It's all about giving high paying, long term jobs to political allies and family members and less about preserving one of the most fascinating cultures the world has ever seen.
Seriously - to achieve high-ranking status in a human organization is to become embroiled in politics. At some point in the hierarchy, politics becomes the main function of your position. As a result, people who are skilled at politics are disproportionately represented at the highest ranks of every organization, and those people are very rarely the "true believers".
I worked at a trucking company for seven years. I was in process improvement, and my focus was in improving efficiency, reducing losses and damages, and being able to measure the impact of organizational changes. The levels below me were concerned with moving individual pieces of freight and their relationship with individual customers. The levels above me were focused on reducing costs and increasing both profit and revenue - I couldn't have cared less about overall revenue, generally speaking. The levels above that were concerned with trends in the competitive marketplace and long-term growth. Above that? Managing to nudge the entire organization in one direction or another in service to one or more very long-term initiative.
Basically, the higher you go in an organization, the less actually matters about what the organization does, at least from your perspective. Leading a priesthood, managing a trucking company, writing legislation, maintaining a bureaucracy... there's a lot of overlap in skills.