We're in the destroying phase right now. Unless you live in China - I hear they're mostly doing well. Or middle of nowhere Africa, where there's nothing to destroy because there's nothing there.

But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.