How crazy will people become about 2012?

[NOW tense]

I heard an account of 5th graders talking about 2012 and I don't mean the movie. My thoughts are that the media is really going to go for the biggest fear card you can possibly imagine. I saw that Lester Holt hosted a show for the (not so much) History Channel about 2012. I am waiting for one of the networks to put a countdown clock at the bottom of the screen. I am pretty sure that this will surpass Y2K on the crazy scale, since we still have 3 years to go.

What do you think?


Note: I put this in the Religion/Theology area since I think that is what is driving most of this.

[Turbineguy]

1. I'm pretty sure

that in 2013 we will find out what Nostradamus predicted for 2012.

[JohnnyLib2]

2. I counsel children and think you are right.

Sadly enough.

[imdjh]

4. When I was a kid, we worried about the "end of the world" bullshit.

Our parents didn't ignore us, but I don't think they understood how much of their generation's bullshit filtered down to us. THe damned Jehovah's Witness prediction of the date of the end of the world has no business in Life Magazine, or wherever it was that my little friends and I heard about it and believed it. I would hope that anyone with kids makes a special effort to tell them that this Maya thing, and all doomsday crap, is crap.

[NOW tense]

5. It has already permeated into

some churches as being the possible date of Armageddon.

[JohnnyLib2]

9. Definitely.

Between that and the media attention, the fears of children are being fed directly and indirectly.

[imdjh]

3. More pot than plot, me thinks.

Y2K at least had some reality based aspect to it, something real in a universal sense, ie people who owned crappy computers in Thailand were as worried as those in the US and France. I'd be really surprised if anyone in China or Russia gives a shit about the Mayan calendar.

[MineralMan]

6. I remember some serious worrying about the end of the world

when I was in fifth grade. We had to dive under our little desks about once a month in the "atomic bomb" drills. My father built a freaking fallout shelter under our little ranch house. I had recurring dreams of the sky to the south of my town lit up by nuclear explosions. We lived about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.

It didn't happen, but the threat was pretty real. 2012? Not so much. The leavings of a dead culture don't do much for me when it comes to predicting the end of the world. Their world already ended, so they must have gotten the date wrong.

Then there are the super-Christians who seem to predict the end of the world with tedious regularity. So far, no luck for them.

So, yes, there will be morons aplenty who will fret about 2012 and the end of the world. I think I'll spend my time trying to strengthen the Democratic majority in Congress that year. I have other stuff to do.

[dschis]

28. It's for us to know

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. I think it's media marketing driving most of this

There are people with books, movies, video games and TV shows to sell. They've fastened onto the internet New Age/ancient philosophy/apocalyptic cult undercurrents, and think they've got a chance for a countdown. They could have chosen Black Helicopter or chemtrail paranoia, but that means having to claim that a real entity (the US government/United Nations/etc) has to be blamed, and someone is likely to answer back. And there's a chance of multi-million dollar Dan Brown-style 'this is true, honestly' BS to it, so it's worth a marketing campaign or two.

By choosing an End Of The World scenario, they don't have a direct opponent. Sure, the astronomers may be pissed off at the made-up 'facts' being thrown about, but massive ignorance of astronomy isn't new. Mayans may be pissed off at their old religion and calendar being hijacked, but they're not bleing blamed for the End Of The World, just wrongly credited with predicting it.

[Sal316]

8. Batshit crazy would be conservative.

I agree, the hype and hysteria has potential to far surpass Y2K.

[Meshuga]

10. I might visit Rio in 2012

Back in 1999 I arrived in Rio de Janeiro, and the cab driver who was driving me from the airport asked me (in a jokingly manner) what I thought of a Nostradamus prophesy that was supposed to take place on the very next day. I think it has to do with this passage:

"The year 1999 seven months
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols. Before and after Mars reigns by good luck."

This prophesy was not even mentioned in the US like it was in Brazil (so I was oblivious to it until I arrived in Rio) but the Brazilians took the opportunity to turn the "event" into a party. The next night the city was filled with "end of the word" parties competing with each other in the busy nightlife of Rio. There were also comedy shows on TV poking fun at the end of days. In short, the end of the world was a big excuse to party.

I would love to see what they have prepared for 2012.

[NOW tense]

11. They sound like my kind of people. n/t

[Ineeda]

12. What I don't get is

why the xians are so terrified of 'end of the world' scenarios. Isn't 'going to be with their father' their ultimate goal? Isn't death kind of their reason for living? BTW, now don't mock me, but I will be seeing the movie. I have no idea if there is a religious slant to it (if there is, I'll enjoy that silliness.) But for some reason I love the natural disaster genre of movies. I hate violent movies that glorify war and man's inhumanity, but there's something about nature's wrathful unpredictability that gets to me. Maybe because it's random, not deliberate. :shrug:

[Silent3]

13. As a kid I lived under the pretty real threat of all-out nuclear war

Although we'll never know for sure how high that risk ever really was, it was certainly real and plausible -- the physical apparatus for major destruction was all in place. The risk isn't entirely gone now, but I think even with all the nukes that still exist that a lot of the technical and political infrastructure for rapid escalation and large scale exchange has been dismantled. (I think nuclear terrorism and small-scale nuclear war are still very real risks, but the end-of-the-world nuclear scenario has faded quite a bit.)

We learned to live with that fear and largely went about our lives as if we could plan on having a real future. I suppose some people might have decided, "Why bother? The world won't be here much longer", and either did foolish things or failed to pursue ambitions and bigger goals, but I'd also suppose that most people who would have thought that way about pending nuclear war would have still have gone crazy or slacked off without that threat, just finding a different excuse.

The 2012 thing is a bit different because there's a clearer time frame for people to get themselves all worried about, but the imagined threat is also a lot less real than the nuclear threat. All in all, I don't see there being any major serious disruptions, perhaps just a few more apocalyptic kooks than usual -- there are always some of them out there all of time, waiting for the next predicted end.

[GliderGuider]

14. 2012 is a very convenient symbol

"End of the World" or millenarian ideas usually have two components: a real underlying issue (that may or may not be consciously recognized) and a focusing symbol of some kind. A religious or spiritual context always amplifies the psychological impact of symbols. The millenarian meme reaches full power when there is a threat that is real but only dimly perceived by most, and a symbol that has both logical and supernatural aspects.

The nuclear holocaust fears around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis were founded on the real fear of a first strike. The focusing symbol was Communism, a quasi-religious system that was poorly understood and imbued with a Manichean aspect of pure evil.

The Y2K panic was founded on a real fear of computer malfunctions. The symbol was of course the year "00", which had both a logical component (we were all told how you couldn't get 4 numbers into a computer memory designed to hold only two), amplified by a deeply non-rational belief in the power of numbers (i.e. of numerology).

The thing that prevented either of these psychic outbreaks from reaching full potential was the lack of an overt religious or spiritual connection to their driving symbols. Their power in the unconscious mind was mainly secular.

Here's how I see the 2012 fever.

The real underlying threat driving this outbreak is the accelerating pace of ecological breakdown and climate change, the increasing instability of the world's economic system, rising cultural/religious tensions and the predictions of imminent Peak Oil and its potential impact on modern civilization. Most of the dire predictions of a near term peak in the global oil supply seem to cluster around 2012, the global economic collapse seems set to happen over the same time frame, predictions of global disruptions due to climate change are getting worse and the timing of their effects is drawing closer with every new report. Whether or not any of these effects actually manifests in the next two or three years, they all appear to have that potential and to be converrging on that point in time. In the game of social frenzy, appearances are everything.

So those are the "real" factors. In the face of that, it's easy to see why the year 2012 has assumed such symbolic importance. The timing is exactly right, there is a logical component to the symbol (the Mayan calendar is real) and it has a deep spiritual aspect as well. The end of the time cycle that is apparently tracked by the real calendar resonates deeply with ideas of transformation through crisis that are at the core of all mystical traditions.

These ideas are all entering the collective consciousness through various media, so even if people try to deny the accelerating physical changes in the world they are being subliminally shifted towards this awareness. The "2012 meme" fits into this situation perfectly, since it's in the right time frame and speaks to a great turning into a new, utterly unpredictable state. It has enormous psychic power as a result. Even if one discounts the spiritual overlay of the 2012 idea, it was inevitable that it would become an archetypal vision in this time of upheaval.

One other thing that is happening is that more and more people who recognize the possibility of an imminent collapse of modern civilization are responding with a turn to the spiritual. If hope cannot be found in the physical or psychological materialism, it is always available in the spiritual dimension. We simply re-frame the problem so that a "solution" can be found. With its inherent spiritual component, the vision of a 2012 shift is an natural component of this response.

It's going to be fascinating to watch this psychic fever build. I suspect it's going to be a lot more powerful than anything in recent history.

[NOW tense]

15. Great post. n/t

[dschis]

Might have been a guess form the beginning

for all we know

[Lydia Leftcoast]

33. I think you're right

People are frightened about a lot of things that they don't understand, so they decide that it's all a sign of the "end times."

[Silent3]

16. As for "surpass Y2K on the crazy scale"...

I hope you don't think there weren't any real issues of concern regard Y2K.

Yes, there was a lot of overblown hype, and excessive worry about some pretty remote to non-existent possible failures (huge power failures, complete break down of emergency services, etc.), but there was a mountain of work that had to be done to make the Y2K transition go smoothly. It's only because plenty of people did take Y2K seriously and did nearly all of the hard work that had to be done ahead of time that things went as smoothly as they did on 1/1/2000, with only a few scattered incidents of ATM and billing problems.

If you take the fact that Y2K went fairly smoothly as evidence that there never was any reason for concern, that's learning exactly the wrong lesson from history. Y2K preparedness was one of the rare incidents in human history where people reacted to a seemingly abstract danger (like global warming is for far too many people) and put in a lot of effort ahead of time to avert a problem rather than waiting for crisis to strike and then having a much bigger mess to deal with after the fact, the usual modus operandi for humanity.

[GliderGuider]

17. On the subject of preparation and averting the crisis

Do you realize that it's not just global warming that poses a threat? The threat is a converging combination of global warming, oil supply limits, the death of the oceans and ocean species (90% of the large fish are already gone), the melting of glaciers that supply fresh water, the depletion of underground aquifers, the loss of agricultural soil and diminishing soil fertility, deforestation, desertification, the extinction of 100 or more species every day, a growing human population and a disintegrating global economic system. All of it happening at the same time, and set to bite us in the ass over the next decade.

How on earth does one prepare for something like this? It's no wonder people are getting nervous and looking to 2012. Compared to this Y2K was utterly insignificant.

[Silent3]

18. There's a big difference between poo-pooing Y2K as a non-event...

...as if there weren't significant problems that were averted, which is what I'm saying, and denying that much bigger disasters can happen, which is certainly not what I'm saying.

Obviously the worst we-didn't-prepare-at-all Y2K scenario, no matter how bad it would have been, would have been a walk in the park compared to, say, a 100-km wide asteroid smashing into the planet. These would both be very (very, very, very.... very) terrible, differing in the number of "very"s you want to throw in.

Global warming isn't going to be an immediate crisis in a mere 2-3 years, however. Oil supplies, marine life problems, aquifers, etc., could get worse faster than global climate, but still not likely in a 2-3 year time frame.

[NOW tense]

19. Here is your computer crisis

in the next 2-3 years...

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm

[GliderGuider]

20. I'm really saying that the scales of the two events are different by several orders of magnitude.

We don't even need to factor in asteroid impacts. Humanity is doing a fine job of messing up our ecological niche without any extraterrestrial help.

I think the speed with which the crisis unfolds will astonish you. It's already astonishing me. The key to both the speed and severity of the changes is in the optimization-driven brittleness of the socio-economic system we've built and degree of interdependency of its components.

Compared to other global-scale events from the past this one is happening essentially instantaneously.

[Silent3]

22. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove or get me to agree to.

You want me to say, "Y2K? Pfffft! What a joke!"? Is that the required stance to show that I appreciate the even greater magnitude of other possible calamities?

As for whether 2012 is a realistic time frame for a major end-of-the-world disaster (or even, say, something bad enough to kill off 5% or more of humanity, above usual mortality rates) I suppose anything is possible, but I'd gladly put down significant money on a bet that we'll all (relatively speaking) breeze through to at least 1/1/2013 without such an event.

[GliderGuider]

23. I'm not trying to get you to agree to anything in particular

I'm just stating my own observations and conclusions. I don't think 2012 is any kind of magic number in real life, it's more an archetypal symbol that people have seized on because it has a set of convenient properties, one of which is its near-term timing. I agree that (everybody minus epsilon) will still be here in 2013.

All I'm trying to say is that I believe most people drastically underestimate the scope and scale of the problems humanity is facing, and the possibility of a rapid devolution of human societies as a result. They look at Y2K and the Great Depression and figure we can handle pretty much anything. I'm not asking you to accept what I say, I just take these opportunities to put out the idea that this may not necessarily be so.

[dschis]

30. It sold a lot of computers

I was working in the IT field for the Post Office at the time and everything went fine. Power well at the time the electrical grid, for better or worse, used a lot manual switches of could be easily over ridden

[TZ]

21. Well aside from the worries about computer glitches

There were all sorts of biblical/Nostradamus type prophecies about the year 2000 being the end of the world. I seem to remember a whole lot of fundie nuts quoting parts of Revelation as proof that Armageddon was going to happen that year...

[dschis]

31. I stand by my assertion that it's not ours to know

[jellen]

24. 2012 & Y2K

What would you do if you were sure the "End"was coming in 2-3 days?

[NOW tense]

25. I have excepted death

as part of the human experience, I would enjoy my time in this form. I probably wouldn't go to work though.

[Pisces]

27. Call everyone I love and tell them so, eat a wonderful meal, make love to my husband, and

kiss and hug my children.

[Pisces]

26. I think people are going to lose it the closer the date comes. Already there are

hundreds of websites dedicated to 2012 and many claiming that the Chinese and the Egyptians also had similar dates, civilizations that did not communicate with one another at the time they were created. Regardless of the consipiracy theories it is an interesting topic. I have been to Chichen Itza and Egypt and I can tell you that those pyramids never cease to boggle the mind. The one in Chichen Itza that shows a serpent body from the shadow twice a year at precisely the vernal and autumnal equinox is incredible.

I wouldn't sell my house or furniture, but I do think the date is of interest.

[dschis]

29. Like it makes a nit of difference

We already know that we should live life in this world (with a bit of help) and we don't know the date, no one does, except One.

The only thing that worries me (for my kids and grandkids) is something like Apophis showing up before we can do something about it

[DU GrovelBot]

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[cynatnite]

34. Not as crazy as the Y2K nuts. n/t