> I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization.

When was stable period, exactly? I'm 40; the only semi-stable bit I can think of in my lifetime was a few years in the 90s (referred to, sometimes unironically, as "the end of history" at the time, before history decided to come out of retirement).

Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.