"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

While I'm all for passionate intensity, you have to admit old William Butler Yeats had a point. He also had our era pretty well pegged. And speaking of literary allusions, good ol' Robert Heinlein saw what was coming in his "Future History" series: he may have gotten the timeline wrong, but the era he dubbed "The Crazy Years" should certainly ring a bell:

"Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the Interregnum."

Looks like we're homing in on those mass psychoses: why, just the other day someone left an empty suitcase in front of a MacDonald's in Times Square – and the cops shut down the whole place in the midst of rush hour.