To quote from P.D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous where he summarizes the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff:
“There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coincide with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character…”