[HN Gopher] The Prophet Who Failed
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The Prophet Who Failed
Author : pseudolus
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-05-25 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (harpers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harpers.org)
| empath75 wrote:
| I hope the reason nobody has responded to this yet is that
| they're giving this wonderful article the attention it deserves.
| I have a lot of thoughts about it, and this is one of the cases
| where I wish comment sections here weren't so ephemeral and
| stayed up long enough to be worth spending more time on it.
|
| All of us are facing a personal apocalypse. We all build an
| entire universe in our minds based on what our senses take in and
| that world is going to evaporate when you die, and the rest of
| the world will continue on just fine without us. For a lot of
| people, it feels better, for some reason, to think that we are so
| important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist
| when we die.
|
| Aside from dreams of the world ending, another way to sort of
| assuage that dread that we all carry around with the knowledge of
| our own mortality is to lean into the intuitive belief that we
| are somehow non-physical entities that are merely contained in
| these physical bodies temporarily, and that some day we'll be
| released and go back into our true form. These two ideas often go
| together, but don't always. The neo-platonists, for example,
| believed in eternal non-physical bodies ascending to some kind of
| divinity after death, but didn't really have an 'end-of-the-
| world' prophecy.
|
| A lot of people reading an essay about this will think about this
| as an object lesson in gullibility and people failing to use
| reason, but there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this
| very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that
| the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of
| some kind -- maybe it's a super-powerful AI escaping, or climate
| doom, or nuclear war, or whatever, and at the same time believing
| that they themselves will find a way to escape death, from mind-
| uploading, or life extension or something similar. Transumanism,
| extropianism, "effective altruism", a lot of those modern techno-
| utopian philosophies are just millenarian doomsday cults with a
| "scientific" technological gloss.
|
| I don't think there's anything especially "wrong" about the
| religion this essay is about. It's no crazier than Christianity
| was, which was also a religion built around a prophet whose
| apocalypse didn't arrive and who died unexpectedly. They had to
| build an (at times beautiful, at times ridiculous) tower of
| philosophical abstractions to retroactively make any of it make
| sense to them.
|
| On a completely unrelated tangent: If you read
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ the subreddit for die hard
| Gamestop "investors", there's a lot of similarity between the way
| they talk about the "mother of all short squeezes" and the way
| the doomsday cults talk about the end of the world. There's a
| religious fervor to it that's sort of based around the idea that
| the modern economy is a house of cards and will completely
| collapse because of people shorting a retail video game store.
| jajko wrote:
| Grasshopper doesnt care about some higher meaning or
| immortality. Its role is to enjoy what life gives and procreate
| if possible. Just because we became self-aware doesnt make us
| any more special.
|
| No point trying to see more to it, maybe that could be one goal
| for folks desperately looking for this.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| What does self-aware mean then? Nothing? Most would disagree.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The first mistake is the belief that we need to mean
| something rather than just be something.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Just because we became self-aware doesnt make us any more
| special.
|
| Disagree - I'd say we are special in that we have enough
| self-awareness to develop technology to destroy the ecosystem
| our existence depends on, but not enough to stop ourselves
| from doing it.
| cess11 wrote:
| Don't need any self-awareness for that. Might want to look
| into how we got the oxygen atmosphere for an example.
| pingou wrote:
| How is fearing the risks associated with technology similar to
| believing in a cult?
|
| Are people who believe that technology can save their life
| considered lunatics? Because it can already do so now, to a
| point, but it's not hard to believe that even old age could
| potentially be cured in the future, although perhaps not our
| generation. As far as I know there is no law of physics that
| would prevent us from being immortals (except perhaps the heat
| death of the universe or something).
|
| Believing in medicine and its incredibly fast paced progress is
| believing in something irrational with a "scientific"
| technological gloss?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > How is fearing the risks associated with technology similar
| to believing in a cult?
|
| If it is driven by an assumption that tech will _always_ save
| us because it always has in the past.
|
| I would draw the line at things like global climate change
| though.
| pingou wrote:
| Well I'd say most transhumanists think that technology
| _can_ save us from ourselves, not that it would necessarily
| always do. I don 't see how that is similar to believing in
| the cult in TFA, and how both are unscientific.
| empath75 wrote:
| It starts to veer into cult-like behavior when people start
| building their lives around _near-term_ apocalyptic
| scenarios. Being involved in anti-nuclear war protests,
| fighting for climate regulation to slow down climate change,
| worrying about AI safety, etc similar actions are all
| completely justifiable responses to reasonable concerns. Once
| you start building a bunker on a remote pacific island,
| you're starting to get into "doomsday cult"-like mentality.
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/billionaire-bunkers-
| doomsday-1.71301...
| pingou wrote:
| It seems perfectly reasonable to me to spend a tiny
| fraction of your fortune on building a bunker to gain an
| advantage against highly unlikely events. Think a
| civilisation collapse has a 1 in 1000 chance to happen?
| Spend 0.1% of your fortune building that bunker.
|
| Building your life around _near-term_ apocalyptic scenarios
| doesn't seem super healthy to me, but it is vastly
| different from being part of a cult or believing in Santa
| Claus, as there is indeed some science behind it, although
| people living that way may imagine those catastrophic
| events more probable or severe than they really would be.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > For a lot of people, it feels better ... to think that we are
| so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to
| exist when we die.
|
| > ...there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very
| website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the
| world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some
| kind ... believing that they themselves will find a way to
| escape death....
|
| Neither of these points resonate with me. I think the people
| you describe are a tiny fraction of people -- I'm not sure I
| know anyone like that in any event.
|
| I think the current trajectory of our civilization is
| unsustainable for a number of reasons and we will no doubt see
| some bad outcomes. I have absolutlely no expectation of being
| able to dodge the consequences though.
|
| Maybe it's people like Peter Thiel though that you have in
| mind.
| personomas wrote:
| "Elizabeth Prophet regarded American society as existing in a
| state of decay, comparing it to the last days of the Roman
| Empire." [0]
|
| She's definitely right about that one ^. A very slow decay, most
| visibly seen by its gradual fall of GDP and world influence. This
| is also paralleled by increasing social welfare over the years,
| which the church also rejected:
|
| "Elizabeth preached against socialism in all forms, seeing it as
| part of the global elite conspiracy's plot to control all facets
| of society. She instead emphasised a philosophy of individualism.
| Palmer and Abravanel characterised the Church's viewpoint as a
| 'conservative Republican stance'."
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphan...
| personomas wrote:
| Now on the other hand Trump has gone insane and is completely
| misleading the Republican party, but this a completely
| different matter...
| krapp wrote:
| Trump only normalized beliefs already gaining ground within
| alt-right, neoconservative and fringe Evangelical ideology.
| His politics were just boilerplate Fox News/AM radio fare.
|
| Blame the Republican party for preferring to embrace and try
| to weaponize their lunatic fringe, and blame the other side
| rather than clean their own house.
| foogazi wrote:
| What's with this obsession with the Roman Empire ?
|
| This the British talk this way in the 18th century ?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| IIRC some strains of alt-rightism consider the Roman Empire
| to be peak manliness and therefore peak civilization and we
| should inject modern Western society with more of its values.
| Naturally everyone who believes this thinks they'll be one of
| the few privileged patricians.
| api wrote:
| This cult and its predecessor, the I AM, are cornerstones of
| American fascism. It's a deep dive worth doing. I AM toward its
| end even perpetuated stories remarkably similar to Qanon, in the
| 1930s.
|
| A fun fact too: General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange
| prayer at one of his gatherings. Turns out it's a prayer from the
| Church Universal and Triumphant, this woman's fascist cult. So
| there may be surviving ideological links today, or Flynn may be
| in a cult himself, or maybe whoever wrote it for him is.
|
| https://x.com/PiperK/status/1445663165186904065
|
| A lot of this stuff goes even further back to William Dudley
| Pelley and the Silver Shirts, an American fascist movement.
| Pelley and Edna Ballard, one of the founders of I AM, were
| associated.
|
| Wouldn't be the first time cults tried to use rich or powerful
| followers to gain money or power for themselves. Look into
| Scientology.
| lolinder wrote:
| > General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange prayer at one of
| his gatherings. Turns out it's a prayer from the Church
| Universal and Triumphant
|
| This is in the article.
|
| As an aside, your repeated use of the word "cult" and the word
| "fascist" detracts from your comment. Both words have been
| diluted past all meaning, and using them together so frequently
| in just a few paragraphs induces a lot of cringing from anyone
| who is moderately familiar with either religious studies or
| political science. They're essentially just expletives at this
| point and don't add much meaning beyond intense disapproval.
|
| The Silver Shirts were straight-up fascists. The other
| movements you refer to were right-wing nationalist movements
| but I see no evidence of most of the characteristics of fascism
| except that you try to paint them with the same brush by
| referring to a vague association between founders.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| They're only diluted if you let them be.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I assume the objection above was to avoid them being
| diluted, here. I'm also trying to figure out if you're
| trying to say that if we just react to the words as if they
| were being properly applied no matter what, that will
| prevent them from being diluted. Because that's not good.
| mistermann wrote:
| Pray someone doesn't come along and take all of your
| magical words away some day.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > the word "cult" ... have been diluted past all meaning
|
| Another interpretation is that Cult has been somewhat
| disarmed from it's modern, weaponized usage.
|
| Historically, Cult was as a neutralish term.
|
| In discussing religious groups, Cult helped clarify that the
| group in focus was a subset of a larger group. It was also
| used as a catchall reference to small religions.
|
| In the latter 20th century, Evangelical authors/lecturers
| (eg:Walter Martin) strongly associated Cult with evil and
| used it to help introduce+nurture animosity toward smaller,
| unliked Christian faiths.
|
| If Cult hadn't been so loaded with sinister vibes, it might
| not have become the term we use to reference cloistering,
| manipulative groups.
| lolinder wrote:
| Eh, when paired with "fascist" it's pretty clear that OP is
| using "cult" in much the same way that Evangelical
| Christians use it. Both words are essentially a label that
| identifies a movement as something that you should be
| opposed to if you're not either evil or naive.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > [cult is] essentially a label that identifies a
| movement as something that you should be opposed to if
| you're not either evil or naive.
|
| I don't disagree with your assessment here.
|
| I am okay, however, with Cult becoming defanged.
|
| Cult's negative connotations sprung from the worst of
| intentions - to divide Christians by demonizing other,
| smaller Christian faiths. Turning a vulnerable group into
| an (punishable) enemy is a classic fascist tactic.
|
| I argue that the negative associations with 'Cult' were
| originally a product of fascist methods.
|
| The further we are from all of that, the better I'll
| feel.
| nemo wrote:
| Trying to language police the use of the word fascism to
| describe right-wing authoritarians is a waste of time and for
| me raises a bright red flag for the person doing the language
| policing. Instead of trying to get people to stop using a
| term of common parlance to describe the emerging and growing
| spread of right-wing authoritarianism, perhaps you might want
| to consider doing some constructive instead, or just coping
| with the fact that with the current rise of right-wing
| authoritarian extremism that mirrors prior rises of the same,
| some people are going to use a word you don't like to
| describe it.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > the use of the word fascism to describe right-wing
| authoritarians is a waste of time
|
| Sort of adjacent to your point. I think the label 'Fascist'
| best serves us when we apply it to fascist behaviors.
|
| I'm not saying Fascist isn't a reasonable label for people
| who embrace fascist behaviors. It is.
|
| But 1) understanding and identifying fascist behaviors -
| this is how we know when to apply the label and
|
| 2) the behaviors are the mechanism for harm; they deserve
| our greater focus and
|
| 3) People are multiple things and things change. Behavior
| is what it is.
| cess11 wrote:
| What characteristics did you test against?
| lolinder wrote:
| A few of them [0]:
|
| > a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism,
| forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural
| social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for
| the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong
| regimentation of society and the economy.
|
| Our vocabulary in the US around politics (left and right)
| gives the false impression that politics is a 2D spectrum.
| It's not, and very few right-wing groups today have many
| shared beliefs with fascists at all. This _includes_ the
| nutjobs who think they 're Nazi sympathizers.
|
| According to Orwell the word was already a mostly
| meaningless insult by 1944 [1], and it's still a mostly
| meaningless insult:
|
| > Except for the relatively small number of Fascist
| sympathizers, almost any English person would accept
| 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near
| to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
|
| > ... All one can do for the moment is to use the word with
| a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually
| done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
|
| [1] https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tr
| ibune...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Michael Flynn?
| api wrote:
| Yes. My mistake.
|
| I'm surprised people are low key defending these groups, even
| people on the right. This isn't conservatism. It's
| totalitarianism backed by new age woo.
|
| I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. Totalitarianism is
| back in fashion lately. Feels like we want to LARP the early
| 20th century.
| Borrible wrote:
| "The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Vol. 14" sounds like a
| great CIA PsyOp piece.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's a great record, and the chanting is impressive. The same
| people also put out a single for Aum Shinrikyo which was
| terrible (although the "A"[*] documentary and it's sequel are
| fascinating if you want to know what happened after their
| prophecy failed.)
|
| You can also hear the Church Universal and Triumphant on
| Negativland's Escape From Noise as "Michael Jackson," giving a
| lecture about the evils of pop music (also on Sounds of
| American Doomsday Cults.)
|
| [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(1998_Japanese_film)
| drewcoo wrote:
| If that interests you, you might enjoy the weekly radio show
| Music of Mind Control on WFMU.
|
| Show's archives here: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/MW
| paulpauper wrote:
| Are Harpers and The New Yorker in a battle to see who can write
| the longest article. It was easy to start a bullshit religion in
| the mid 20th century. No google/yelp, a huge population of
| credulous people before the post-90s cynicism set in, post-war
| prosperity and discretionary income, Cold War paranoia and the
| public's receptiveness to doomsday messaging, a willingness of
| public to trust authority figures or anyone who claimed to be
| one.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Enjoyable article. Reminded me of the experience of keeping the
| faith in a startup after it's become clear that it's going
| nowhere - there's the pragmatic need to keep earning, of course,
| but also an unwillingness to overturn the social framework of
| your life, and perhaps a stubborn refusal to upset your strong
| conviction that you were on the bus to destination success.
|
| I met an ex-JW the other day who has become convinced that he is
| an extra-terrestrial volunteer, sent to earth in order to help
| stabilize human society, and that he's able to remotely converse
| with anybody through the aid of his physical paraphenalia. He was
| interesting to talk with; 100% convinced that his belief system
| was real; IANAP, but I wouldn't immediately lump him into any
| major DSM-5 category. I guess certain minds seek non-mainstream
| belief systems as a way of distinguishing themselves from the
| norm, or accounting for a deep feeling of being different, or not
| fitting in. Perhaps this too is somewhat endemic in the startup
| crowd; why work for a big firm when you have special
| capabilities, and can blaze your own trail?
| gumby wrote:
| > Reminded me of the experience of keeping the faith in a
| startup after it's become clear that it's going nowhere
|
| Ouch. So on-point.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Ha! I'll raise you the woman I know who thinks Michael Jackson
| was the John the Baptist to Donald Trump's Christ!
|
| There's wrong, and then there's so-wrong-it-should-be-a-
| musical!
| calciphus wrote:
| I've known more than a few ex-religious of varying types who in
| young adulthood have to find an explanation for why:
|
| - they are not at all who the faiths they were raised by said
| they should be - they know there's not actually anything wrong
| with themselves (or others like them), despite what their faith
| taught them
|
| Squaring these two deeply personal realizations is challenging.
| People take many paths. Your interaction is an outlier, but by
| no means the most extreme I've encountered.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| This brings back memories of the 1980s. The Church Universal and
| Triumphant had posters plastered all over college campuses about
| their retreats. As I recall, according to the posters at said
| retreats one could "quaff potions created by Merlin" - yes, THAT
| Merlin from Arthurian legend.
|
| The posters also, incongruously, had this androgynous-looking
| image prominently displayed:
|
| https://store.summitlighthouse.org/images/thumbs/0000144_pos...
|
| I thought up until very recently that this was supposed to be an
| image of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (whose name I thought also was
| surely made-up), and always wondered why this woman had a
| mustache :)
| RajT88 wrote:
| I am always amused by these doomsday cults predicting the end of
| the world.
|
| As long has there been human writing, people have been saying the
| end is nigh. Nobody has ever been right!
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > As long has there been human writing, people have been saying
| the end is nigh. Nobody has ever been right!
|
| You aren't wrong. I've been a Christian of some stripe, my
| whole life. Even general Armageddon predictions (soon!) are
| really dumb and I wish we would stop them.
|
| Besides being wrong, they're either a pointless distraction or
| they're counterproductive. Counterproductive because fear sucks
| as a long term motivator.
|
| Faiths have examples and our job as adherents is to strive to
| embody the example. That's it.
|
| The rest of the guff might be supportive if applied correctly.
| Mostly, we don't do that.
| cess11 wrote:
| I'm not so sure it's fear. I suspect it's more often
| resentment, and the hope that 'our' enemies will soon be
| consumed by monsters and then 'we' get to watch them be
| punished for an eternity, so that 'we' may rejoice.
| kromem wrote:
| _Yet_
| wudangmonk wrote:
| Amusing yes but while many will point and laught at these silly
| 'cults' preaching about the end of the world they fail to even
| register the bigger cults now called religions that preach the
| things but due to them being older they don't seem as silly as
| the new ones.
|
| Christianity originating from a jewish apocalyptic cult,
| graduating to a religon and spawning derivations of even more
| death cults some of which have become major death
| cults/religions of their own.
|
| I do not find them that amusing because I truely believe that
| humanity has a greater chance of being destroyed by one of
| these death cults than anything else out there.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Even people who at first blush should be immune, since they,
| you know, worship reason and rationality, have created
| something which has all the outward appearances of a doomsday
| cult (a prophetic leader, who lives on donations from wealthy
| followers, elaborate prophesies about impending doom, an
| extensive corpus of religious texts w/ commentaries, polyamory,
| group living, an elaborate rationale to dissuade followers from
| being concerned about their finances, etc.).
|
| Like, if you created a dataset with the notable features of
| various doomsday cults and then compared them with the notable
| features of Rationalism, then used that dataset to inform your
| priors in an attempt to answer the question, "Are my concerns
| about impending doom reasonable or have I succumbed to a
| doomsday cult?" surely the only reasonable answer is, "I have
| succumbed to a doomsday cult."
|
| And yet here we are.
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