What you often see in a high pressure situation - I'll start with a simpler, physical situation and then work my way up in the level of abstraction - such as what to do to get a car unstuck from the mud, say, is that there may be tussling every which way over an approach to the problem.
There may be as many opinions involved as there are participants and observers, but what eventually wins out is the correct model of the forces at work and the experience and seniority that backs up such a model. It could be that someone who misapprehends the problem is given the reigns, but then the feedback is instantaneous in that the approach fails, and that person's competence is put into question.
Ultimately the result of such a limited conflict is collective deference to whoever successfully solves the problem, an authority that can creep beyond the boundaries of that particular conflict.
Even here, there are complex social conditions that can distort and foil a simple problem such as this, but then scale up the problem further up in the levels of social organization and things become much more complicated - and in a weakened society, fraught - when you begin to speak of high pressure conflicts and problems in a complex society.
What of an incredibly long arc of an incredibly complex social system? In which feedback to responses to a given set of problems can take decades to emerge as it fans out, and which then must be studied for more decades in turn, and which presents additional nested problems of conflict in defining the problems, formulating responses, and perceiving and apprehending the feedback in the first place?
Whatever is going wrong is going wrong in relation to a stream of converging activities of interrelated factions and classes, which in their mutual interrelations, dependencies, and antagonisms, have produced the totality of society in the first place.
Amongst the differing factions, classes, etc. are different values and different ways in viewing society and the world, and those differences can only be subsumed into a higher level unity in a tenuous and imperfect way.
And as general dysfunction accumulates to a fever pitch, the impetus to seize the reigns grows. To seize the reigns is to bring the current arrangement to an end, and a new beginning is instantiated in the image of the victorious power.
With a crisis of this complexity however, the various antagonisms won't vanish as the dust clears. No, such a process is likely to be drawn out in a series of spasms, further weakening the totality of participants.
