What They're Feeding Me

For thousands of years, people have been predicting the end of the world. People in the Middle Ages were certain, 100%, that bad weather was a sign of the end times. Credit cards were the mark-of-the-beast. Rock and roll was the end of morality. Americans, a few at least, have called every President since Washington the Anti-Christ. Technocrats believed that Y2K would shut all the lights out for good.

The current apocalypse du jour involves the Mayan Calendar ending on December 21st, 2012. As Todd Armstrong puts it in his comedy routine, if the Mayans could predict the future, why couldn’t they see the Spanish coming?

Meanwhile, revolutions occur with regularity. A couple of hundred years is typically the life-span of a government, in particular one with a fiat currency. One Founding Father even famously declared that revolutions every so often were necessary… even while building a very strict framework for a government he would then defend with his life.

Fear of the end-times is paralyzing. It keeps people from advocating for changes. When you believe in imminent doom, every step you take makes you think “Am I going to cause it? Will my next foot-fall be on the button that launches WWIII?” So you do nothing. You stay home and worry. You zone out on the internet. You watch other people trying to make changes, and blame them for starting the inevitable decline of humankind. You see drastic switches and you tense up and reject the new, instead of casting away the old.

Revolution is a driving force in humanity. Sometimes we call it ingenuity, or self-examination (which invariably leads to personal revolution), or love (and the new humanity it creates through procreation), but humanity is defined by its stunning advances, its revolutions in thoughts and deeds. The American and French Revolutions weren’t just about starting a country, they were about showing the world that a country could be started if the people in a particular place decided to. We have advances in technology so lightning quick that you can’t own an up-to-date computer for more than a few days at a time. We conduct business meetings from our cars, now, so we don’t waste time in traffic. It makes us feel good to be up-to-date, but striving to stay up-to-date is a reminder that things haven’t always been this way, that we had to lose plenty of work-hours sitting in traffic before someone invented the teleconferencing and mobile networks necessary to solve the problem, that old-school computers were inadequate for modern communication, that a feudal state is incompatible with modern conceptions of rights. Every day in our pampered lives is a testament to the power and reality of constant human revolution.

Certainty in the present drags down the inevitable march of history from the past to the future. Despite our human lust for advancement we stop ourselves for fear of getting what we wish for, and because we just wish we could be comfortable and secure in what we have at the moment. The greatest operating principle in the conspiracy to prevent progress and revolution is to make people feel certain about the rightness and predictability of the now, with revelations of a certain end. Popular myths about the end of the world only serve to make people fearful of progress, more willing to work actively against large-scale change, as these apocalyptic myths are always tied to the idea that the present is fully explained in some way or another, in some ancient text, or a calendar artifact from a dead civilization.

Our collective certitude in the present manifests in a belief that every recent phenomenon is just a sign that prophecies of apocalypse have already come true. The more of us are convinced the world will end in fire, the more likely someone will be able to douse the planet in gasoline and light a match, unchecked, while we read our little books convinced the future has already been written. The idea of inevitability stops us from controlling our collective destiny. We’d do better to write it ourselves. The end-times have never happened, and revolutions against standing governments have, and will again.