A middle ground? No way! Heresy! Either we utterly demolish all social norms and structures and create a top-down designed society, or we enshrine all traditions as immutable for all eternity. Anything else is just a wishy-washy half measure.

In all seriousness...

The optimum in a complex multi-objective optimization problem is almost never at the edge, and nuances do in fact matter. It really feels like at some point circa the 1960s American society completely lost the ability to think in terms of anything other than immutable absolute dogmas (a.k.a. fundamentalism in all its forms) and simplified sound-bite slogans.

You can't improve closed systems. You just change who carries what cost and shout loudly that you've made things better.