Why Humans are Suckers for Doomsday Beliefs

Here's a bit from an essay by Michael Shermer in the New Scientist magazine:

Emotionally, the end of the world is actually a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. In religious narratives, God smites sinners and resurrects the virtuous. For secularists, the sins of humanity are atoned through a change in our political, economic or ideological system. Environmental prognostications of calamity are usually followed with reproaches and recommendations for how we can save the planet. Marxists projected communism as the liberating climax of a multistage process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Proponents of liberal democracy proclaimed the end of history when the cold war was won by democracy and liberty.

Most recently, the US Tea Party's messiah is John Galt, one of the heroes of Ayn Rand's apocalyptic novel Atlas Shrugged (recently adapted into a movie) who leads a strike by the men of the mind, forcing civilisation to collapse into anarchy - only for the heroes to resurrect an "Atlantis" on Earth. As Galt and co-hero Dagny Taggart fly over the shattered ruins of a once-great civilisation now darkened into a charred landscape, Taggart proclaims, "It's the end." No, Galt rejoins, "It's the beginning."

Cognitively, there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains are pattern-seeking belief engines. Consider this evolutionary thought experiment. You are a hominid on the plains of Africa 3 million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? If you assume it is a predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made what is called a type I error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. You connected A, the rustle in the grass, to B, a dangerous predator, but no harm. On the other hand, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind but it turns out that it is a dangerous predator, you have made a type II error in cognition, also known as a false negative, or believing something is not real when it is. You failed to connect A to B, and in this case you're lunch.

The problem is that assessing the difference between a type I and type II error is highly problematic in the split second that often determined the difference between life and death in our ancestral environments, so the default position is to assume that all patterns are real; in other words, assume that all rustles in the grass are predators. Thus, there was a natural selection for the cognitive process of assuming that all patterns are real.

Apocalypse thinking is a form of pattern-seeking based on our cognitive percepts of time passing.

Go read the whole article.

Here's Shermer's bottom line:

Apocalyptic visions also help us make sense of an often seemingly senseless world. In the face of confusion and annihilation we need restitution and reassurance. We want to feel that no matter how chaotic, oppressive or evil the world is, all will be made right in the end. The apocalypse as history's end is made acceptable with the belief that there will be a new beginning.

I think he has got it right. I never cease to be amazed by easily people are suckered into thinking that some trend heralds "the end", a big crash, doom, annihilation, etc. I guess I'm an oddball. My approach to life is a muddling middle of the road approach. I think the truth is generally in the grey between stark black or white views of things. I expect tomorrow will most likely be like today. I look at the long stretch of history and see that peoples have been some horrendous history, so I'm expecting we will survive the latest calamity. This makes me boring. But it means I'm not subject to joining cults or suddenly selling everything and running for the hills with the latest survivalist fad.

I even remember the late 1960s "back to the earth" movement and thought it ridiculous because two generations in my past were farmers and I knew how hard it was to scratch a living "off the land". But a fair number of hippies decided that the world wasn't going to blossom into the expected "Age of Aquarius" so they packed up and moved into communes for a few years, starving, wretched, until they had enough and snuck back to the towns and cities.

I watch religion being package and sold by a preacher in my family. He was good. He could have been a Hollywood actor, great drama in his voice, ability to let the tears flow. Women loved him. Men admired him. He was a bit of a star and was used by the church to go into areas to build up congregations. But I watched and saw how religion was a "business". I caught on that there are a lot of people who love hell fire and damnation preaching. They loved that "anger of the Lord" stuff. They loved the "end of days" preaching. While I watched that I learned to become cynical.

I think you are better off assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today with some veering toward better or worse. But don't get sold into doomsday scenarios:

• Zero population growth and "the population bomb" in the 60s telling us we were doomed and there would be mass starvation.


• Modern Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich were selling droughts and the inability to grow more food and predicting great famines by the 1980s.


• The Club of Rome published "Limits to Growth" and showed impressive "models" that clearly predicted we would run out of resources and civilization would collapse before the end of the millennium.


• The rise of oil prices convinced many that oil was a disappearing resource and by the end of the millennium all cars would be banned and our technological fossil fuel based economy would collapse.


• The 1980s were famous for predictions of a nuclear winter because of nuclear weapons. That had a positive benefit in getting arms reduction talks going, but later studies showed that the "winter" was oversold by Carl Sagan because the "models" were wonky.


• The 1970s and 1980s ran hot with fears of emergent diseases. That has caused a number of panics including the "swine flu", SARS, the bird flu, ebola, and other emergent hemorrhagic fevers.


• The year 2000 was notable because the Y2K bug was supposed to cause all computers to fail and civilization to collapse. This was very popular with survivalists.


• With the rise of right wing politics and tragic events like the Waco attack by ATF as well as the Ruby Ridge attack by ATF, crazy "militias" were spawned all over the US convinced there was a left wing conspiracy to invoke UN-domination of the US.


• With Al Qaeda and the 2001 attack the right wing militias were again stirred up and a lot of people were convinced that there were "secret Muslims" in America that were running the government and trying to bring Sharia law to America

That's just an "off the top of my head" list of doomsday craziness. It doesn't even consider the religious doomsday cults like Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, the Heaven's Gate cult, and the recent Harold Camping prediction of "end times".