Great works - like paid specializations - do more than reveal or create; they act as teachers, training the mind within a given state of being. They do this through repetition: if you think about something once, or do something just once, more than likely the effects of that thing are to fade away and dissolve without too much efficacy. With much sustained repetition, their effects become greater and more permanent, until there is enough momentum that they perpetuate themselves, and it takes more work to simply get rid of them.
If one obsesses over a given work and goes over it again and again, thinking about it and thinking about things through its lens, eventually one sees everything through that lens, and one cannot unsee it. It has been fixed into consciousness, and so that thought and that way to think can even be perpetuated institutionally, say through social or economic pressure on the part of its adherents in an academic establishment.
Further, what wage labor and class and caste systems have in common is that they serve as mechanisms - often very complicated ones - to guarantee the perpetuation of a given state of affairs. For example, crops, cupboards, circuit boards, and engines all imply extremely intricate fabrication disciplines that have to be rigorously repeated in the individual, and then reproduced in subsequent individuals.
The higher up the chain of specialization, and the more a given technology requires the unconditional perpetuation of all of those constituent parts, the more is at stake, the more a society needs to take care to ensure that its constituents are reproducing all those many repetitions in concert. This growth of idea and discipline, and the carrying out of repetition to sustain it, can be a very powerful tool, utilized for the good of human beings. But then it can also be the case that this growth does not turn off.
There then arises a condition in which there are so many ideas and projects vying for attention in the human organism, all of which demand to be reproduced in perpetuity, even when there is not enough energy to sustain them all, that it becomes impossible for everything to continue together in its present state.
It is here that crises and failures become teachers in their own right.
