MaxQ

Sagan taught a course on critical thinking at Cornell. He demonstrated that focused, disciplined thought combined with asking the right questions that went to the core of a problem (rather than symptoms) was more important than raw intellect.
A pretty insightful guy.

I could never get past Spengler's ties to, nationalist, authoritarian statist philosophy,- regardless of his apologists.

Have you read Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies"? William Ophul's "Plato's Revenge" is a worthwhile read also. Both books, amongst others, are a more updated take on Spengler's "decline...". They show that the decline of not just the West, but industrial civilization in general, is probably an unavoidable consequence of the type of thinking/philosophy required to create our current Civilization in the first place. The success planted the seeds of destruction. We simply do not have the will to endure the suffering required to avoid or mitigate the inevitable outcome of resource and environmental overshoot. Hence the mitigation will be enacted by Nature herself, in Her long time honored tradition.