"In a society based on competition, you inevitably get fewer and fewer winners and more and more losers." -Wendell Berry

Perhaps that was the bottleneck, and its output was a single winner (humans) against all of Nature's losing systems, so now we compete inside a bubble, pretending that the separate marketed fanaticisms are not a collective suicide pact.

As for the numbers, how many does it take to successfully demand a right to know at every decision point what the true costs of everything are(VAT)? Is there a viable number of hubrans that actually want to know? When Nature finishes marking up prices for us, we'll find out (if we survive).