What do we not understand about the staying power of these ideas?

I think a lot of us have tended to assume a kind of progression of human history, that religion gradually fades out with the rise of science and the rise of different understandings of our natural world. A kind of secularization model of history has been very pervasive in the teaching of history. What we’re seeing is, the secularization model really doesn’t work. Belief systems, including this biblical prophetic understanding of history, have enormous staying power, even in an era of high technology and advanced science. Why? It appeals to some very basic human needs. History is meaningful. History has a beginning. History will have an end. And history will culminate in a glorious era. Beyond the horrors of the Great Tribulation lies the Millennium. So at its deepest level, this is a utopian belief system. It speaks to the human need to believe that life somehow must be better than we’re experiencing it today; that a very different kind of society must be out there somewhere, if only we could achieve it. The prophetic belief system speaks to that need in a very profound and direct way. And I think that helps us understand its remarkable staying power.

Where does the power of this apocalyptic message come from?

The apocalyptic message has enormous power for various reasons. One is, ironically enough, the terror that it inspires. The vision of the future that’s embedded in the apocalyptic world view is really a frightening one. But yet, combined with the fear, is a sense of meaning, and also the sense that as individuals we can escape the true terrors that lie ahead. And that’s where the Rapture belief becomes so important, because horrible events will be unfolding in the future, but true believers will be spared all of that because they will be taken in the Rapture and spend that time with Christ in the skies. So there’s the sense of fear that comes with thinking about those events, combined with the sense of escape, the sense of personal redemption from all of that, that I think is one of the sources of strength of this belief system.

The way I see it – and I could be spectacularly wrong – is that apocalypticism speaks to a kind of archetypal intuition. At some point, humans are going to evolve – both socially and physically – to create a better world than the one we have. So a utopian ideal isn’t actually that far fetched maybe 5000 years from now, when we’ve figured some things out.

But also, suppose, hypothetically, that the afterlife exists – after we die, we go on, to be reborn on this planet or somewhere else. In this way, death is not the end, but is part of the natural cycle of dying in the winter, growing in the spring. The apocalypse is this idea writ large – death and rebirth for an entire species.  If the afterlife is possible – a scientific one, not a Biblical one – then this explains the pervasiveness of eschatology in most every religion, as well as belief in religion itself.  People know something is out there because there very well may be.

Imagine a world where people have definitive proof of the afterlife – this would transform everything we’ve come to know. It would create a totally different value system about what it means to be alive – as well as what it means to die.  To my mind, this is a potentially positive apocalypse. Of course, we have no idea if the afterlife exists, but until we do, there will always be questions, and there will always be a fairly understandable death wish to wipe everything clean and start over, so long as the world continues its slate of misery.  It’s profoundly stupid to make predictions about an exact date this will happen – especially as it pertains to flawed religious texts. It’s not quite primitive superstition to wonder if societal transformation may one day happen.

Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.

Bowie: The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ‘cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the young dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.

Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

Whole thing.

Science may be a culprit, but it also offers some explanation for why we can be so fearful. Some researchers think that apocalyptic dread feeds off our collective anxiety about events that lie outside our individual control. The fear of nuclear war and environmental decay that gripped the nation in the 1960s was a big factor in the rise of the counterculture, says John R. Hall, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, and author of Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. In this decade, civilization has suffered through even more fundamental threats. “After events like 9/11 and the Great Recession, as well as technological disasters like the BP oil spill, people begin to wonder—not just people who are fringe zealots or crazies—whether modern society is any longer capable of solving its problems,” Hall says. If the world appears to be going to hell, goes the thinking, perhaps that’s just what is happening.

The impulse is partially a consequence of our pattern-seeking nature—we are, after all, creatures of the savanna, programmed to uncover trends in the natural world. It is in our nature to weave a simple story from a complex set of data points. (In recent years this tendency has been amplified by news media that are very good at turning complex events into cartoon crises.) The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself also has roots in another human trait: vanity.

All true, except at some point, the last civilization is going to be right.

“Tony Vigorito’s inventive debut novel [is] a madcap adventure of a sinister government plot and an apocalyptic vision worthy of Kurt Vonnegut… Vigorito’s research is impressive, and the narrative pops with linguistic acrobatics reminiscent of Tom Robbins… Vigorito engages in consistently dazzling wordplay, and readers will eagerly follow the narrative as it moves beyond the conventional boundaries of storytelling ” –Kirkus Reviews.

His book led me to this piece by Mark Morford that I agree with:

We are, apparently, right on the cusp.

I mean right now, as we speak, as you read these words, as we race through this awful-beautiful world with our coffee and our angst and our adorable artificial gods, we are, each and every one of us, just on the verge, the edge, the very tippy lip of complete and total madness, chaos, murder, anarchy and complete, raging insanity. And not in a good way.

Have you noticed? Have you fully acknowledged the trend, the relentless pattern running throughout time and culture?

The nasty little notion is everywhere. In every thriller or horror movie, in every panic over a new global pandemic, in every viral outbreak or alien invasion or conspiracy-theory novel, it’s the same: we as a species are mere inches, millimeters, a hairsbreadth away from total meltdown, from pounding each other with clubs and stabbing pitchforks into myriad soft tissue and laughing maniacally, and then going back for more.

I’ve written an end of the world novel, but I’d hoped to not be too depressing, as the book’s about beginning something, as well as ending stupid ways of thinking.  Not really a vehicle to fetishize destruction, I hope.  As much as I like a movie like “28 Days Later” to see how people would react in such a situation, it’s also such a dead end.  The movie itself is a zombie – it just attacks you with fear.  UFO movies suffer from the same  problem.  Anyway, this is why I keep writing The American Book of the Dead (Part II is being written).  If mainstream culture’s only going to focus on human disintegration, rather than human progress, I’ll add my voice to the mix.

Iran has unveiled haircuts that according to officials are in line with Iranian and Islamic principles.

Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism (via Technoccult):

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn’t just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She’s also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an “abnormal” disinterest in babies, don’t want to play with girls’ toys or become mothers, and whose “career preferences” are deemed too “masculine.”

Big Banks Mask Risk Levels:

Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York….Excessive borrowing by banks was one of the major causes of the financial crisis, leading to catastrophic bank runs in 2008 at firms including Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers.

We are Fucked:

About a year ago, I interviewed a guy who invented a plug-in electric hybrid designed so that you only fill it up 4 times a year IN THE MID-90s!!!! And what happened? All the auto-makers and the U.S. Department of Energy saw the car… and they did nothing. A few years later, one of the major automakers asked this guy to make them a prototype of a similar car, which he did. He delivered it to them, they did nothing with it. A full decade ago.

All Things Emergency Prepared:

World-wide insecurity, growing financial crisis, natural disasters, all these are increasing to a level that we have never seen before.

It has never been more important for you to take action and commit to making important decisions.

Prepare NOW to ensure you and your family’s safety and security.

We are living in the dark ages.

As I explored in previous works, I am convinced that we are reaching the hinge point of a shift in human consciousness and the earth that will either lead to a rapid transformation of our way of life, our “civilization” and its basic paradigm, or the termination of our species in a series of intensifying cataclysms. One clear reason for this is that our technological powers continue to advance rapidly, while those who are currently in control of these galvanic forces reveal a dangerously reduced consciousness, a lack of forethought based on their self-centered greed, combined with a complete absence of ethical and moral development. As Rolling Stone recently exposed in a great piece of investigative journalism, the bungled handling of the oil spill was preceded by the gutting of the regulatory system that monitored such operations, revealing once again the government’s capitulation to corporate interests. It seems increasingly obvious that, if we wish to survive as a species, the current ruling corporate, political, and financial elite – working seamlessly together to bring about our collective suicide – must be deposed, replaced by a new orchestration of civil society, an openly democratic and truly transparent system, where nothing is hidden, where profit is not the only motivation, and all have a voice….

I try to maintain faith that the human spirit will awaken in time to liberate itself from the prison that has been built around it. While my doubts grow, I continue to work for that result – to hope and to pray for it. What seems more likely is that the great churning multitude of humanity will choose to remain distracted, disconnected, pursuing narcissistic aims, vain and virtual pleasures, as the natural world, the generative earth, crumbles around them. On what the Russian mystic G I Gurdjieff called our “ill-fated planet,” most people apparently prefer to die rather than awaken to the situation, think for themselves, and join together in a collective movement to restore the earth and build a sustainable and equitible global society. Many of us can see the awakening happening, but it seems to be coming far too slowly, in hesitant fits and starts, while the destructive force also grows in strength, pumping up the volume on mind control technologies, predatory drones able to assassinate from a distance, data-mining intelligence operations, and all the rest of the sterile evils that our technocrat sociopaths can envision and unleash.

Before you say “mind control”? Yes, mind control. TV is mind control – as are the multitude of anti-depressants.  It’s not hard to look at this video and see it as some kind of archetypal beast.  America first killing itself and then reaching across the ocean to affect other continents.

A new and less well known asymmetric threat has surfaced in the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher. Methane or CH4 gas is being released in vast quantities in the Gulf waters. Seismic data shows huge pools of methane gas at the location immediately below and around the damaged “Macondo” oil well. Methane is a colourless, odourless and highly flammable substance which forms a major component in natural gas. This is the same gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people. The “flow team” of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. The constant flow of over 50,000 barrels of crude oil places the total daily amount of natural gas at over 145 million cubic feet. So far, over 8 billion cubic feet may have been released, making it one of the most vigorous methane eruptions in modern human history….

By some geologists’ estimates, the methane could be a massive bubble trapped for thousands of years under the Gulf of Mexico sea floor. More than a year ago, geologists expressed alarm in regard to BP and Transocean putting their exploratory rig directly over this massive underground reservoir of methane. Warnings were raised before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that the area of seabed chosen might be unstable and inherently dangerous….

According to geologists, the first signs that the methane may burst its way through the bottom of the ocean would be manifest via fissures or cracks appearing on the ocean floor near the path of least resistance, ie, the damaged well head. Evidence of fissures opening up on the seabed have been captured by the robotic midget submarines working to repair and contain the ruptured well….

A methane bubble this large — if able to escape from under the ocean floor through fissures, cracks and fault areas — is likely to cause a gas explosion. With the emerging evidence of fissures, the tacit fear now is this: the methane bubble may rupture the seabed and may then erupt with an explosion within the Gulf of Mexico waters. The bubble is likely to explode upwards propelled by more than 50,000 psi of pressure, bursting through the cracks and fissures of the sea floor, fracturing and rupturing miles of ocean bottom with a single extreme explosion….

If the toxic gas bubble explodes, it might simultaneously set off a tsunami travelling at a high speed of hundreds of miles per hour. Florida might be most exposed to the fury of a tsunami wave. The entire Gulf coastline would be vulnerable, if the tsunami is manifest. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and southern region of Georgia might experience the effects of the tsunami according to some sources.

Apparently, this wasn’t a joke:

Update: Methane bubble “doomsday” story debunked.

Via The Australian: Frank Fenner sees no hope for humans

Fenner is an authority on extinction. The emeritus professor in microbiology at the Australian National University played a leading role in sending one species into oblivion: the variola virus that causes smallpox….

Fenner says the real trouble is the population explosion and “unbridled consumption”.

The number of Homo sapiens is projected to exceed 6.9 billion this year, according to the UN. With delays in firm action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Fenner is pessimistic.

“We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he says. “Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable changes in the weather already.

“The Aborigines showed that without science and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive for 40,000 or 50,000 years. But the world can’t. The human species is likely to go the same way as many of the species that we’ve seen disappear.

“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he says. “A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.”

Complete extinction seems a little too pessimistic. Mass die-offs, maybe. Bright side!

2012 shelters from Hardened Structures (also via DM):

Threat Assessment: While the shelter will be designed and constructed to mitigate the anticipated effects of 12/21/2012, no one knows for certain what, if anything will actually occur on this date. However, most engineers and scientists agree that for a fully protected 2012 shelter the following threats must be mitigated;

1. 3-Bars Blast Overpressure of 45 psi
2. Force 10 Earthquake in successions
3. 450 MPH winds
4. Extreme Gamma & Neutron attenuation from a 100 megaton air burst detonated 20 miles away
5. Solar Flares with 1,000,000 volt EMP
6. Flooding (complete submersion for 100 hours)
7. Extreme External Fires at 1250 F for 10 days
8. Magnetic Pole Shift
9. Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons
10. Forced Entry and Armed Assaults
11. 12’ of snow and 10’ of rain
12. 500 lb Hail Stones or flying debris at a speed of 100 mph

Colbert gets in on the act:

My God, this is a weird time we’re living in.

There’s also a way in which the “Toy Story” movies exploit people’s basic fears.  “Exploit” is perhaps too cynical a word.  “Explore” is probably better, as these fears are reasonable.  In the first movie, there’s fear of the bully, in the form of Sid:

Sid’s a sadist who tortures toys.  With the skull on his chest, he represents a kind of fear of death, as he very literally threatens to blow up Woody and Buzz with a rocket.  With the second movie, this fear becomes more pronounced.  “Toy Story 2″ uses the fear of kidnapping when Woody’s abducted by this creep:

It also builds on the fear of death when Jessie, the cowgirl, yells that she doesn’t want to go “back into storage,” which is death for a toy.  The world of toys actually has the potential to be a nightmare, as they can be ignored and forgotten – every kid has this fear as well, as does every adult.

“Toy Story 3″ then takes this theme to a new level, in which the toys don’t just fear a figurative death by being ignored by their owner, Andy, but also a literal death, where at the end of the movie they risk being incinerated.  Like “Madagascar,” the movie begins with a strange image – which, coming at the beginning, seems fairly innocuous, but by the end takes on a new meaning.  In the beginning fantasy sequence, one of the toys drops a bomb of a barrel of monkeys that blows up into a mushroom cloud.  Sensitive as I am to this stuff, I did feel this was strange at the time, because making light of a mushroom cloud seems as inappropriate in a kid’s movie as evoking 9-11 in “Madagascar.”  But it’s creative and amusing too, so it’s not really an outrage.  Just…weird.

In the end though, this takes on a new meaning, as Woody and the gang sit in an incinerator. One by one, they look at each other. Instead of trying to fight it anymore and escape, they give in and acknowledge – we’re going to die. They hold hands with each other, waiting for the moment to come. This isn’t just the fear of not being played with, or a mere fear of death, it’s a fear of your whole world coming to an end.

It’s as emotional as this scene from “Deep Impact,” when an asteroid hits the earth. See minute 4, where Tea Leoni’s character clutches her father as a tidal wave is about to hit them. Reverting to childhood, she says, “Daddy” – one of the better moments in the movie. “Toy Story 3” is doing the exact same thing, bringing us both to a place of intense childhood  imagination and also childhood fear:

I realize this review is incredibly heavy-handed for a kid’s movie. But kid’s movies have always taken on heavy subjects. See: “Bambie” and “Old Yeller.” I love the first two movies, but “Toy Story 3″ isn’t as effective, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.  I realized that it doesn’t always follow the rules of these archetypes.

In the middle portion of the movie, the toys get imprisoned by Lotso, a stuffed bear, inside a daycare center. This sequence is not as effective as the last 45 minutes (the incineration) or the intro (mushroom cloud of monkeys). Why – because the fear of false imprisonment isn’t nearly as visceral as the fear of a bully (first movie) or fear of kidnapping (second movie) or fear of death (last 45 minutes of the third).

Also, at the daycare center, the toys are put in the preschool section, where they’re played with violently, so the toys want to escape.  But this is kind of a false choice – because to be played with at all is preferable to the opposite – which in the universe of “Toy Story” is  equal to death.  Choosing otherwise would be a kind of suicide, so the fact that the toys get imprisoned at the daycare center is less dramatic – at least they’re getting played with.

This section drags a bit compared to the rest of the movie, as it doesn’t fit the archetypes of the other movies, or the ending of this one.   So I came up with this review – which is part total overstatement, but not too far off. Each movie ups the ante over the previous one and “Toy Story 3″ exploits people’s basic and growing fear about the end of the world.  As Woody and the gang stare into that glowing fire pit, it’s like all of us staring into the uncertain future of Global Warming, or whatever other annihilation the world might throw at us.  That the apocalypse made it into the “Toy Story” franchise isn’t a great surprise, given the literal apocalypse of Pixar’s “Wall-E.” So if you look beyond the cuteness of Woody et al. there’s perhaps a deeper reason why these characters are so popular and why the issue of loss is so integral to the sequels.