RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Western Civilization’s Growing Intellectual Dead Zones. “The world is living through a crisis of civilization which differs from ordinary disruption in that it involves not a breakdown of physical systems, as might be caused by a natural disaster or technological failure, but is a malaise afflicting the intellectual functioning of society itself. By its nature a civilizational crisis affects elite institutions, the dominant ideology, the core operating system of an ruling system. It is not a breakdown of the backward periphery but a madness in the heart of empire, a rot in its ivory towers.”

The intellectual decay is not happening by accident.