IF you haven’t yet done so, I urge you to watch a new documentary called Fyre. My recommendation comes not simply because this is a great piece of long-form TV journalism – telling the story of the collapse of what was promoted as the world’s most glamorous music festival amid a welter of lies and fraud. What makes Fyre so important is that it exposes the deep cultural problems affecting the west today – our shallowness, our short-termism, and, to be brutally frank, our deep stupidity.

In Fyre, a group of Millennial wannabe entrepreneurs think they can simply imagine success and success will follow – it doesn’t take hard work, planning, or brains. If you dream it, it’ll happen – it’s magical thinking. So a luxury festival on a private Caribbean island is planned – except there are no acts, there’s no private island, and instead of luxury there’s squalor. “Social media influencers” – the rich, stupid, and beautiful – promoted the festival on Instagram, luring fools with too much money and a naked desire to live a life of Kardashian-level vapidity. This is a world where branding is more important than an education; where the number of followers counts more than the content of your soul. Fittingly, Fyre ends in disaster for all concerned – the sociopath behind the scheme ends up in jail; festival-goers end up in the Lord of the Flies, pillaging mattresses to sleep on when they thought they’d be in luxury seafront apartments; and the social media influencers – socialites and models like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid – are left looking venal and idiotic.

If ever there was a story of our times, this is it, for we are living in the Age of Stupid. It isn’t that most of us are stupid – far from it, most of us are thoughtful intelligent people, trying to make sense of the world the best we can – but it seems wherever we look, from politics to the boardroom, we’re ruled by fools.

There’s a growing mantra in the western world: everything is broken. How many times do we hear from our friends and family that nothing is working? From the police to the NHS and education, every institution seems staffed with well-meaning hardworking folk, but at the top there are idiots – paper-pushing, bean-counting, league-tabling non-entities who’ve failed upwards. Private industry is worse. Politics is a joke. Economics is voodoo, and new technology is delivering us into hell, not paradise.

It could be drawn from all this, that in terms of human evolution our technological abilities far outstrip our emotional and social abilities. We’ve changed the world, when we should have changed ourselves first. We’re peasants in a palace of our own creation.

Look at some recent events for proof that the Age of Stupid, the Idiocracy, is upon us. We’re told that British-born people who joined Islamic State should be stripped of their citizenship – except they can’t be. If you’re born in Bethnal Green, you’re as British as the Queen, and you cannot be rendered stateless, yet this is what the nation debates: an ill-educated fantasy.

While it’s important to discuss the legacy of historical figures like Winston Churchill, the manner in which the recent debate was conducted was at the level of Kindergarteners. To debate the nuance of history through politicians’ emojis and lurid, ugly insults by hack TV presenters – to reduce the discussion down to a Yes/No answer as was done in an interview with John McDonnell – is to debase human intelligence.

You can bet that in ordinary households across the land clever conversations were being had about Churchill that weren’t black and white and reductive, but tentatively trying to tease out the truth.

Then we have the UK Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, and the ferry company with no ferries. Again, a non-entity, fails upwards. The Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, performs some desperate display of male prowess by threatening to send a warship to the Pacific, and for his troubles sees Chinese trade talks languish. In America, Donald Trump declares a national emergency when there is no national emergency.

From the company you work for, to the state institutions that control your life, the people in charge, the people with a voice, the people paid the big bucks, act like infants. These infants have power, we do not. They set the tone, we do not. They shape the discussion, we do not.

The symptoms of our western malaise are all there to be seen – shallowness, short-termism and rank stupidity. There is no depth of thought, there is only a desire to cut corners, and there is simply a lack of intelligence.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education posed the question: is email making professors stupid? Our use of technology once simplified tasks, the piece said, but now it’s strangling the ability to think. It talked of “the long-term value of uninterrupted concentration over the short-term convenience of accessibility”.

Our great failing is that we have all, so far, put convenience before concentration. The baby-boomers inherited the world and blew it, thanks to greed and self-centredness – hippies with the welfare state or a trust fund to protect them; Generation Xers like me – we did nothing, we let the decline continue because we were too busy partying; the Millennials … well, just watch the documentary Fyre if you’ve any hope of the Millennials changing the trajectory of the western world.

But there is hope, and it lies with the young, with Generation Z, kids now in their mid to late teens. They are not slaves to short-termism like their parents and grandparents – these young people think long-term. Just look at the school strikes over climate change that are popping up like partisan units across the nation. These young people have read, they’ve thought and they’ve come to a conclusion about the long-term welfare of our planet – the biggest and most complex question facing humanity –and they’re prepared to personally rattle the cages of the old guard to achieve the change they want. I cannot wait for a future when I can vote these young Gen Z-ers into power and hope that unlike the generations before them they put the Age of Stupid to the sword.

Read more: McDonnell brands Churchill a 'villain'