The past few years have been rife with comdemning exposes on everything from politics to the environment that it's become a very popular entertainment genre. Yet this is not a new thing. It has been in place since before the Industrial Revolution. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle heralded the ruthlessness of the meat industry and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation showed nothing changed a century later.
I believe the universe to be cyclic. Everything runs it course, grows stronger, weakens and dies. I'm not sure where the peak of humankind is but we are past it. Not only that but we have gone past the point of no return. The world has been in an almost continuous state of war for the last century, there is not enough food to feed all the world's inhabitants. Viruses have outpaced medical science's ability to find cures, politics have become nothing more the greed and dishonesty while corporations have grown into monstrousities more powerful than they countrys that contain them.
People are finally waking up and noticing the glaring evils in today's world only to find there is no solution. The problem has become to great to be able to remedy now. Small countries, civilized for thousands of years are still seen as "developing" and preyed on by younger, more industrialized countries who reward their labor by paying them too little, ensuring that the country will never better itself and will stay enslaved to them.
In The Corporation, a speaker said it best; "We're in a freefall and we thing we're flying." Most people don't care, others busy themselves in trivialities while missing the elephant in the living room.
It worries me more and more. In my lifetime the world will become a terrible place to live. Economies will sicken, governments will weaken and people will become even more self involved and apathetic. There have been more than enough warnings and now it's inevitable.