Competition and Survival in Modern Academia

I'm not sure the social organization of hep-th has a lot to do with the field being stagnant. Granted, if there hadn't been 20 years of superstring hegemony there would have been 20 years of other theories that would have struggled to connect to reality.

The real problem is a lack of experimental results. No detection of dark matter. No measurement of the neutrino mass term. No sparticles. No observed proton decay.

The real social organization question is if the FCC turns out to be useful or if it's a distraction from machines specifically aimed at the neutrino sector, which is the one place where: (1) we know something strange is going on, and (2) there's no doubt that bigger detectors and higher event rates will turn up something.