A big source of Brahminical system's legitimacy was the class of Brahmins excelling in 'secular' fields while still having moral and material allegiance to Brahminical system.

The present problem: the Brahmins are still at the top everywhere, but owe allegiance to rival systems.

All of these fields: academia, administration, judiciary, art: movies, tv, music, journalism, theatre.

Brahmins have always led all of these fields in history, at the very top where theorising comes in, it's almost a monopoly.

So this class of Brahmins, the non-priestly, engaged in worldly activities, it was a kind of interface between the sacred and the secular world of Hinduism.

This is why their loss to competing moral systems (like liberalism) is a double whammy.

Not only is the most important intellectual support for our own system gone, we also lose the main 'method' through which the core of Hinduism is continuously communicated to the masses.

This is one big reason for this problem. That we fail to make sense of the world in our frame.

Many people on this site blame traditional brahmins for this, what that analysis is missing is the total absence of this second layer of Brahmins. https://twitter.com/Shatrubhanja/status/1252875664195117057?s=20

"Making sense of the world in our frame"

This is an inside-outside activity where you are looking to the frame inside and the world outside and trying to reconcile.

Traditional scholars can't do this alone because they are focussed inside (a feature of the system).

To put it more clearly:

I'm not blaming Brahmins here, I'm theorising the existence of a second layer of Brahmins around the core of trad ones, their role in keeping Hinduism dynamic, and the loss we suffer from their absence.