I think it's a good thing that democracies are often slow to respond to change, and sometimes decide change isn't such a good idea after all, and abandon it. This tends to be a stabilizing factor. Totalitarian governments can often quickly mobilize their resources, but they also have a tendency to go off half-cocked, and to paint themselves into corners. They are much more delicate than they appear, and often self destruct at the drop of a hat. Witness the Nazis and the Soviets.

Your second comment, "People tend to congregate with people from the same milieu and with people of similar opinions" seems to be the operative one here. In the past, the world one's grandparents lived in was not that different from that which one's grandchildren would inhabit. People could adapt socially and culturally to changing times. But technology has now created a world where for most people alive today the world is very different from the one they grew up in, we are all temporal exiles, the present is a different country from our past, and the future is unimaginable. Neither people nor cultures have evolved mechanisms to deal with this. The traditional defenses of humanity, family and community, cannot adapt or are deteriorating, and we see either extreme social dislocation where there appears little justification for it, or a desperate need to return to ancient norms (political, religious and cultural fundamentalism).

The techies talk about the singularity, but what I fear will actually happen is that the speed of change will soon exceed the ability of social structures or individual psychologies to cope. The question is, will the infinitely adaptable ape find a way to go on with ever higher levels of change, engineer a form of quasi-stability, or just fall apart as a society?