[Transcript of Episode 9: ‘The Truth Behind The Apocalypse’ from 06/20/17]
INTRO
Welcome, I’m the
Conspiracy Man. In this series we’ll be blowing the lid off many of the world’s
biggest conspiracies that the man doesn’t want you to know about.
‘The End of the World
as We Know It’ has been predicted so many different times throughout world
history and is a concept present in many religious texts and other forms of
fiction.
SO MANY APOCALYPSESSES
One of the more
famous apocalypses-that-never-were was the Mayan 2012 apocalypse. This was when
the Mayan long count calendar would end, and thus the world would end too.
Surprisingly, 2012 came and went without a cataclysmic pole shift, or asteroid,
or ancient Mayan gods cracking the Earth open. The problem with this prediction
is the Mayans themselves – these guys from millennia ago knew the world would
end? Their ability to predict disaster would seem to be lacking since they
couldn’t even predict their own – the Mayan civilisation itself fell into decline
around the 10th century AD.
Christians predicting
the Rapture and subsequent end of the world is a common occurrence. Californian
engineer Harold Camping predicted the world would end in 2011, by applying math
to the Bible. Spoiler alert – in 2011 the Rapture didn’t happen, and Camping
said he’d been wrong to try and predict it in the first place.
It’s not always religious
beliefs that result in prophecies of doom. Leading into the end of the 2nd
millennium, along with the expected predictions of Jesus coming back since it
was an anniversary year, we had a technological terror to deal with. The Y2K
bug was going to cause all sorts of disaster but it didn’t, either because it
was completely it was never a big issue, or, if you buy the party line – because
of all the money spent in Y2K compliance.
There are countless
predictions of astronomy-linked doomsday. Asteroids, comets, solar flares, pole
shifts, supernovae, aliens and even whole planets like Nibiru, which was
supposed to pass near Earth and destroy us. I have my own theories on Nibiru
but that is something for another time.
Sometimes these
things end bad, or good, since the world doesn’t end. But badly for the
believers, such as with the UFO cult, Heaven’s Gate, 39 members of which
committed suicide so they could board a spaceship following the arrival of the
Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. There were no aliens and no apocalypse.
SAVIOR OF THE WORLD
No matter how many of
these predictions fail to come true we keep getting new ones. And even where
ones failed to come to pass people still believe they were correct. Why have all these predictions come to naught?
To explain, let’s look at one particular cataclysmic prediction – that of Dorothy
Martin in the 1950s. God I love Wikipedia.
Martin was a Chicago
housewife who received messages from a mystical planet that told her the world
would end in a flood on December 21, 1954, but her and her followers would be
saved by the aliens. So her followers quit their jobs and sold their possessions,
but the time of doom came and went. Everyone was disappointed but then the
aliens sent Martin another message that said the group ‘had spread so much light that God had saved the world from
destruction’.
This episode is chronicled in the book by Fred
Schlesinger When Prophecy Fails and
he puts the fact that the prophecy didn’t come true, yet the group still
believed and said it had been averted rather than been fake the whole time down
to cognitive dissonance, a concept he came up with. Faced with their beliefs
being disconfirmed, they just rationalised this away rather than stop
believing.
But he’s wrong – they weren’t making excuses
for being wrong –they were actually right. The reason it didn’t come true was
because they believed it – predicting and having people believe in the end of
the world is what actually prevents it from happening. Kind of like a reverse
of that book, ‘The Secret’.
SCIENCE FACTION
This idea may seem nonsensical but there are parallels to
this idea in several fields of science. In physics, the act of measurement can
affect what is being measured – for example, in thermodynamics a thermometer
draws some of the heat of what it is measuring.
In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics, psychical systems do not have definite properties until measured –
until then they exist in all possible states. This is the observer effect,
where all possibilities are possible until it is observed and thus only one can
be.
A famous example of
this is Schrödinger’s Cat, from famous physicist and cat-murderer Edwin
Schrödinger. In this experiment, a cat is put in a sealed box with a trap that
may or may not go off and kill the cat. Until one opens the box, the cat is
simultaneously both alive AND dead. But when one opens the box and looks inside
the cat is either alive OR dead – thus observing it determines the state of the
cat. I would assume that you could tell if the cat was alive when in the box
since you could hear it screaming and clawing to get out, but I guess Schrödinger
had murdered so many cats he just tuned that out and could no longer hear it.
Maybe he’s a dog person.
The idea that the act
of observation can affect something is a real thing. You can’t argue with
science.
Certainly, for the
Biblical ones it makes even more sense since God would likely be pissed off if
someone predicted the Rapture and would stop it happening just to fuck with
that person for having the chutzpah to try and predict the divine will of God,
like with the Camping 2011 prediction.
So, when some nut
comes up to you predicting the end of the world give them a hug and believe
them – it’s the only way to save the world. I myself shall be constantly
predicting the world will end – it’s the only way to ensure the world won’t
end. No need to thank me, I’m just doing my duty to mankind.
OUTRO
Provided I am not
taken out by the powers that be, I shall return ... if the world doesn’t end. What conspiracy will
I be prognosticating? Well, let me just say – the deadly sin of gluten-y.
Scared – you should be?
Starring: Death
Written by: Famine
Edited by: War
Music by: Pestilence
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