Psychology of the apocalypse
Bitchute is a video streaming site for everything that Youtube won’t host. Type “vaccines” into bitchute and right now this is the top search result:
That’s right, mRNA vaccines were designed to depopulate the planet, and vaccinated people will all die off in 3–6 months. Video posted 1 year, 2 months ago.
Now, Bitchute is a cesspool for misinformation, you can find every conspiracy theory imaginable. Here are few of the next top links for “vaccines”:
As you can see, covid vaccines are a catastrophe. They’re weapons of mass destruction. The government has been planning to kill us with these vaccines since 2009. They’re so secretive about it that they aired the plan on TV. If you’re not just worried about being dead, Bill Gates admits the vaccines will change our DNA. If you get vaccinated, you’ll end up dead and your dead body will have altered DNA it it. Scary, right?
Every one of these theories is entertaining for some reason or other, but the fears of a delayed vaccine die-off stand out to me. Why do people worry about this? And why do they keep worrying about it, even after the deadline has come and gone?
Anti-vaxxers evoke this idea in many different ways. I see it in memes:
I see it in claims by Robert Malone that young people who got myocarditis from the vaccine will die in 5 years (unlikely to be true — people claiming this seem to be extrapolating from studies on the elderly or terminal AIDS patients).
And I see it on Fox News, where Alex Berenson gets on and talks about “concerning numbers of excess deaths in Europe”, which he insinuates are due to vaccinated people dying off.
This is actually a common cult belief.
I went on a roadtrip through Wyoming, back in 2011, and saw this billboard:
I wasn’t too worried by the sign because I saw it in September, 2011. No one had bothered to take it down. Maybe the sign’s owner had disappeared in the rapture.
Today’s covid conspiracy theories are the same as any prior apocalyptic cult. The psychology behind evangelical rapture predictions is the same as that behind anti-vaxxers warning that the vaccinated will soon die off.
In the evangelical apocalypse, righteous people will be raptured off to heaven while the sinners will face destruction and chaos on Earth.
In the vaccine apocalypse, righteous people who didn’t take the vaccine will survive, while the sinners who took Pfizer’s poison will die off.
Both play to an ethic of purity that’s more common among conservatives.
And both cults are ultimately lead by grifters. Leading up to 2011’s predicted apocalypse, some people gave away their life savings, expecting they wouldn’t need money after the end of the world.
Today, people just send five dollars a month to Alex Berenson or Robert Malone.
2011’s rapture prediction was lead by Harold Camping, an evangelist who broadcast on “Family Radio”.
This wasn’t Camping’s first prediction.
In 1992, he published a book titled “1994?”, where he said that Christ would return and the world would end on September 6th of that year. 1994 came and went, and nothing particularly apocalyptic happened. Life got pretty bad in Bosnia and even worse in Rwanda. Doomsday cultists in Japan released Sarin gas on the subway. In the US, NAFTA got signed, Paula Jones sued Bill Clinton, Tonya Harding hired a hit on Nancy Kerrigan, OJ killed his ex-wife, and Kurt Cobain killed himself. Jesus decided not to return.
Harold Camping moved on to selling 2011 as the end of days.
Some people caught up in his movement quit their jobs, sold their houses, spent all their money.
After May 21st came and went, Harold Camping simply moved his end times prediction to October 21st. After the second date went by, he apologized and said that his attempt to predict the second coming was sinful.
Sinner or not, his radio station was commercially successful. It brought in 80 million dollars in contributions in the 3 years leading up to 2011.
This wasn’t the first Christian Apocalypse cult.
William Miller predicted that Jesus would return in 1844.
Alex Beyman writes about this 1800’s rapture cult:
Followers of Baptist preacher William Miller, known as Millerites, were persuaded by his numerological arguments that Jesus would return to Earth in 1844. Many sold their homes and other possessions, or took out ruinous loans in order to congregate with fellow believers in anticipation of the second coming.
When nothing happened at the appointed hour (“Miller Time”, as I prefer to call it) rather than mass apostasy, the Millerites split into several denominations based on their rationalization for why the Earth wasn’t destroyed on schedule. This schism gave birth to what we now know as the Seventh Day Adventists, as well as the Watchtower Society, aka Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So, anti-vaxxers resemble a doomsday cult, and there have been many such evangelical movements before them.
Alex Beyman likens the Millerites to QAnon.
QAnon began with this post, in 2017:
Hillary was never extradited. Most sensible people would realize that Q couldn’t predict anything and stop listening. But many tuned in and kept reading.
And Q kept making promises — “the storm is coming”.
Followers stayed attentive, waiting for some exciting events to unfold.
Just like the Millerites, some followers remained believers even after Q stopped posting. Some believe the 2020 election is still going to be overturned, somehow.
Besides apocalyptic cults and QAnon, we see some of the same behavior in the financial cult that’s been built around Gamestop.
It’s been over a year since the exciting short squeeze that drove Gamestop’s stock price from $4 to $400.
People continue to buy the stock, and reddit forums anticipate a bigger price spike. Instead of predicting “the rapture” or “the storm”, people are expecting the “mother of all short squeezes” that will take the stock to much higher levels and make every share holder fabulously rich.
People still buy in, expecting a low cost ticket to great wealth.
Beyman notes how the Millerites remained faithful,
[Jehovah’s Witnesses] are still around today, which bodes well for the potential longevity of Qanon despite multiple disconfirmation events.
When people invest themselves irreversibly in a lie, even if the lie is conclusively disproven, they often do not accept that they were tricked. Instead they double down, seeking to surround themselves with others who share their beliefs so everybody they know agrees on the same false reality. This makes it feel comfortingly real to them in spite of the disconfirmation. After all, how can so many good, earnestly believing people all be wrong?
We can likewise expect that some anti-vaxxers will keep expecting a mass die-off of the vaccinated, no matter how many times it doesn’t happen. Once your identity becomes built around believing a lie, it becomes painful to hear it refuted. So, you instead gravitate towards Youtube videos and Substack writers who perpetuate the lie.
People are drawn to these cults for many reasons. The cults sell a hope of a better life, whether that’s heaven or stock market wealth. There’s an excitement in anticipating when these events will happen. There’s a sense of superiority, in knowing a hidden truth that others don’t. There’s a sense of belonging that comes from being part of the movement. And there’s a difficulty in leaving, in recognizing the cult was built around a lie.
If you’re reading this, odds are good you’re not an anti-vax cultist, an evangelical expecting the rapture, a QAnon believer, or heavily invested in Gamestop.
But maybe you read a lot of articles on medium, so I’d say you probably still get caught up in some apocalyptic thinking. Here are a few articles that I’ve recently seen here:
It’s not just anti-vax nutjobs and religious extremists that like to think about the end of the world. It’s all of us. Even the most sane people can get caught up in apocalyptic thinking.
You might think about climate change in this way.
In 2007, climate activists set a limit on carbon at 350 parts per million in the atmosphere as a safe upper limit, a tipping point before we reach climate catastrophe. Today we’re up to 419, with no end to fossil fuel emissions in sight.
In 2018, the refrain was that we only have 12 years to act, to solve the climate crisis. People drove less during the pandemic, giving the planet a short break. Otherwise, we haven’t made much progress with CO2.
Unlike the rapture, or the vaccine apocalypse, climate change is real. It is not, however, imminently apocalyptic. It’s a slow motion catastrophe. Rising seas will flood major cities over the course of hundreds of years, but sea level will only rise 1–3 feet in the next 100 years. Global warming will have complicated effects on weather. Forest fires will be more frequent in some places, less frequent in others. Hurricanes will be less frequent but somewhat more intense. Heat waves might start to become fatal in some parts of the tropics, sometime after 2050. Overall, more lives may be saved from less cold weather.
We’ll need to solve the problem at some point. The planet would be dramatically changed with 10 degrees of warming. But, 2 degrees won’t kill us all. Your life won’t change dramatically. You might buy an electric car. Or an air conditioner.
The problem with reading apocalyptic articles on medium is that most writers had no clue what was coming when an actual catastrophe arrived.
In February 2020, we should all have been preparing for the arrival of covid. I was starting to do the math and freak out. Here was Jessica Wildfire’s advice:
Maybe she was just trying to help you find love before the lockdowns started?
Famous doomsayer Umair Haque predicts the collapse of western civilization in a different way, every week. A few years back, he said that school shootings would be the end of us all:
Faced with a real pandemic that went on to kill a million Americans, Umair was clueless. He still hadn’t realized that covid was a big deal by the beginning of March 2020. As of March 3rd, he told us not to worry about the coronavirus, because fascism was the true plague:
I’m not sure how the world will end. But I am sure that these people won’t see it coming.
I spent much of 2020 doomscrolling. Reading about how bad covid is, and how bad it would get. About how intense the George Floyd protests would get. I worried that we’d see armed conflict after the 2020 elections.
Part of this is a form of PTSD.
I was in a serious earthquake, once. I saw several people die that day. For a few years afterwards, I would react every time a truck drove by and the ground started shaking.
Another year, my house flooded after a huge rain storm. For a few months afterwards, I would get a little nervous every time it would rain. I would go out and clean the gutters in preparation.
Victims of assault remain suspicious of anyone that looks like a potential abuser.
2020 likewise left me reading the news too often. I realized early that covid would be bad. That helped me stock up on food and prepare. It let me avoid getting sick in the initial wave of cases. It let me warn my family and friends not to travel.
Paying attention seemed to be helpful. After that, there was a drive to keep watching, and to be ready for the next big event. I ended up scanning the news every day, reading Twitter incessantly, trying to find out what was coming.
Most of that time was wasted. Once you’ve learned a few facts about covid, decided what precautious you’re going to take, there isn’t much sense in watching every single day.
Beyond a point, paying attention just becomes an addiction.
Part of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking is a desire to live in exciting times. But, in another sense, it’s about avoiding personal responsibility.
Losing your sense of agency is awful, if you’re a motivated person. But it can feel like a good thing if your life isn’t going anywhere. It absolves you from planning mundane things.
This author would rather think about the apocalypse than do her laundry:
Work is hard. School is hard. Raising children is exhausting. But you don’t need to worry about these things if the world is ending in 12 years.
Greta Thunberg is emblematic of the modern environmentalist movement.
We’re going to need new technology to solve climate change. We’re going to need energy efficiency. We’re going to need individual sacrifices. We’re going to need collective action.
Greta encourages young people solve the problem by skipping school.
We live in anxious times.
Some of that anxiety comes from frightening developments in the news, like covid or the war in Ukraine.
Some of it comes from paying too much attention. From doom-scrolling. From getting notifications all day from different apps and social platforms. Getting updates about anything right or wrong in the world.
Some of it even comes from freedom.
Covid restrictions aside, most of us are freer than we’ve been in history. Free to study anything we want. Free to pursue any career we want. Free to share anything online with most of the world.
We spend our days on social media, comparing ourselves to others. That gives a vague sense that we could be anything, or do anything.
For some, there’s an anxiety that comes with not knowing what to do, or not measuring up to all the possibilities.
And thinking about doom can be a distraction from that anxiety.
The truth of the matter is that the world isn’t ending.
Some people will have bad reactions to covid vaccines, most will just get a sore arm. They won’t drop like flies, over the coming months and years.
Covid is a chronic problem and we’ve lost control of its spread. Millions will continue to get sick and die. We’ll make better drugs, maybe start updating vaccines for new strains. The world won’t end.
Russia will get mired down in Ukraine but it’s unlikely to lead to World War 3.
The world will get warmer. There will be climate refugees, some species will go extinct. In the developed world, your life won’t change much.
AI will continue to advance. Doomsayers think that Skynet is coming to kill us. Perhaps we’ll just get moderately useful robots and obnoxiously personalized advertising. The speed and consequences are hard to predict. In 2019, Andrew Yang was predicting the imminent end of truck driving. In 2022, full self driving cars still haven’t arrived and Walmart is struggling with a shortage of truck drivers.
We will have more black swan events. We could see another pandemic, a solar flare, a larger war.
I guarantee you that most popular authors will not help you predict these things. But when you do get distressed by the events, they will swoop in to monetize your concerns.
The real question on your mind should not be predicting the apocalypse. It should be figuring out how you want to live your life in a world that keeps on going and changing. Everyone peddling doom is just distracting you from those decisions.
I can’t tell you how to live, but I checked to see if Bitchute has any advice.
Here’s the top result, which might be appropriate for the anti-vax audience:
