“Ah, what shall I be at fifty,
Should Nature keep me alive,
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five?
–Lord Tennyson – 1809-1892.

Disillusionment with society comes easy nowadays. Unforced and potent. Corruption does not only exist within the realm of the elites, but has colonised the minds of majority of the population. In the process of guarding an already distorted moral framework, people have little more than cryptic hatred to offer to each other. Discrimination over gender and belief systems, spiralling crime-rates, increasing tension between the individual and the state; life may seem suspended between uncertainty and mistrust. How did the world become so bitter? Or, has it always been this way?

An examination of global history demonstrates that nations that enjoy hegemony today have already gone through, and dealt with, such social ills. But in their case, new poisons have replaced old ones. Is our society, as suggested by the course of history, destined to escape these miseries; or, is there nothing but perpetual angst?