It's hard to imagine how festival organizers could top the unrelenting smugness and faux-exclusivity of an event that boasted packages starting from an eye-watering $12,000.

According to an archived copy of the Fyre Festival website, one particularly obnoxious package was available at a cost of $400,000, which gave eight guests the privilege of staying on the artists' island, though in separate accommodation, for just $50,000 per person. [...]

While festival organizers plan on making a "considerable donation" to the Bahamas Red Cross Society, many observers have been left unconvinced by their half-hearted contrition, especially in light of one damning article published online in New York Magazine by an alleged member of the event staff.

The author claims that Ja Rule himself gave a toast to the production crew several weeks in advance of the event, in which he was quoted as saying: "To living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and f*cking like porn stars."

As if that toast wasn't nauseating enough, the author further claims that the event organizers were fully aware of the impending catastrophe awaiting the festival, but chose to brush it off.

"The best idea, they said, would be to roll everyone's tickets over to 2018 and start planning for the next year immediately. They had a meeting with the Fyre execs to deliver the news. A guy from the marketing team said, 'Let's just do it and be legends, man.'"

For context, Ja Rule has also been involved in another less-than-reputable business venture directly targeting naive millennials: the Magnises credit card.

This kind of comfortable life - blind to the negative underbelly - gives rise to increasing levels of self-importance and hysteria, which eventually reach a critical point. If this critical point can't be overcome, a bloody tragedy usually results within the next generation. In other words, if the disease isn't treated in its infancy, crisis is probably inevitable. How bad it is depends on how far a society has devolved morally and psychologically. Some societies survive relatively intact; some are tied to the fate of other nations; but empires can and do collapse. A crisis of hysteria is how it all happens.