“When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” Deuteronomy 18:22
The UN recently tried out a new sobriquet for the planet’s impending climate destruction: “global boiling”. It's important to keep it fresh, lest we forget to be terrified.
Al Gore made a lot of scary predictions in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, and just like the biblical apocalypse, the timing of the climate one keeps getting pushed back.
Peddlers of fear have different motives, but alarmist and apocalyptic thinking is as old as civilization. Modern writers from Michael Shermer to Michael Shellenberger have endeavored to understand the religiosity of human conviction across causes theological and secular.
In the excellent book Apocalypse Never, Shellenberger writes, “Now we must address the question of how so many people, myself included, came to believe that climate change threatened not only the end of polar bears but the end of humanity.” He explains how the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and others exaggerated the threat and misrepresented data for decades and branded scientists who pointed this out as heretics. It became a spiritual problem, not a scientific one.
Secular religions are forming faster than we can keep up. Race-ism (as opposed to racism, although that too.) Genderism. Covidism. Climatism. Trumpism and Anti-Trumpism. The decline in religious faith has created an open market for replacements; that much seems apparent. But the more interesting question is: where does our propensity for fundamentalism come from? Why is the apocalypse always just ahead?
In 2017, historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier, a professor at CUNY, published a follow-up paper to his 1994 book Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Entitled “The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Fundamentalist Mindset,” in it he writes, “Endism, as I called it in 1994, is the location of self in some future narrative.”
Strozier suggests apocalyptic thinking comes from our fear of death and the belief that “the power to create and destroy” is in the realm of the divine. In the modern era, the power to destroy is in the hands of many (atomic bombs), and that is unsettling. Apocalyptic beliefs contain elements of violence and destruction as well as regeneration, and (emphasis mine): “The narrative fits the more extreme dualistic fantasies of paranoia that feed on the desire to destroy the evil persecutor. Certain things are clear about paranoia. Someone in its grip lives in a world of heated exaggerations, in which empathy has been leached out and where humor, creativity, and wisdom are absent. The paranoid lives in a world of shame and humiliation, of suspiciousness, aggression, and dualisms that separate out all good from pure evil. The paranoid is grandiose and megalomaniacal, self-centered to a fault, and lives within the apocalyptic…in paranoia everything is intense and of the moment, and time is forever running out.”
This seems more relevant now than even six years ago. Sam Harris comes to mind.
I had a front row seat during the End Times craze of the 1970s and 1980s. My parents were so deeply into apocalyptic Christianity that they literally believed they were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the book of Revelation. As far as I know, they believed this until my dad died in 2012, despite my mother’s many predictions and prophecies failing to come to pass. So I have something to add to the analysis of fundamentalist beliefs: the exquisite satisfaction that comes from possessing Special Knowledge.
In the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III thought the rise of Islam heralded the End Times, and in every century since, people have predicted the end of the world.
The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey was published in 1970. The book claimed to prove the infallibility of biblical prophecy, mostly by using the Bible to prove the Bible. The signs all pointed to the coming apocalypse. Lindsey warned, “The time is short.” The book has sold more than 35 million copies.
In 1975, pastor David Wilkerson, of The Cross and the Switchblade fame, published The Vision, a doomsday prophecy. He published two more in 1998: God’s Plan to Protect His People in the Coming Depression and America’s Last Call: On the Brink of a Financial Holocaust. In 2009, he published an article on his website that opened with this: “I am compelled by the Holy Spirit to send out an urgent message to all on our mailing list, and to friends and to bishops we have met all over the world. AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE - EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US.” Wilkerson was killed in a car accident in 2011.
Just last year, the late Pat Robertson claimed that God pushed Russia to invade Ukraine to prepare an invasion of Israel, which would bring about the biblical final battle and apocalypse.
A Christian radio evangelist named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would occur on May 21, 2011, and the end of the world on October 21, 2011. Take a minute and watch this coverage:
At time stamp 00:32, a believer named Victor Diaz says, “We’re at a point now where we are so certain that this will happen that we are ready to, you know, travel eighteen hours, leave our jobs, and you know, whatever, it doesn’t…we know.”
We know.
The year the rapture failed to come, Michael Shermer wrote for New Scientist magazine, “Secular end of days may be found in Karl Marx’s end of capitalism and Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, along with scientistic doomsdays brought about by global warming, ice ages, solar flares, rogue planets, black holes, cosmic collisions, supervolcanoes, overpopulation, pollution, nuclear winter, genetically engineered viruses, the grey goo of runaway nanotechnology – and let’s not forget Y2K, the millennium bug…Like Camping’s rapture, many of these prognostications have failed to unfold. Given that there can only be one apocalypse, most of the others will too. Why, then, do we find the basic narrative so appealing?” Shermer concluded, “The end of the world is a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life.”
And that might be part of it, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
In the 1970s, my parents became born again Christians. They studied the Bible and inevitably focused on the juicy parts. Prophecies are irresistible, the lurid ones especially. My parents read and reread The Late Great Planet Earth and other books of prophecy. In no time, they were casting out demons and interpreting dreams and visions. They claimed their new enlightenment made them targets of the devil, and that meant evil spirits were lurking everywhere. The dogs were said to see demons on the ceiling. Mom announced one day that Satan had turned a bottle of cooking oil into poison, and she marched into the woods to dump it out. Satan also shocked Mom with electricity, tossed balls of fire across her path at night, and sent demons to pilot UFOs to taunt her. That we were in the Last Days was certain. Soon the biblical prophecies would come to pass. As the two witnesses from Revelation, my parents would perform miracles, preach publicly, be killed, and have their bodies left in the street for three and a half days. Then they would rise and be carried up to heaven.
My mother used to say, “I don't want to be fooled!” She was terrified that Satan might mislead her, so she took pains to verify with God that what she heard in her mind were direct messages from God. And they were, of course.
Her relationship with God was so intimate that she had Special Knowledge.
This meant that if you did not believe my parents, you weren't in God's inner circle. Anyone unconvinced by their proselytizing just didn’t get it, or worse, they didn't want to. Their access to Special Knowledge gave my parents a preening humility. How lucky they were to have been chosen by God! Incredible, right? What are the chances.
This fantasy dominated their lives for almost forty years. It may capture my mother still, but we don't talk about it anymore.
Christianity doesn't have exclusive rights to Special Knowledge. Every secular faith of our era flatters its believers as those who know.
The COVID faithful, who, more than three years on, will not be deterred because they have Special Knowledge of The Science.
Climate prophets understand that only those with Special Knowledge can be trusted to make decisions to save the planet.
Gender identity is so special that there are now “xenopronouns” defined as “a type of hypothetical neopronouns that are not able to be understood by humans and/or expressed through human language.”
The victim classes have lived experiences that cannot be known or understood by anyone who is not one of the elect.
If we feel some paranoia because much of life is outside our control, exposure to Special Knowledge provides context and imparts status.
Special Knowledge means that you understand the signs and possess the wisdom. It means that you are not only right, you cannot be wrong. Arguments and debates are worthless. Dr. Peter Hotez refused to talk to Robert Kennedy Jr. about COVID and vaccines on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and there were lots of hot takes. He’s afraid; he knows RFK would embarrass him; he’s a pharma shill; he’s a government shill. And while all of that might be true, the real reason is probably less sinister. Dr. Hotez has Special Knowledge. Why debate someone who doesn't?
The status attached to Special Knowledge is more powerful than the truth. Rejection of it is not accepted as a different opinion. Those who reject it do so out of ignorance and stupidity, or they reject it cynically. They are either dumb or bad.
It's tempting to label Special Knowledge zealots as disordered, and surely some of them are. These probably have a higher representation of diagnosable personality disorders than the general population (estimated at less than 15%), but I’d be surprised if it was more than 30%. Not everyone who claims ‘the gender critical are committing genocide’ has a personality disorder. Certainly, we can't say that all religious people who believe the world will end have one.
It is a very human thing to enjoy being one of the few who know a secret or the answer to a great mystery. To be on the front lines of something big and important. Special Knowledge satisfies our need for prestige, purpose, and even adventure.
It's also dangerous, because it's a long lie. How do you dismantle it? What parent will say, ‘Oops, sorry!’ after medically castrating their son because Special Knowledge told them he was a girl? Which activist whose identity depends on a cause will abandon it? What non-binary pansexual wants to admit they got caught up in something silly? What do you do when an entire industry is built up around your Special Knowledge? The narrative is tweaked to align with new information. There are no facts, only rationalizations. Human egos are too flattered by Special Knowledge to let it go.
It's one reason we’re gullible and easy to manipulate. It's why we double down on shit takes. Why we keep voting for people and things that hurt us, like we're insane. Leftists are destroying the country, the evidence is undeniable and everywhere, but if you have Special Knowledge that Democrats are Good and Republicans are Bad, you will not change your vote. We call it confirmation bias when we only accept evidence that aligns with our preconceptions. Our preconceptions are often formed by our belief that we have Special Knowledge.
It is a rare person who will admit to being wrong about something important, so wrong that it might have caused harm. I’ve been humbled by my own bad opinions in the last three years. I think one of the most important things we can do is accept another’s change of heart with a little grace, even if they are years late. So often I see replies on social media like, ‘Some of us knew it was bullshit all along!’ Insisting on ideological purity is itself an act of someone who is pleased with their own Special Knowledge.