Worst Apocalypse Ever!

Worst Apocalypse Ever!

So here we are a little more than a week later after those pesky Mayans made a calendar that ended (how dare they!) and we all took it to mean that the end was here. Well, I'm still waiting for this crazy train of an apocalypse to take over. Especially since it's the last day of the year. Come on, man!

Apparently it was really just a case of Y2K for the Mayans. Which shouldn't be a big deal since they never actually sold anybody a mainframe computer without enough bytes of storage to hold an entire year, but hey, here we are.

I like how many people said they knew it wouldn't happen because of the rationalism or science or some crap like that, but a much easier way to be sure is to assume that NOTHING interesting is ever happening. Face reality folks, horrible things that happen always happen in incredibly dreary and predictable ways that the world has seen a thousand times before. Not in some fascinating ways like cosmic Armageddon.

I knew it wasn't going to happen because simply put, the Mayans never really said it was going to happen in the first place. We just translated this notion that a calendar ending means the end of the world. Sure, they got killed off by conquistadors - which they really predicted so well, didn't they? But at the very least they weren't dumb enough to think that the end of a marking for days meant the world was going to end.

It's pretty obvious with the increasing frequency of these failed apocalypses that people aren't so much predicting them as they are fantasizing about them. Doomsday Preppers is all about that. All those preppers are entirely banking on that doomsday prediction to go the specific way they want it to go. It's like they hate the status quo and they don't understand how delicate and transient the current arrangement is so they just imagine it going on and on forever unless some all-encompassing grand catastrophe intervenes to make it stop.

This is all how the collective depression of all people who yearn for something different but can't articulate their problems or their desires manifests itself.

Then again, there's been a constant stream of cranks predicting the apocalypse for all of recorded history, but most of them didn't get as much attention in the days before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. They were set aside for what they were - fucking nuts

It's really interesting to see how this notion has survived all this time. Look at John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion And The Death Of Utopia. It's a pretty interesting look at how the christian idea of an end times has survived all kinds of permutations, from communalist millenial cults to the enlightenment to of course the End of History.

Personally, I like to believe the theory that the rapture did in fact happen but that no one was virtuous so we have all been condemned to continue living in this hell of our own design.

Wouldn't that be something. HAPPY NEW YEAR!