Somewhere down the 85-year long path connecting the Gilded Age to The Age of Aquarius, Western values unraveled but still maintained the silhouette of the previously shaped garments they had been woven into.  The following fifty-two years of ill winds blown in by the ironically named Summer of Love in 1967 has nearly obliterated the frayed cultural fabric of the West, leaving us cold and threadbare. 

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead" in one of his most important books, The Gay Science.  The phrase was more a premonition than a proclamation, since most of humanity believed otherwise in the late nineteenth century.  But Nietzsche foresaw many telltale signs, including the marvels and maladies of the Gilded Age, featuring mass transportation and ruthless mechanization, devouring craft and farm labor, plus worldwide communication — all accompanied by a simultaneous expansion of wealth and poverty.  Later, with an added dose of the Roaring Twenties bracketed by two world wars, followed by the Cold War and its genuine threats of nuclear annihilation, our present predicament looms into view.  Excess replaced enlightenment.  Gluttony replaced God.  Purpose surrendered to purchase.  Fantasy replaced family on the collective top shelf of Western minds.  Life's meaning beyond the horizon of human lifespan was ridiculed precisely while astronomical and molecular discoveries allowed far and close scrutiny of unsolved mysteries for the first time in human history. 

With hubris, many believed that certainty in some fields made uncertainty anywhere obsolete.  Globalism and Progressivism flourished among the growing numbers of those disaffected.  Fast-forward to 1967, and it's plain to see how, just 85 years after God died, we came into the Age of Aquarius.  A musical by that name appeared on Broadway, and John Lennon wrote the song "All You Need Is Love," which was sopped up by the drug-tenderized minds of counter-culture youth.

The next 52 years following that Summer of Love have brought us to present day.  The collective brain of Eurocentric culture is being held captive inside a dystopian hip-hop club where serial disk jockeys named CNN, Disney, QVC, and the Ivy League play virulent music amplified beyond pain to maintain the illusion of life while choking out thought itself.  When the record is played backward, the pleaful phrase "I give up" can be faintly heard in the background.

The nightmare of Biff Tannen's alternative future world pales in comparison to real-life derangement.  The many offshoots of postmodern dogma pretend to offer new insight and wisdom but actually provide only novel isomers of old drugs that serve to distract, anesthetize, or excite.  Nowadays, everything is either "awesome" in the best case or "no problem" in the worst case, despite that both bromides are hypnotic, lazy lies.  While the cultural brain continues to wither, the soul of our society has been in the intensive care unit, on life support since at least 1967. 

From his epic work, The Story of Civilization, author Will Durant summarizes our plight perfectly:

Every civilization eventually goes through a conflict between religion and science.  And then it reaches a point when the intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and, after some hesitation, the moral code allied with it[.] ...  The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and idea.  Conduct deprived of its religious support deteriorates into epicurean chaos and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden to conscious poverty and to weary wealth alike.  In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together like body and soul into a harmonious death.