How do doomsayers cope

Responding to Cecil’s article, How do doomsayers cope when the world doesn’t end, he touched on but didn’t describe a fascinating piece of research by Leon Festinger in the 1950s which bears repeating here. Apparently - and this is all quite well documented in the book he describes and elsewhere - a lady named Martin claimed she was receiving telepathic messages from aliens on the planet Clarion, saying that the earth was doomed and would be destroyed on December 21st, 1954. Said aliens promised to appear to a spot, conveniently not far from Martin’s home, and rescue anyone who wanted rescuing.

Not the most plausible plan to save several billion people, but perhaps they had way cool transporter technology. Anyhoo, she persuaded several hundred followers to collect with her outside of town where they anxiously awaited the coming of the giant black flying saucers.

When the saucers didn’t appear, after a certain amount of rationalization (“oh, they probably didn’t realize we’re on daylight savings time”), the followers switched their beliefs around. Rather than concluding they were a bunch of credulous nitwits, they decided that this had been - you knew this was coming - a test of faith. Why the aliens would care whether we have faith or not is anybody’s guess. But their conclusion was that by the very act of assembling, they had demonstrated their faith and actually saved the earth from destruction.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive … ourselves. The really fascinating part of this, it seems to me, is how it compares to another, even better known historical event. Consider this conversation between Jesus’ followers:

“Yea, wahoo, Jesus, you da man, go for it [etc].”

“Wait, they’re taking you away, why don’t you smite them, knock 'em dead, lord, bust them up!”

“Wait, they’re crucifying him. In fact, they’re taking his body back down. He’s … dead!”

“Hoo boy. Either we’ve all been taken for gullible saps, or … perhaps this was part of the master plan! Yeah, that was it! This was his plan all along. In fact he, uh, he had to die! Yeah, he had to die, to, uh, save us from our sins! We’re not gullible fools after all! Wahoo!”

And thence is born a religion. And by posting this I am guaranteeing I can never be elected to public office in the United States.

(I’m taking a different tack in responding to the column, Patrick.)

It seems odd enough that Cecil includes the Ehrlichs in the same-- uh-- “Camp” as certain obvious loonies.

But what is really regrettable is that he doesn’t once mention that, late in his seminal book, Ehrlich actually faces the possibility that his projections may turn out to be significantly off target. So he didn’t only have something counter to the main thrust of Population Bomb after the passage of time.

Sigh.

ETA: I double-checked with a fresh reading of the column.

I want to chime in and also recommend the Festinger book as a great analysis of a cult of doom. I have a PhD in cognitive psychology, and in the sciences, there are not so many pieces of research that remain important for a very long time, and the Festinger book is one of them.

Sir Frederic Barlett’s 1932 book ‘Memory’ is another. And A.R. Luria’s ‘A Small Book About a Big Memory’.

Anyway, back on the topic. I have been a successful doomsayer, though obviously not on a world wide scale.

In early 2000, My girlfriend and I were trying to decide whether to go to NYU or the University of Michigan. NYU was the higher rated school. I argued for Michigan partly because of the probability of a major terrorist attack in lower Manhattan. Which sadly was accurate.

We coped by going through the stages of bereavement. Though there really should be a stage called “drunk” in the process.

I heard one expert on the radio who described one of the more common coping strategies is to rationalization that the end was imminent, but by their faith, actions, donations, etc., they actually diverted/postponed it.

The part that puzzles me is why doomsayers get any media coverage. I am a Southern Baptist deacon, living in the buckle of the Bible belt, with many Christian friends, including many pastors. Not only did I not know anybody who took Camping seriously, I don’t even know anybody who knows anybody who did. As he apparently owns some radio stations or something, I can see where maybe his own stations would cover him, but why would anybody else? Was there that big a void in the media after the royal wedding?

RR

I have a twofold problem with the article. It seems to skim over what cognitive dissonance means leaving it obscure to those that either don’t already know or want to look it up on wiki. Second it would be interesting to see how the groups actually facilitated the cognitive dissonance of their members. Ways I’m aware of are:

(1) We saved the world through our faith.
(2) It’s going to happen, we were just slightly early and the new date is …
And most horrendous,
(3) It is happening but we have to die right now to reap the benefits.

I don’t know about where you live but in San Diego there were billboards advertising Camping’s prediction. There were people handing out literature in the tourist spots around town. His followers were doing their level best to make sure people knew about this prediction. That is why it got media attention.

Camping may not be big in your area, but his stations are very present in some parts of the country. His West Orange, NJ, station (in the NYC suburbs) is the only local religious station I can name offhand, though I suppose there may be others. Perhaps he made a point of putting them in the big urban markets. Anyway, when he started putting up billboards on major commuter roads, the mass media could hardly ignore the story; people genuinely wanted to know what was going on.

Well, Camping and his bible-whacking followers didn’t expect the world to end in May (so Cecil just got that wrong (OMG!)). They predicted the Rapture would happen that day, and that the world would end in October. So their rationalizations are more easily dissected: the Rapture did happen, but it didn’t lead to the spiritual torture of a kind they expected, so we’re still on course to explode in October. Never let the results get in the way of your hypothesis; it’s easier that way.

You’re correct that Camping never said the world would end on May 21; he always said it would be October 21. However, as I understand what he is saying now, Judgment day occurred on May 21 but it was a “spiritual” Judgment day, and the Rapture which was also to occur on May 21 has been postponed to occur the same day as the end of the world on October 21.

As I said in another post, I hope very much that dude stays healthy until at least October 22. I really want to find out what he says then!

  1. as others have mentioned, the proponent must invest in it significantly. a homeless man with a signboard on the street corner isn’t likely to garner any attention.

  2. Once that threshold is obtained, the media will latch onto any story that will generate ratings while not denigrating their sponsors. IOW: bread and circuses.

  3. This is the first major doomsday prediction since a majority of the developed world is online regularly, creating a global water cooler for a very large echo chamber. --Contrast to Heaven’s Gate circa 1996-1997 which few people heard about until after the mass suicide. See also: Jonestown.

  4. To garner that much attention pre-mass carnage is rare: David Koresh/The Branch Davidians are the only example of religious nutjobs that come to mind in relatively recent history. Having the feds surround their compound and employ psychological warfare tactics for weeks created a media circus before the tragedy ensued. Granted others like the FLDS made headlines more recently, but never quite reached the omnipresence and longevity as #1 with a bullet as mass suicide/murder was not the end result, nor was it expected.

I would expect that, Oct 21st notwithstanding, any doomsday prophet in the next 20 years or so is going to have a very high bar to garner the attention of the media and a jaded populace as a whole, given Camping’s quite public failure to predict the rapture.

I should also add that Fred Phelps and the WBC are current religious nutjobs who frequently make headlines. Though I believe that without any specific doomsday message, they’ll fade into obscurity very soon after hanging up their picket signs for the last time.

Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore coped very well with failure in their doomsday sketch in “Beyond the Fringe”. Firstly they realised they hadn’t allowed for the hour on in summer time, and when that didn’t work, they said “same time tomorrow lads?”.
It’s a very funny sketch, and I think it’s on Wiki somewhere.
Anthony Kaye
Bristol, U.K.

I have to take issue with this. Great resources - time, money, and talent - were thrown at the Y2K issue, looking for code that not only used but assumed two digit year dates.

Yes, just because Y2K was solved doesn’t mean that it didn’t have to be solved. And it didn’t always bite on 2000-01-01. Some companies ran into trouble on 1970-01-01 because they had allowed for only one year digit. I dare say it had also happened on 1960-01-01, 1950-01-01, and 1940-01-01—perhaps even earlier.

The first manifestation of Y2K proper that I know of was the one that hit IBM mainframes on 1972-08-16, 9999 days before 2000-01-01.

Nonsense. Most of the media and popular attention is of the form of pointing fingers and laughing. Nobody was taking this seriously. The next doofus who makes a big visible display will also get a lot of media attention, from more people saying “You see those billboards from the latest doomsday clown?”

And people have overlooked the most obvious way of coping: “See, things are so bad even the Apocalypse is late.”

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One thing I want to point out in the interest of accuracy. Harold Camping did in fact originally predict the End of the World on October 21. What May 21 was supposed to be Judgment Day, when the saved would be bodily assumed into heaven (a phenomenon called the Rapture) with the rest of us left behind to face diaster, chaos, famine, pestilence, and misery until The End (Oct. 21).

So, yes, he was wrong, but it’s also wrong to say that he changed the date. (Believe me I am not defending him.)

James Howard Kunstler, for all his hyperbole, points out a very fundamental fact that most economists miss:

An economy, any economy, can only grow when it’s available energy inputs grow

Given that the yearly production of oil is peaking or set to peak in the near future, the energy per unit of time available to our global economy will also peak and inevitably diminish. This will result in some rather strange and unexpected behaviour from people that have lived 10,000 years with ever-growing energy inputs. This is not a crack-pot theory, this is the laws of thermodynamics logically applied to a set of living conditions.

I’m personally hoping peak oil is rubbish, but to presume, with no proof, that it’s rubbish seems like a disservice to your readers - I expect better from you guys!

Harold did predict the Rapture on May 21 2011 (His second prediction by the way). His second date came out only as a rationalization: backpedalling so as not to lose to many followers. I lived in Oakland CA the first time Harold predicted the end of the world. If I am remembering right he and his congregation rented an ammunition bunker on the old Alameda Naval Air Station to ride out the apocalypse. Like this occasion, many followers had drained their savings, quit their jobs and moved to the SF Bay Area. the only difference this time is he had over 150 million dollars…so got a lot more attention.

This has been a common occurrence since they christian church decided to incorporate the work of apocalyptic theists into their bible to help garner more followers. Millennialism picks up for the 100-200 years on either side of the millennium. When Columbus doesn’t rise from the dead, Harold will come up with something else.