First of all, what exactly does "bullocks" mean?
Try reading about the last moments of the Titanic. ("The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that the Titanic had a band.") Or the last days in the Fuher Bunker beneath Berlin. Or AC Clarke's "Childhood's End". Or the last days of the Japanese Empire at the end of WWII. There are some eerily similar thought patterns among the participants. I read an interesting book about the Concentration Camp at Treblinka. The book had been written in honor of the author's parents, who had both died at Treblinka. He opened the book with the question of how six million Jews had allowed themselves and their children to be hustled off to the holocaust? He said that Hitler had once said that after the war, that he was going to allow only six Jews to remain alive, and that he was going to put them in a cage and cart them all over the world so people could see what Jews had looked like. Chillingly, the author said that every Jew believed that they were going to be one of those six.
But things have always been bad, right? Sure, why I can remember reading how Henry IV troubled himself over the nuclear problem of radioactive waste. And Teddy Roosevelt started that senate committee on AIDS, While the Emperor Justinian led the march to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. And everybody knows how damn near 3/5 of the population of Paris in the 1890's were stoned to the gills on anti-depressants and how the Incas were so troubled that a single outbreak of a disease could spread around the planet in just a matter of hours. Nope, nothing has changed .