It has also rapidly deteriorated into a virtue of the vicious with a total disdain for spiritual values.

Vituperative sermons typically consist of a volatile cocktail littered with blame and fear, which are regularly punctuated with racism and bigotry.

Moreover, the homilies are frequently reinforced by intolerant and coercive religious zealots, or sinister political and economic fundamentalists, to boost compliance and guarantee conformity with the venomous ideology.

All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.

This unremitting indoctrination decays discernment or critical judgement, which extirpates communities of practice, renunciates wisdom while simultaneously suppressing social dialogue and destroying tacit knowledge or incidental learning.

This dystopia has eclipsed the public domain and turned light into shadow.

Distinguishing between lies and truth or fact from fiction has become increasingly enigmatic, and represents an existential threat to an already diaphanous or defective democracy.

A simple but distinctive ritual emerges involving the manufacture and embellishment of stories to induce panic, disorientation, hatred or fear.

The origin of these foibles is then relentlessly reinforced through intrigue, ideology or dogma.

Meanwhile, an appointed demagogue delivers inflammatory sermons that identify scapegoats, who are often minority groups and who inevitably endure the blame.

Indeed, the medium is the message. 

The meteoric rise of cable television and use of antisocial media platforms has undermined serious journalism with algorithmic audience planning and the social amplification, or sometimes attenuation, of risk.

This concocts consent and immerses the laity in a perpetual state of flux or vertigo that eviscerates the reality of experience and standards of thought.

And all this, my friends, affords a fertile environment for totalitarianism.

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Link here for the Cambridge Thesaurus                                                                                          Illustration avove by Sydney Morning Herald