Apocalypse season is upon us again, bringing with it another round of claims that something or other is going to bring industrial civilization crashing down around us. Indeed, a case could be made that apocalypse season is like the holiday shopping season in America, which begins promptly each year on 26 December, and continues for the next 364 days. Certainly the most visible result, when one prediction of sudden cataclysmic change passes its pull date, is that many of the people who believed the failed prediction quickly go looking for another. Yet the number of believers, and the share of the public imagination taken up by apocalyptic predictions, does wax and wane over time — and another uptick in apocalypse fever seems to be brewing just now. No other theme in popular culture combines such enduring popularity with so unbroken a record of failure. Of course, cataclysmic events do happen from time to time — as I type these words, the people of Venezuela are struggling with the aftermath of a major earthquake. But there’s a crucial difference between real events of this kind and the gaudy dreams of universal destruction that cluster around apocalyptic claims, like so many wasps round a jam jar. In Venezuela, after all, the survivors are picking up the pieces of their lives and preparing for a slow return to business as usual. The core premise of the apocalyptic faith, by contrast, is that business as usual will never return. An apocalypse places a full stop at the end of everything familiar, and if anyone survives to witness the aftermath, they will inhabit a world wholly unlike the one that was destroyed. The mere fact that destructions so total don’t happen in the real world does nothing to dent the devout faith that some time soon it will happen to us all. More from this author The predictive power of dreams By John Michael Greer A contribution from the odder end of postmodern philosophy may be useful here. You will rarely catch me quoting Jacques Derrida, but just this once he has something useful to contribute: hauntology. The word is a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” (or in Derrida’s own language, of their exact French cognates “hant” and “ontologie”). The concept is the recognition that something which has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist, can still affect human culture and thought in much the same way as something that possesses a less phantasmal mode of being. Derrida coined the word during a famous discussion of Marxism. That was wholly appropriate, of course. The entire apparatus of Marxist historical mythology — all the way from primitive communism through the arrival of the Workers’ Paradise, for all the world like the New Jerusalem descending from the clouds — is a 19th-century construct pieced together from scraps of inaccurate anthropology and random pieces of Christian apocalypticism with the serial numbers filed off. Such oddly assorted raw materials are common enough in the backstories of popular movements. Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were quite correct when they claimed, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto , that the specter of Communism was haunting Europe. While the ghost in question was chased out of its familiar European haunts by the events of 1989, it still hovers unbanished in Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-largest political party in the country, and in the United States, where a resurgent socialist faction is battling the mainstream Democrats for control of the party. Given the massive unpopularity of socialist ideas in the US, outside a handful of huge and very liberal cities, that struggle may yet succeed in handing the midterm elections to Donald Trump: a reminder, if one were needed, that when idealists go charging into the political sphere, the outcome of their actions may not be what they hope. The specter of apocalypse has less immediate political impact than that of the ghost just studied, since believers in imminent cataclysm are much less likely than their Marxist peers to join political movements and try to overthrow governments. Even so, belief in the impending end of the world can have considerable indirect impacts on politics, economics, and society. Consider the prepper movement in the United States — a complex phenomenon poorly understood by most of its critics. On one end, you have people who have reasonably decided, after watching the remarkably inept responses to recent natural disasters by state and federal agencies, that having food and other necessities stashed in safe places might just be a good idea. On the other, you have believers in full-blown apocalyptic ideologies insisting that this time for sure the Antichrist or some other figure of dread will show up and give red-blooded Americans the long-awaited chance to blaze away with automatic weapons. There are, of course, many other options between these two extremes. “People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead.” While the prepper scene in any of its variations inspires and supports a certain skepticism toward government, it has little direct impact on politics. Yet its indirect impact is considerable. Prepper networks routinely become informal conduits for political ideas, as well as rules for storing powdered milk and recipes using dried beans. Since the networks exist outside the accepted channels of information flow in American society, and make a point of not being too conspicuous in the mainstream culture, pundits and politicians alike can end up blindsided when large numbers of their constituents take up ideas that the talking heads of the establishment media never thought to push on them. It was thus by way of prepper networks, among other channels, that the ideas that paved the way for Trump’s victories — notably the rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and economic globalization — found their way well in advance to a considerable share of the US electorate. Paying attention to upsurges in apocalyptic belief is, therefore, one way to gauge when such conduits for alternative ideas may be forming, and perhaps yield clues about which ideas are likely to flow. Apocalyptic beliefs are important in another way, however, which they share with other beliefs at odds with the consensus reality of their society. Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book on the subject, form a sensitive indicator of social stress. Notice where, when, and among whom strange beliefs find a substantial foothold, and you have some chance of guessing where stresses are rising toward crisis. This was why imperial China had an entire government department dedicated to keeping track of omens, and required local mandarins to send in reports of any strange events from local people. That gave the central government a back-channel view into the collective thoughts and passions of people even in the most remote provinces. The power of strange beliefs and rumor panics to flag unrest before it breaks out has not diminished in modern times. It’s hardly an accident, for example, that the same regions of the rural United States that were seized by the cattle mutilation rumor panic in the Seventies became hotbeds of anti-government sentiment a decade or two later. The cattle-mutilation panic evolved into the centerpiece of a flurry of competing conspiracy theories: was it government agents who were mysteriously slaughtering cattle in the rural West, or was it Satanists doing those evil deeds, or were aliens in flying saucers responsible? The lack of a single focus didn’t make the signal less important. When conspiracy theories flourish, whether or not they reach consensus on the plot’s supposed nature, that tells the attentive watcher that large numbers of people have lost faith in the government that rules them. By the time conspiracy theories arise, it’s too late to resolve the situation with propaganda or the suppression of free speech — the government needs to change its policies in response to public pressure, and the punishment of a few high-ranking scapegoats is usually needed as well. Apocalyptic beliefs have a different message to communicate, though one no less explosive. People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead. Think for a moment of the state of mind that would make you regard the prospect of huddling in a burnt-out basement, eating rats if you’re lucky enough to catch them, as a less daunting option than waking up tomorrow morning and going on with the life you lived today. Plenty of people have reached that state. While it’s certainly true that few of them genuinely grasp what life would be like if they got the collapse that anchors their dreams, the prevalence of such fantasies shows how little faith they place in the future toward which their societies appear to be heading. Suggested reading AI: A God we can’t trust By George Scialabba Nor will that disaffection remain safely locked away in the realm of fringe beliefs. It bears reminding how short a time passed between the first great wave of apocalyptic frenzy in the American colonies, the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the outbreak of the American Revolution — or how an even shorter interval passed between the second such wave, the one that culminated in the so-called “Great Disappointment of 1844”, when tens of thousands of Americans waited vainly on hilltops for Jesus to appear, and the outbreak of the American Civil War. British readers may draw a comparable lesson from the way that Puritan apocalyptic beliefs in the first half of the 17th century helped drive the rising spiral of political and religious passions that sent the New Model Army marching across the British landscape and brought Charles I to the headsman’s block. It’s possible and, I suggest, useful, to generalize from these examples. The strange popular beliefs and rumor panics of a society are its collective dreams, and they can be interpreted in much the same symbolic manner as the dreams of individuals. In a very real sense, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic beliefs, and other forms of popular rejected knowledge are the ways ordinary people say the unsayable, and communicate in veiled form those realities of their lives that can’t be mentioned in public. I’ve mentioned above some examples of where these trends can lead. In the United States and Britain alike, we may be closer to a repetition of such scenes than the respectable thinkers of our time are willing to recognize. For this reason, if no other, close observation of the specters haunting the collective imagination of our time is an urgent necessity. view comments