A number of crackpots have garnered attention recently by predicting the imminent end of the world. While superficially these predictions are based on, say, the Revelation of St. John or the Mayan calendar, it is clear that prophets of doom have been able to find post hoc justifications for their claims year in and year out for decades. Something else is at work today.
Consider the appeal of Falun Gong, the illegal movement that admittedly has tens of millions of Chinese followers. Is it a coincidence that this movement, which rejects modern medicine and promises miraculous relief from illness and injury, is exploding just as the state is de facto pricing access to health care out of reach for the vast majority?
Analogously, should it be a surprise that people whose private worlds are coming to an end as a result of capitalism's drift toward depression and war should take refuge in the faith inthe destruction of the old world and the birth of a new? The last big wave of millenarianism in the U.S.--the age of the Millerites and the Jehovah's Witnesses--presaged the days of the bloodiest, most desperate labor battles, of Coxey's Army, etc. Jesus in his time similarly also appealed to those who sought an end to the world of slavery and poverty.
The frantic search for signs of the end times is itself an omen. It signifies the despair of billions with the world we know, and the hope for its destruction. And just as in the past, when the masses find that no God, no impersonal fate, no Man of Destiny, will deliver us from the future capitalism promises, they will take matters into their own hands.
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