Love the article, Gato, and love your desire to tackle big questions that deal with big timeframes. Allow me to play Devil's Advocate, however. Now, I don't disagree with a single thing you're laying out about the degeneration of our civilization. Neither do I disagree about the true nature of so-called "Green" groups, whose solutions always seem to come back to increased central power. But I wouldn't call this the result of a Master Attack by another civilization. (I read the Three Body trilogy as well - one of the few "Holy sh**" trilogies I've read in my life. Excellent books.)

And the simple reason is this: China and Russia are nothing if not monuments to Central Planning, and time and time again, central planners prove to be spectacularly incompetent. They funnel money to the wrong places. They misallocate capital and resources. They miss new opportunities due to ideological blinders. They launch bold ideas that are little more than an emperor's folly. China's central planners gave them the Great Famine and the One Child Policy, which has Chinese demographics looking even worse than ours.

Now, the end result is the same - the West decaying into an unrecognizable corpse. And Marxist/CRT ideologies have absolutely played a central role in fomenting and nurturing these civilizational tumors. But the fault lies as much in our post-WWII selves as it does with the disciples of Comintern. The Commies and Greens are less Grand Masters, and more sleazy pimps with dime-bags of easy fixes. We should have known better; we should have cleaned them out decades ago with the enthusiasm that we cleaned out the Nazis. But we didn't. I wish I had a more satisfying answer. I personally believe we've passed a Point of No Return, and we're stumbling into an unknown Dark Forest of our own making. The only way out is forward, and hope we live long enough to teach our children to be wary of Central Planners.