Very well written and thought out.

I often view culture from a self-organizing principle, and in the various social media sites on the internet, various 'cult cultures' will acquiesce and individuals with tastes varying from low to high will assimilate into their respective self-organizing network through random or perhaps teleological (as in, 'water seeking its own level') branching.

One point of hope is that thinking versus feeling cults have better chance of survival in a decentralized network then in a top-down centralized command-control environment.

Case in point would be that the historical shift from thinking culture to mass media feeling culture is attributed largely to the efforts of Edward Barnays, father of modern 'Public Relations', whose sales tactics included appealing to the feeling a product delivers, not its functional, nor necessarily aesthetic, and especially not its intellectual value. Of course, mass communications then was more hierarchical if not precisely a top-down centralized command-control structure compared to today's network topology...