a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all—all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance.

Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized.

In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism : the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply

By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center.

Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society.