Forget my previous lament about the neighborhood: it’s the whole planet. We’re being dumbed down at an alarming pace.
To annihilate a thing so it cannot return or rebuild or know what it was and what was taken... is to annihilate the living memory of it, the social/cultural flow and the minds which can carry it.
What do you see happening in the west, in general, right now?
It's the oldest tactic in the book, being used on the internet/information era. Slow going, but it can still be done.