We don’t fully understand how society works. There is an emerging field known as Cliodynamics that has started to identity cycles and feedback loops societies go through.
For instance, people raised inside of a generation tend to have a similar cluster of personality traits to some degree. These traits propel certain innovations forward , leave other things lagging, and cause a reaction formation in the next generation who tend to value opposite traits. These new traits then alter which innovations are pushed forward, which are left behind, etc.
There are additional cycles I’m not covering here, but together they form a sort of “super cycle” with great periods of unrest as well as innovation occurring when the lines converge periodically.