What, did you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time recently?
It's also not particularly challenging to see society lacks any intrinsic defence from the most ruthless and greedy from advancing in any given power structure inside of it, it's a long term damage so it's abstracted away while more immediate issues take presedence, it's in our DNA to give too priority to immediate threats, while long term problems such as this don't make the top 10 (another example being climate change, etc)