A Boring Dystopia

Like the past few decades of stripping education and anti-intellectual culture and anti-solidarity propaganda isnt a factor.

We weren't flush with quality education and rich intellectual culture and a staunch labor movement several decades ago.

None of these problems are new or unique to the current moment.

We have enough people without the general ability to critically think

Everyone has the ability to think critically. What you often stumble on is their priors. People who have accumulated a body of understanding or a logic flow that is totally alien to you don't seem to follow any kind of rational behavior patterns.

the fallout will be that we will rush into a probable Nuclear war coupled with ignoring climate change till it’s too late

We've been predicting imminent interstate thermonuclear war since the last bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Nearly a century later, we've never used one in an overt act of aggression. There's a whole litany of reasons why. But the hard truth of it is that nuclear weapons aren't any more efficient than nuclear power plants. You can get a lot more bang for your buck doing violence the conventional way. And we've done just that for decades.

Meanwhile Billionaires are undermining democracy across the globe

What we're discovering is how little democracy there was to undermine. But, again, this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention. What's shifted is demographics, not politics. The formerly hegemonic upper-middle class white male voter is no longer the dominant political face or voice, outside of the increasingly cloistered echo chambers of reactionary state-sanctioned media.

Even the fucking billionaires don't have the decency to be interchangeable WASP stereotypes. So now we're seeing a real crisis in continuity of governance, as Middle Easterners and East Asians and South Africans and Latin Americans all pop their heads up into the top rungs of the bureaucracy.

What we are seeing in the modern era isn't a degraded democracy. It's a civil war between the various plutocrats who they they should inherit the American Throne.

We are well and truly fucked.

The blinders are coming off your eyes as you learn more about the real function of the world at-large. And this can be immediately shocking, to the point that you assume "We're at the end of the world!"

But to quote from the sage words of Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism:

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

and, therefore

it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism

What we're witnessing is the end of an era. It's a thing every generation gets to bare witness to over enough time. It isn't the end of The World, just the end of the world you were born into.