Cities are going to be more important that their countries. No one cares about what they are wearing in Japan — but everyone wants to know the latest styles out of Tokyo. America is t known for tech; but Silicone Valley, Silicone a
Alley, RTP, and Santa Fe are. And so on
Apologies, dear reader, this article got stuck in a buffer last month, when it should have published…
In the first article, I decided to look under the hood at the apocalypse belief, and see what makes it tick. Next, I covered the first half of what makes it work. There is a hook made of human desire that the world change, and another plank that lends it emotional immediacy.
Now, onto bits three and four.
3. And replacement with a utopia in which they will flourish, …
This is the heart of the belief, that we will be rescued, like a child sobbing from a skinned knee, by some beneficent figure. That the state of things will be made well, that we will get all the chocolate milk we want, and the world’s big meanies will have none, and yea, the meanies will cry, and it will be good forever, and ever.
This certainly is a lot easier than punching the big meanies in the face and taking your chocolate milk back, isn’t it? And this is the key part: utopia is delivered to us by some outside agency for no other reason than we are ourselves. The world itself recognizes the good stuff inside us, and rewards us for simply being who we are.
Little is asked of an apocalypse believer. Devotional tasks, perhaps, to prove to others that the belief is earnestly held. But you never see anyone taking steps to make their utopia happen, do you? Even the militia men are content to sit around and prepare of the event, shooting targets and patrolling territory invaded by nothing worse than deer.
“But isn’t it a bit cracked to wish for, say, the collapse of government into a mad max reality, as many militia men must, according to your idea?”
Take that up with the militiamen. Each groups prepares for the future they want. The militiamen patrol small territories, hunt small games, and shoot small guns, all expecting, nay, hoping for a payoff. If they are correct, they’ll certainly flourish. And they’ll smile as they shoo-off unbelievers like you and I from their compounds.
Some people have an odd idea of the sort of world that they can, or would flourish in. I’d guess that the more unhinged the idea, the more earnest the prayers for apocalypse.
Want all of you’re anti-zombie training to payoff? Then you might look into believing in a zombie apocalypse. Want to ensure all your praying means something in the deep, dark end? Well, then I promise that you religion has a group or two (or 100) dedicated to waiting around for the end of things. And, no, you won’t be expected to do anything to bring this about. That’s for someone else. But you will get to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching unbelievers suffer.
But who else? Funny you should ask.
4. As prophesied by the Authority.
Narratives are stories, and thus have authors. They must, and there is no way around this point.
It hardly matters that the authority be real and it is often better that it is not. If you’ve got an authority, you’ve already got a group of people retelling this narrative: you and the authority in your head! It matters very little if the authority is accessible to others.
Of course, an authority in your head is immediately accessible to you, always right, and can never be challenged by others.
This links up to the third element of the apocalypse narrative; the convenient idea that we can go back to our idealized childhood where benevolent parents do all of the hard stuff, we get to play, and we are ignorant of things like death.
Surrender your responsibility to the authority? Sure. Fight over the authority? Kill for it, if you must. Define your other relationships by their proximity to the authority? Most definitely.
This element gives the whole narrative cohesion. It keeps it from being a simple daydream. It gives you enemies to persecute (or be martyred by). It gives you something lean on when you start to doubt. And it guarantees that you’ll never, never be alone, not even in death.
I’ll close this whole thing up with some optional bits and bobs that can be stuck onto this whole meme, and then I’ll move onto another big narrative: War.
A little review:
Apocalypse narratives can be broken down into four parts, and a few optional bits. Here are the parts, as I see them:
Let’s tackle the first two planks:
1. The end of the current order …
Life’s a drag. Or worse. I’ll bet you thought things would be different when you were planning them out as a kid, huh? Wouldn’t it be great if something could sweep it all away?
That’s the pitch that each apocalypse narrative makes: nothing less than a radical transformation of our shared environment. That’s the promise.
Which is of course much easier than a radical transformation of our inner environment. All those problems? They belong to someone else — namely, the person who is going to fix all of this.
It is human to be dissatisfied. You can wrap an entire religion around that truth. (We call it Buddhism). This dissatisfaction is why apocalypse myths are so popular. It’s the hook, this hope for something better, and it’s sitting inside you right now.
2. Within the lifetime of the believer …
Now we’re cooking with gas.
This warning does not sell: “it is generally accepted that the world will experience a 3.5 degrees centigrade increase in global average temperatures by 2100.” None of us think about making it to 2100. The sentence is so chock-a-block with math and latinate words that I can feel the garage door of my brain crashing down. One of the reasons climate scientists have been getting their asses beat by climate deniers is that scientists never make the consequences immediate.
Climate deniers shriek to the high heavens about corruption and lies, dominating the emotional aspects of this debate. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth stirred debate with terrifying images of what was happening now or, worse, soon.* Sure, fiddly graphs filled with fiddly facts were shown, but we felt with the polar bear stranded on that tiny ice flow. Gore (like the deniers) knows that if you want to connect with earth humans, you had to feed their limbic brain, the lizard brain, first. There’s the lesson — always feed the alligator first.
And it’s a bad news alligator. There’s something perverse in how we perpetually root about for bad news. Sure, it’s easy to see how this evolved; a concerned hominid is an alive hominid. But while the need can be explained rationally, it’s important enough that evolution has buried it at the emotional level. It’s practically a compulsion, and responsible for much of our misery.
That’s the purpose of this plank. It gives emotional immediacy to something that is only complaint, a wish. The first plank is the hook that this idea hangs on, but the second plank gives us the reason to adopt this belief. You can finally feed that fucking alligator! The more emotionally immediate this plank is, the more strongly the belief can be held.
I’ll wrap this up in the next article with sacrifice, authority, and zombies.
*Something bad happening soon is far worse than something bad happening now. That’s why torture scenes in movies (and in real life) often begin with a little conversation while the torture tools are displayed in full view.
I considered titling this “2012, the year nothing happened”, but that would be disingenuous. The year is pregnant with a number of inflection points: the 2012 election, regardless of the outcome; Europe, India, and China are in the world economic balance; the Arab Spring may get a second act; Israel and Iran are both bellicose; Russia may have had enough of Putin; and so forth. Things will definitely happen this year. The apocalypse, however, is not one of them.
Of which apocalypse do I speak of? Do I mean the Mayan foretold timewave zero?
Or do I mean the end of the world in which the Anti-Christ returns, the faithful are raptured, and the rest are left to face the tribulation until the king of kings manifests the kingdom of heaven?
Or, are we Jewish, and still waiting for the Messiah? If Muslim, then we can call him the Mahdi. Or are we Hindu, and looking forward to the next incarnation of Vishnu battling Kali Yuga for the very last time? Even some Buddhists believe that Maitreya will usher in the Pure Land. Zen? Well, I guess you’ve got nothing to look forward to, but then that’s the point.
Or what about the coming global climate shift in which the world’s major metropolises vanish under great gouts of salty water, and the world’s remaining population is left to fend for itself in a preindustrial land red in tooth and nail?
Or do I mean the one in which the Democrats with their supercharged death panels come for grandma and send her children and grandchildren to FEMA reeducation camps in black helicopters from the UN?
Or is this the year that the singularity finally comes about and self designing mega AI cater to our every demand?
It really doesn’t matter.
These narratives are everywhere. They are all closely related, and in the style of ‘APOCALYPSE’. And they have more to do with people now than with events in the future.
Like every narrative, they are all born of a common seed: a human’s need to explain his unhappy place in the world. A need to explain why, despite deep sacrifice, bad things are happening to me now.
When I cut ‘em up, this is what I’ve see:
1. The complete end of the current order …
2. within my lifetime …
3. replaced with a utopia in which I will flourish …
4. as prophesied by the Authority.
Why are these stories everywhere? Why do people need to believe in the immanent end? I’ll handle each of these planks in coming articles, which will come pretty quickly.
Nate Silver suggests that the Bain controversy is potentially far more damaging for Romney than Reverend Wright was for Obama:
In the case of Mr. Wright, there were videos of certain sermons, and there were questions about how close Mr. Obama was to him personally and to his church. But the supply of new information was soon exhausted. By contrast, the transactions that a company like Bain Capital engages in are complicated, and it made dozens of investments. Each investment might constitute its own compelling story, some of which might reflect favorably on Mr. Romney, others less so.
The longer that investments made by Bain Capital are deemed to be salient to the presidential campaign, the more effort financial and political reporters will make in pursuing leads about them, hoping to uncover a “scoop.” It is true that the public might develop a level of exhaustion with these stories, but they would be a target-rich environment for reporters, and Mr. Romney’s campaign would have to spend resources in making sure it manages the news coverage as well as it can.
Correct. When Romney talks about “creative destruction”, “Corporations are people too”, and that people questioning his record are simply “jealous”, he really means it, and people know it. It’s the only time we have seen spin-free, unambiguous Romney.
He genuinely believes these things. How do I know? He would not have risen to the position at Bain Capital without believing that firing 90% of a workforce and taking their pension plan as compensation was “creative destruction”.
It will continue to be brought to the fore, because Romney is a true believer. He keeps making “10,000 dollar” bets and petulantly defending Bain. No voter cares about the egos at Bain. But a lot of people in swing states knew someone that was laid off from by Bain consultant in the 80s.
He can’t come clean, either, because that means talking about Bain in specific terms. Why was this particular company subject to slash and burn? How can you count all of those jobs that were created? These are questions that you cannot answer without Bain’s cooperation, and that is legally prohibited by their non disclosure agreements.
He will not be able to tackle the individual cases as they come up, nor reframe the narrative. It will writ itself.
The is no narrative salvation for Romney other than Unrepentant Wall Street Baron. Even Republicans have a problem voting for that; Libertarians hate him, and the Evangelical wing dislikes this kind of unfeeling Mammonism.
I’m calling it, at 8:26pm, January 13, 2012, Obama wins reelection.
Access over ownership
If they end up supporting ObamaCare, Barack Obama will claim vindication for the next few months of the campaign for his re-election bid. If they strike it down, Obama loses his signature achievement and has to explain that for the next few months leading up to the election — and explaining is not winning.
Correct as to the first part, wrong as to the second.
Look, Obama could very well sit around explaining things, and that would be a loser. But give the man some credit: he beat the Clintons at the top of their game.
The correct argument is to advance Health Care reform again and use unpopular defeat draw distinctions between ‘Tea Party crazies’ and ‘jurassic Justices’. You can now take a stand against an authority, an enemy, on an issue that is a proven winner.
Lesson: Leaders don’t explain facts, they use facts to leverage further action. Only the powerless explain how things are — this is why Clinton looked so weak when he explained that it, “Depend’s on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” None of the usual Clinton bravura — only his practice as a master politician keeps this from sliding into tale-between-legs territory.
*my guess is that the Supremes will affirm the law as it stands. The weight of lower court opinion and popular opinion will be on the side of the law by summer of 2012.
An article in Physics Today lists “Terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public”.
Unsurprisingly, all of the abused words are borrowed from Latin or Greek. And remember, Latin is for Liars.
A pro tip from Orwell:
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Snow, squids, schizophrenia; a chthonic nightmare. Beautiful imagery. From Politics and the English Language, which every scientist should now read.
Orwell explains what we lose by being imprecise. Confucius tells us what we get:
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
You don’t say, Confucius. From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3 (James R. Ware, translated in 1980).
Scientists (usually) use Latinate words correctly: to talk about precisely defined things. Scientists mean them sincerly. They have been trained to do so for many, many years. If they do not, no one in their community takes them seriously.
This is not how it passes in the general language, because most English speakers (even Lawyers!) are not trained in their use. We learn: “See the dog run” not “View the coursing canine”. We’re more comfortable with English words, because their meaning is solid. Notice how “aerosol” turns into “spray can”. Their ‘better choices’ could be improved as well; “small /air/ particle”, for instance.
Judging from the “Better Choice” (good choice of heading, by the way) options, really just more Latin, I predict that climate deniers and other people will keep winning political victories.
A narration collects a body of facts and weaves a compelling story about it.
What makes it compelling? One way is to place the audience right in the middle of the narrative.
This is why we attend political rallies and cast votes. It’s why we get into arguments with our uncle Clem over Thanksgiving turkey. Active Christians aren’t just Christians — they’re “living in Christ.” Christ’s story may be over (for the moment), but his followers can still live it.
At this point, the specifics of Perry’s narrative are for him to create. But I’d guess that it will revolve around God, Texas, and Jobs.
However Romney and the establishment know enough about Perry to start telling their own narrative about him:
This is the sort of story that can be boiled down to a few words, an epithet.
Trigger-happy. Katrina. Loose-cannon. Reckless.
Ah, yes. Reckless Rick Perry. You’re welcome, Mitt.
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