Substack author "Gaius Baltar" has an excellent analysis of what's wrong and why

Heavily edited from "Why is the west so weak: The role of human capital and western education," by Gaius Baltar on substack, Aug 3, 2023

Long but very good.  I've edited it extensively, including for length, but encourage you to read the whole thing:
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It's becoming impossible to ignore the growing dysfunction of most western nations.

Most big cities in western nations are cesspools of crime.  The economies of most western nations are crumbling, and all current public policies seem to be leading toward civilizational suicide.  Nothing western pols are doing seems to work.

On hearing a western leader, diplomat or so-called “expert” speak, rational people wonder,  “Are they just lying, or corrupt, or are they really this incompetent and delusional?”  While all are probably true, the author claims the main problem is incompetence.

Clearly it hasn't always been this way, so the natural question is, How has this happened?

The author suggests that our current problems have been deliberately created, by intentionally promoting incompetent people and sidelining competent ones.

That concept is hard for rational people to believe, because a rational population would seem to prize competence and would fight to keep incompetent people out of positions of power.

But for decades in the west, that hasn't been the case.  Instead, competence has been replaced by a system in which promotion and rewards have been handed out based on one's obedience to a certain ideology, while those who didn't have the "right" ideology have been sidelined.

The author contends this is happening--quite visibly--at all levels of the social ladder, from kindergarten teachers to university profs and corporate executives, and all the way up to the preznit. [spelling intentional]

He speculates that just a small percentage of any population is qualified to lead.  A rational society would want such people in leadership roles.  Conversely, if incompetents are in powerful positions it's likely that a complex society will fail, so you'd think citizens would NOT want incompetents in power, eh?

He says western societies today are controlled not by competence but by a particular ideology, which is easily seen everywhere by any rational and independent-thinking person.  A good example of the dominant ideology is the EU’s policy-making body, the World Economic Forum.

In order to achieve the WEF's ideological goals two things must happen: a) The right people must be put into power at all levels of society and b) any disruptive elements must be silenced or eliminated.  Instead of independent thinking being an asset, the ideologues view it as a problem.

Since independent thinkers are disruptive to the ideologues, they can't allow such people to hold any positions of power.  If someone in power is about to break ranks they must be kept quiet and/or forced to toe the line--which is what we're seeing in western nations today.

Many people have noticed that meritocracy has gradually been abandoned in the West--and almost completely in government. What few people seem to realize is that the WEF ideology wants this.  High-level competence can't be promoted or encouraged because it threatens that ideology.

Example:  Elon Musk seems to be smart, probably has an IQ of 150 or more. He's also definitely an independent thinker.  His ownership and operation of Twitter/X is a huge problem for WEF ideological goals because free speech is an obvious threat to any ideology.

Worse yet, Musk made fun of the guardians of approved thought at Twitter before firing them, and we can already see the furious response: The EU is planning to block Twitter in Europe. In response, ideological lizard robot Mark Zuckerberg was instructed to create a "reliable" Twitter clone.

The reconfiguring of western education

As noted, two things must happen for the WEF's ideological goals to be achieved:  people with the "right" ideology must be promoted, while those with the wrong views must be censored and sidelined. This has become the main goal of the west's education system, from kindergarten up to university. If we look at what the education system has been doing, this becomes extremely obvious. Here are a few examples:

*Evaluation of student competence is being systematically removed, to avoid having any way to compare competence.  Exams are being replaced by constant “projects” in which students work in groups, which allows the incompetent to hide. Schools avoid testing students directly as much as possible.

*Universities are increasingly basing admissions on criteria other than competence, including racial quotas.  The most insidious tool is the “personal essay,” which most elite universities now require.  The essay enables universities to identify and admit those with the "right" ideology– which is the main purpose of the essay requirement.

*So-called "experts" are teaching that almost all academic subjects are subjective. They even claim intelligence is now subjective, which allows stupid people to be touted as smart.  "It’s just a question of perspective," they bleat. Thus we see idiotic constructs such as “emotional intelligence.”

*Almost every subject has been made easier, to help incompetent students pass.  Even fields such as medicine are now graduating people who are virtually incompetent.  

*Disciplines which may be a threat to the irrationality of the Ideology have been massively subverted and corrupted. This applies to several fields, but particularly to psychology and history, which in their original form would be a massive threat to the ideological goals. Psychology has been twisted into an almost unrecognizable abomination, and history as taught today is mostly lies.

*Fake disciplines have been invented, for the purpose of promoting students with the "right" ideology without the need for competence, intelligence or any connection to reality.  Degrees in these new, useless "disciplines" elevate those with the right ideology simply by being from elite universities, and are then used to justify giving the holders powerful positions.

What we're seeing here is a very carefully planned pivot toward new objectives. The main purpose of the education system in the west today is no longer education.  Instead it's to identify and elevate those with the right ideology, while suppressing those who disagree.

This mission is not just carried out by the education system, but by all institutions of governments and a large part of the corporate sector.

It's been said that the best way to suppress a rational person is to subject him to rulers who are totally irrational--which describes most western governments today.  It is essentially gaslighting on a civilizational scale.

Those with the right ideology are indoctrinated rather than educated, given university degrees and provided with an endless amount of unproductive but well paid jobs in both the private and public sector.  This well-paid, now-powerful group then becomes the power base of the new ideological system--the “leaders of tomorrow.”

The upward migration of the incompetent

After the incompetent reliables leave school with their certifications, government and the private sector take over and actively push them up the power structure.  This effort has been helped by two developments in the West: the outsourcing of western manufacturing to Asia, and the increasing use of government fixers to eliminate competition in the corporate sector.

Both factors eliminated the need for engineering and manufacturing competence, since the U.S. no longer made lots of things.  At the same time, companies started relying on government to pass rules to cripple competitors, so a company's government connections became far more important.

Obviously this only works as long as nations that manufacture the things a western nation needs are willing to supply those things.

The upward migration of the ideologically pure is managed by three main methods, which together form a long-term takeover process of society. These are
    "Filtering"
    "Stuffing"
    Job-creation by decree

Filtering happens during hiring.  "Woke" politicians, bureaucrats and corporate types control who gets hired.  Decreeing who is to be hired--and who is NOT to be--has become so overt that governments and companies are openly advertising who won't be considered, such as the British government saying “white men” will no longer be hired to become fighter pilots.  Corrupt western governments have almost completely excluded competent applicants from public-sector positions, including their armed forces, and corporations aren't far behind.

"Stuffing" is what happens when the purists inside the system start creating more non-productive, deadweight positions for those with the right ideology.  New departments are created, work groups and committees appear, and the public sector expands. Publicly owned companies, such as utilities, hospitals and schools are crammed with large numbers of these useless but well-paid employees.

This is extremely obvious in the West. Every unnecessary law or rule requires more and more people – all of whom are carefully selected.

"Job-creation by decree" happens when government--both pols and bureaucrats--pass new laws and standards which all companies are commanded to obey.  Those commands usually involve the environment, "equity," and "inclusion," and force the creation of a large number of positions within private companies which are only open to those with the right ideology.  Examples: "human resources" and "compliance."

The ideologically pure have systematically been moved into almost all positions of power in the public sector and almost all of the private sector – and the situation in the private sector is increasingly mirroring the public sector in hiring practices and employee stuffing. The power base of the WEF ideology is firmly in place.

These programs are hugely costly.  Millions of unproductive jobs cost tens of billions per year.

The consequences

As a result of the above, the WEF has pushed western societies and economies to replace productivity, competence and competitiveness with ideology.  

The process is so complete that now the least objective and independent thinking people hold virtually all positions of power, so in the West incompetence becomes more common the higher you go.

All of the above have created millions of jobs in western societies which create no value. The author speculates that 20 to 30% of the entire labor force of the West could be fired without any adverse effect.  But as it stands, western societies are now unsustainable and can only be run by constantly increasing debt.

Example of a once-excellent company taken over by incompetents: It's normal for a company that built a very successful airplane decades ago to keep refining that plane to make it more efficient.  Thus Boeing rolled out the tenth iteration of its amazingly successful 737 twin-jet, called the 737 MAX.  

The tweaks caused some rare stability problems, so to solve these the company added an autopilot-like function.  Normally that means you add a switch on the control yoke that turns the damn thing off if it goes haywire.  But in this case the company didn't do that, so there was no way for the pilots to override the "stability system" short of one of the pilots to get out of the seat, find and pull the thing's circuit breaker.

Company test pilots realized this and warned executives that this was an accident waiting to happen.  But the "suits" ignored the pilots.  Either the execs weren't pilots (and thus in a competent company would never have had design authority) or they were incompetent pilots.  Take your pick.

About 400 innocent people died in two crashes.  A nameless Boeing employee summarized the problem as “This airplane was designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

This was an extreme case, but many western companies are no longer competent, so they simply can’t function unles they're operating within a politically-protected safe space.  

This also applies to western societies as a whole. The political leaders--raised in a society that promotes incompetence--lack the skills to analyze and solve any novel problem.  The only thing they're good at is grifting.

The reconfiguration of the education system, and the huge disconnect between competence and reward in the job market has profoundly changed the decision-making process used to choose a degree field.  Why would a savvy American student study engineering--a hard, demanding field--when you can get a far better paying job with a degree in political science or public administration?

The revamping of western education has changed the reward structure, encouraging young people to pursue easy degrees in non-productive fields, because the System offers them lucrative jobs.

Even now, growing numbers of engineering jobs in the U.S. are filled by Chinese and Indians.  The control of education and government is so complete that this situation is unlikely ever to be reversed.

Source.

https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia