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I'm not sure that 'we', collectively, are so bad at predicting the next big thing at all really. I believe that many individuals spot the next big thing but it can never begin to take hold until a number of the individuals come together to make it happen. Watershed stuff.

The problem lies in the very nature of paradigms - once spread throughout society they become stuck, they become the status quo, and 'we' collectively like the security and stability of a status quo. We like the familiar, we like sameness, it's part of our make-up as beings.

Many individuals among the collective DO see the next big thing, indeed some of them have seen the next big thing several big things down the line and have probably spent their entire lives waiting for the rest of us to catch up and have died not seeing their real big thing vision come even close to manifesting itself - they are the source of where the next big things come from but, being individuals among a majority, when they have the temerity, or perhaps under the circumstances it might be considered audacity, to speak out and begin suggesting that there ought to be a next big thing to replace the current big thing the rest of us say 'WHOA there, hold your horses. You are a heretic, the status quo is what we are at, what we want and what we need and it's the way it is and it should not change. Why SHOULD it change because it all works so well as it is? What you are suggesting is outrageous and obviously wrong. Off with his head (and so on)'.

This is also why we, collectively, KNOW that we are eating up the planet we live on when there is no escape from here but find it impossible to change the way we behave collectively - even though we know we are killing ourselves. Well our children's selves.