Once upon a time, in a teetering civilization, DJ, the demagogue, thrived by wielding Frankfurt's bullshit — a total indifference to truth that focuses solely on persuasive effect. Per Trivers, DJ sold his narrative with hypnotic sincerity because he had deceived himself first, eliminating the behavioral cues of a conscious liar that normal people typically detect.

His message resonated because it spoke directly to the innate moral foundations that Haidt has identified in voters, triggering intuitive "gut feelings" that people later used post-hoc reasoning to justify.

Society was primed for this surrender by Spengler's and Tainter's "complexity trap." That is, as their institutions hit diminishing marginal returns, citizens experienced "decision fatigue," seeking cognitive relief in simple, decisive answers.

They entered a phase of "functional stupidity," where Alvesson and Spicer argue even experts are incentivized not to question assumptions, so as not to disrupt society's smooth operations.

The public accepted DJ's poisonous stories because they relied on Kahneman's System 1 — the quick and metabolically inexpensive thinking — choosing not to employ the careful scrutiny available only through the effortful System 2.

Moreover, the Dunning-Kruger effect locked them in: they felt certain that DJ's toxic explanations were correct because they lacked the metacognitive skills to recognize their own ignorance regarding the subjects — such as economics, science, and demographics — that he touched upon.

Once DJ seized power, Bonhoeffer's law of human stupidity took hold: the "strong upsurge of power" deprived people of their inner independence, turning them into "mindless tools" who parroted slogans. Elites running institutions that could have resisted DJ's takeover succumbed to Janis's groupthink, preferring to maintain the "illusion of unanimity" within their committee meetings that silenced all dissent.

The lack of resistance allowed the fatal shift that Cipolla identified in the 1970s: stupid people gain authority, producing "negative-sum" outcomes that destroy total social welfare rather than merely redistributing it.

Lacking Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom), this civilization's leaders could no longer connect immediate actions to the "true good" that permits human flourishing. No longer anchored to the common good, the smart and the well-connected began strip-mining economic and institutional resources for personal aggrandizement. Starved of intelligent collaboration, complex global systems such as finance, trade, and treaties became unstable; world society collapsed.