Things are seldom what they seem;
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
Which is really to say that, given certain historical conditions, the craven and mediocre seem to rise quite quickly in the present world, and quite often, they run the show.
(And just wait until they really learn to use the LLMs.)
But one must gild the philosophic pill. Human knowlege, human virtue, in the single soul. And the humility to realize that the humans are, by design, never much more than incidental singers of comic songs.
Gently on.