Lotta Love For Doomsday

The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult.

--Jane Borden, "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America"

Borden attributes to those Pilgrims seven key elements of belief that have shaped America. I'm not saying which of these seven apply very much to moi, but some do. Because I evolved from the same social reality as everyone else. Our history shapes our propensity for self-destruction. (I've used as a source an interview with Borden by Paul Rosenberg in Salon.)

1. "Our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us."

The story so far: "A small Edenic community is under threat and unable to save itself. The police are inept. The politicians are corrupt. What are we going to do? Then suddenly out of nowhere appears this outsider, or sometimes this loner from within the community. This person saves the community through violence."

 2. "The temptation to feel chosen."

The idea of being a chosen people.

The whole of exceptionalism.

God wants us to help get there, and we have the ability to do so.

If we listen to and follow our Fathers.

3. "Both knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism."

"Classic American conspiracy theory always has an evil leader or group of leaders behind it, who are unfathomably powerful, typically world leaders -- a.k.a., the story of the Antichrist. These evildoers are also brainiacs, apparently incredibly intelligent. They use that intelligence — which is part of what corrupted them — to prey on more simpleminded folk who are virtuous."

But there's something the simpleminded folk can do about it, dammit.

 

After all, the word protest is the base of Protestant.

4. "Our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market."

"The Puritans were also obsessed with self-investigation. They literally made themselves sick with the practice -- mostly self-investigating to figure out if they were chosen. They believed no one knew who was and wasn't chosen, but they were pretty sure they were, and that they could find out if they just looked within. So these trials of self-investigation have always been with us and self-help is now a $5 billion industry."

5.  "Hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin."

"This idea that work is holy became a justification for acquisitiveness. Because if you're working a lot to show how much you love God, you're naturally going to accrue wealth. Isn't that wealth just a sign also that God loves you in turn? And if that's true, wouldn't it also be true that those who don't have money are not loved by God, or are not working enough to worship God?"

Sin should be punished, not rewarded. The down-and-out caused their own poverty. 

The flipside -- the wealthy deserve what they have.

"I believe the American dream has become a pyramid scheme. I don't think it was always that way. I think the American dream used to be realizable by a huge and booming middle class, and that's been pilfered. We see this in a variety of ways — lobbying for tax breaks and removing regulations for risky behavior, moving manufacturing overseas. All these things that facilitated the redistribution of wealth occurred, in my opinion, because of this doctrine that work is holy and therefore wealth is a sign of being chosen and poverty is a sign of sin."

6. "How quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking."

"The first thing to acknowledge is that cults increase during times of crisis. Times of technological upheaval, social upheaval, general crisis, natural disasters -- all these things that cause someone's world to wobble and shift can lead us to cult-like thinking."

"When cult-like thinking is being utilized, it's usually by a demagogue who's just trying to activate people to behave in a way that benefits the person pushing those buttons."

"We evolved in kin-based communities, usually with one patriarch or small group of patriarchs in charge. Those kin-based communities had an instinct to fear outsiders, and they managed firm boundaries. Kin-based communities were and are very cult-like. We evolved as a species in these kinds of groups."

7. "An innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, 'Chaos!' and then offering control."