> I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong

It's painfully obvious to me society cannot do two things at once. You focus on one shared goal as a culture or everything falls apart very rapidly - as we are seeing today. It's why a common external "enemy" (e.g competitor, nation state, culture, whatever) has historically been so important.

The shared goal can be complex in nature, which requires many disciplines to come together to achieve it via a series of many parallel activities that might look like they are all doing something random, but it's all in the service of that singular shared goal.

This holds true from my experience at the national level all the way down to small organizations.