That is a rather well constructed rant... agreeable in the substance behind the rhetorical questions. Especially in this anti-intellectual social-climate that i

That is a rather well constructed rant... agreeable in the substance behind the rhetorical questions. Especially in this anti-intellectual social-climate that is all-pervasive through and through all institutions of the west, and the infantile ideologies of that took hold of the western elites. (I single out west here purely for the contrast of where we come from intellectually/philosophically to where we are currently which to me is easy study case). However, while we would agree, I wonder which "natural" processes are really to be understood to stand behind this decay. Of cause, it is not new, we can read already in Sumerian tablets, Greek and Roman then witness accounts of their empire's disintegration and how in fact people did clearly perceived the rotting (just as we do now). In other words, identifying the symptoms (as implied in the question you posed), is one thing. To understand processes inherent in the system of systems itself is yet another level. And then, thought I do not think possible, one can postulate how to slow down, or even reverse such trend. (I would say natural trend in the phase of natural systems of societies).