Here is how I think it may work. The world as we know it is an expression of what exists within the human mind. You take all those conflicting passions in your little soul and put them out there, the profanities, the spirituality, the disciplines, and desires, they are all there. The world is a reflection of what exists within.
Now there are some of pure spirit, let's say, who would say this is absurd. That we are in essence like subspecies, and one of those subspecies is the pornographers, and one is the priests, and so on, and that the world, rather than being a reflection of the mess within us is actually a simple quantifying of the subspecies that exist. To say this denies the essential conflicted nature of humans. The vast majority of humans are not of pure spirit. If this were so then most of art would have little basis. We are not only inwardly conflicted, we are defined by how we meet those conflicts.
This being the case then the argument that by changing the world we can change people becomes mistaken. The world is not what it is because of individual choices, but because of our aggregate make up. And people are not what they are because of the environment presented to them, rather the environment is what it is because of the people who made it.
If such an argument is truly the case then to change society we must not change the environment but the people live in it. To do otherwise creates an unworkable system which is doomed to failure. The answer for many of the cultural ills we see then is a spiritual or psychological one, not mere societal engineering.