Carl Sagan saw it comming...
 

30 years ago the Discovery Chanel, The Learning Channel (TLC) and alike were a wealth of documentaries and science related broadcasting.
Today's groundbreaking ratings?
"Here comes Honey Booboo"
(It was broadcasted in TLC)
Sigh...


“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”


https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632...-my-children-s

Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" was prescient.

Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" even more so, as he predicted a collapse AND an embrace of primitivism as people failed to understand the complex systems around them that seemed magical, but were also failing.

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.