Responding to signals and feedback

One of the most striking concepts in Diamond's book is that of the rulers and elite of a society becoming too insular from the actual society and thus unaware of the signals of pending problems; once they realise, it is too late to change.

In this sense, we must wonder whether the elite of society would be the ones most able to survive a collapse (and if so, they have no motivation to prevent a collapse) or whether they too would suffer.

Somewhat related to this is that it seems businesses are being more responsive to the trends in society than elite or politicians are; maybe because businesses are thinking long-term and elite or politicians are not. Businesses might, though not democratically elected, be more responsible to their share holders and customers and employees (through active media, NGOs etc) and thus responsive to changes. However the problem with business is, though they need a successful civilization/society/economy in order to exist, their focus is not on the success of society, their focus will be on profits or some other metric that is rather selfish (as with selfish, nationalistic, governments).

In this sense are the current systems of global governance helping or hindering in any improvements in our responses to the obvious destruction we are causing?

It would seem that the global formal and informal governance systems are not up to the job, but they themselves will protect themselves (and resist too many calls for change or competition for governing institutions) and we will be unable to solve global problems collectively, or as individuals.