I wonder if I can side-track the conversation for a second to consider the inputs for concern?
I mentioned people not paying attention and some people having an acute sense that most other people are asleep at the wheel or dreaming (to a good extent their right). Some of the other factors I think:
1) 7 billion people; MENSA was supposed to figure out what to do with this back in the 70's and they concluded that any feasible solution was too unpleasant to suggest and implement. It makes people wonder if there isn't all the reason in the world to start liquidating humanity in large swaths. Papers like Agenda 21, the UN seeming to want to do something about the US having right to bear arms, all of these things add to a deep concern a lot of people would have that an institutional juggernaut of sorts is trying to force itself onto the stage, take the power to itself, and for all the most believable reasons (especially as humanity becomes obsolete as a workforce not to mention the global warming and potential extinction of life issue) make very dirty work of the headcount on the planet.
2) The sense that the Book of Revelation is close at hand. Christianity has had that for 2000 years, its nothing new, but current cultural overhauls and stamping out of the ethic in that particular name in the west seems to have the same kind of worrying and catalyzing effect that the western cultural invasion has had on the Islamic world - ie. a fair amount more eschatological thinking on average and lots of places sought for a source of that old dragon.
3) The sensed complexity that life is coming to. We can see the western nations hanging on huge debts, seeming like there's an unprecedented bubble, and it feels like a shoe should dropping soon, hard, and by hard perhaps more terrifyingly than the German situation between WWI and WWII. When we start feeling like no one really knows what's going on regardless of what they tell us or even what they think to themselves we start wondering if that unseen guiding hand of security is the kind of illusion that's about to fold at any moment.
I don't know if apocalyptic thinking - either religious/eschatological or political in the sense of organizational conspiracy theories - will ever fully lose it's appeal, something really tells me that it will but I'd also have to say that during uncertain times it will be persuasive to a lot of people. I think back to what was said about the 14th century and the boubonic plague, the psychological effects that had on a very Christ-centered Europe that was struck, reeling, and trying to make sense of what was happening. Needless to say people were walking all over the countryside with bleeding feet, falling over dead, and so much of it had to do with them leaving their homes with the belief that the end times had come. I really hope - whether we have a major solar flare, whether God forbid a terrorist lets an EMP or nuke loose on the US or other western nations, if anything so pronounced happens to completely reframe our priorities that we don't get so swallowed up in emotion that we resign our futures to an automatic reaction. If there were a cabal working out of City of London financially, Washington DC militarily, and the Vatican religiously (ie. the three 'cities within cities') attempting to bring the world to its knees and yoke the populace under one world government and religion in ten global sectors - forcing us into reaction mode and leading us by the noses along a fast and furious path of prefabbed Hegelian dialectic would be exactly how they'd make it happen.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
15 Jul 2015, 11:25 am
A person has to be somewhere in the middle, having an open mind. The opposite of this guy is being completely closed off and not willing to listen or look at any information - not a good way to be either.
