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"Giving themselves up to insatiable passion, filled with vanity, pride and arrogance, adopting bad abjectives due to delusion, and having impure resolves, they engage in actions." Bhagavadgita 16.10
The scriptures term the present age the age of Demon of Ignorance called Kali. This era has lasted for several thousand years and it is the last in the evolution, when spiritual awareness as well as the order of the human society have fallen to the lowest levels. In west world is it mostly manifested through the downfall and abandonment of religious systems, which were capable of maintaining spiritual awareness in the earlier days. Moral decadence accompanies the spiritual deterioration, further deepening ignorance and resulting in all the living beings losing peace and happiness.
The present age can be characterised as a time of enormous consumerism and greed. People see their only happiness in fulfilling their bodily needs, and the insatiable consumerist society keeps backing them in it. This has started a carousel of enormous exploitation of the nature, frantic massacre of animals, cutting of forests, and the associated environmental destruction affecting thousands of species, poisoning the air, water and soil. The materialist attitude has led to an absolute decay of the human society and disintegration of family relationships. Everyone only wants to know their rights, but no-one will hear of responsibilities, self-denial and self-sacrifice. Our future: children have many useless rights, but no-one will grant them the right to a complete family meaning a happy childhood. How can we expect happy old age then? Moreover, our so-called "civilised society" cannot protect children from alcohol, nicotine and other drugs. There is nothing in the entire society that could serve them as a positive and encouraging model, therefore they are under the influence of negative models, leading only to loss of peace and enslaving of their minds. There have been several dark ages in the known history, but nowhere can we find such a terrible disaster. But alas, this is still only the beginning.
Nowadays, one is continuously bombarded with ideas that the past would have considered demonical, whilst the once highest and impeccable ideas are merely surviving at the edge of the official life. Religions have often lost their spiritual nature, and churchgoers practise solely to deal with their profane problems and desires. People are charged with ever growing expectations, driven like cattle from birth to retirement so that they forced to produce and consume. Hardly anyone realises the absurdity of the times. Under the mottoes "bread and circuses" and "divide and rule", an unthinking, dull herd of citizens is fooled with hundred-times repeated lies and poisoned with dear-paid drugs, chemical food and plenty of medicine. Hardly anyone can, or even wants to, think independently and freely. People are mercilessly robbed of the most precious thing they can have in life: they have lost peace, meaningful life and thus happiness. 
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