but universal philosophy, concrete change will come naturally. The progress will be slow and painful, but it is the only genuine way it can be done. Otherwise you just end up up with utopian dreams and failed states.
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