There are some very good thinkers out there but the market for readers has collapsed catastrophically
Discussion
Most of the biggest examples I know of are quite weak in comparison. I may have blind spots, of course. I don't know everything. But it's quite telling that the person who fired me up about freedom, prosperity, western ideals, capitalism, reason, intellectualism, and philosophy died 43 years ago (before I was born) before all this technology existed. I also think you're right though. People obviously have decayed in general (as I'd expect having such weak intellectuals). It's compounding decay.
In some ways, all of this technology has made it harder for people to stand out. There's just so much garbage to sift through that the good voices stay rather small or invisible. Maybe this is a multifaceted issue as they usually are.
I think it's more nuanced than this. I read in the sovereign individual that the boomer generation had high rates of illiteracy. I think there was a stat cited in that book claiming that something like 30% of the population was considered to be incompetent.
Do you have evidence to support this? Because last I checked literacy and readership is at an all time high relative to human history. Not saying that you are wrong but I think that humans tends to overestimate how bad things are.