>>106583>>106584I always recommend reading Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.
As a heads up, it is written by a Marxist, so a bit of that seeps in there, and the guy writes maybe a bit too well for his own good, sacrificing clarity for beauty. But the overall points it makes are largely Nietzschean in nature and pretty solid.
The TL;DR is that the elites of postmodern society have replaced virtue with virtue signaling. Actual ideology, culture, politics, and leadership have been exchanged for symbols, gestures, catchphrases, and celebrities that are under the control of the elite and have no actual content or impact on what happens in the real world beyond distracting from that which does. The book was written in the late 1960s, right around the time this stuff started becoming a major problem in the West, and things have only gotten worse since.