As tormenting trials begin to impact the world with still greater ferocity due to climate change and the full force of globalisation penetrates the deeper echelons of society “disunity is a danger that the nations and peoples of the earth can no longer endure.”  In fact, the guns of August 1914, signaled to the world – but the world then could not understand – that one of those anguishing eras of history was under way during which society tears itself apart in the cruel and awesome pangs of giving birth to a new social order – whose boundaries are those of the planet itself. 
And post World War II further altered relationships between states, between regions, between continents destroying old privileges, conferring new franchises, and literally breaking up the old Order and redefining geopolitical realities leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crashing of the Berlin Wall.  What appeared as a silver-lining in the new horizon soon made blood run, run, run into another quagmire of global disorder which defies any explanation to international relations in the opening years of the 21st century.  
New ways of life, new modes of producing, of selling, of consuming, of communicating have caused such disequilibrium that it seems to me the majority of the world’s population has given up thinking as to where we are headed.  “One need only consider the deepening moral crisis engulfing humanity to appreciate the extent to which the forces of disintegration have rent the fabric of society,” Bahá’í writings state. 
Nor should we be “misled by the painful slowness characterising the unfoldment of the civilisation being laboriously established or to be deluded by the ephemeral manifestations of returning prosperity which at times appear to be capable of checking the disruptive influence of the chronic ills afflicting the institutions of a decaying age.” Tragically, what Bahá’ís see in present-day society is unbridled exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as the operation of “impersonal market forces”. 
What meets their eyes everywhere is the destruction of moral foundations vital to humanity’s future, through gross self-indulgence masquerading as “freedom of speech”.  For Bahá’ís, the qualifying essence of our Age, the end of which is still ahead of us, lies in two factors. The first is that, among other things, technology now available to us gives us the option of wiping out human life from this planet.  The second is that whereas in the past the drama of transition from an old Order to a new Order affected just one nation, or a group of nations, the shift today is towards the entire planet and beyond.