The flipside of the widespread loathing for the prince was exaggerated reverence for Bhumibol, and intense fear about what would befall Thailand when he died. For the elite, this terror was largely due to their sense of self-preservation, but in wider Thai society it chimed with widely held traditional beliefs that an immoral king would cause the decline and fall of the nation, and that the world was on the verge of a dark age, or กลียุค. An alleged prophecy dating from the beginning of the Chakri era, which suggested that the monarchy would collapse after the ninth reign, also fed the anti-Vajiralongkorn hysteria.