If you read back in the Bible the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Thessalonia he said that in the latter days before the end of the age that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order.
We have become a society that can't self-correct that can't address its obvious problems that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.