For centuries people have been proclaiming that the End of the World is right around the corner. Are there any psychological studies of how these people cope when the date passes and the world doesn’t end? -Gabriel
I could fill the rest of this column with a list of end-of-the-world prophecies that didn’t pan out, starting with early Christians who thought the Second Coming would happen in their lifetimes and ending (for the moment) with religious radio broadcaster Harold Camping, who recalculated after the world failed to terminate on May 21, as he’d confidently foretold, and now predicts doom on October 21.
The devout aren’t alone in being off on their dates. In the late 1990s author James Howard Kunstler argued that Y2K would bring civilization to its knees. Didn’t happen, but that didn’t lead Kunstler to rethink his views on the end, just the means. In his 2005 book The Long Emergency he declared that the kneeification of humanity would arise from a shortage of oil.
Perhaps the best-known example of a failed scientific prophecy came from Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne, who in their 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted massive global starvation due to overpopulation in the 1970s and 80s. Was there starvation in those decades? Yes. Was it massive and global? No. Were the Ehrlichs chastened? Not so much.
The leader of the Japanese sect Ichigen no Miya (“Shrine of the Fundamental Truth”) predicted an earthquake would destroy his country on June 18, 1974 at 8 AM. Distraught when proven wrong, he attempted suicide. But he’s an exception. More commonly the reaction is: eh, so I messed up on the details.
What persuades doomsayers to fill in these missing details? Let’s look at a typical case. A couple decades ago climatology consultant Iben Browning predicted a huge earthquake centered on New Madrid, Missouri. New Madrid is in the middle of a well-known earthquake zone, and seismologists have long predicted a cataclysm there. However, they’ve never given an exact date, because to do so is beyond the grasp of current science.
Public reaction to these open-ended prognostications: yawn. Browning’s innovation was to assert flat out that the earthquake would happen on December 3, 1990, backing up his claim with a convincing pseudoscientific spiel. Result: a media frenzy, but no quake. Lesson: there’s no profit in facts; the payoff’s in precision BS.
A more consequential example is the Ehrlichs. To give them credit, their take on how life as we know it will end was (and is) all too plausible: we’ll simply run out of resources. As for when, on the other hand, their methodology was just a couple pegs above Browning’s. They predicted demographic disaster by extrapolating the trend du jour, which showed the earth’s population rising at a geometric rate. If that kept up, they wrote, in 900 years the planet would house 60 million billion people.
That was crazy talk, as the Ehrlichs themselves acknowledged. Their forecast of imminent mass starvation, intended more seriously, was also unfounded. Environmentalist Barry Commoner, hardly an optimist, pounded the Ehrlichs for their apocalyptic warnings. He noted that developing countries typically experienced a “demographic transition,” when birth and death rates got temporarily out of phase and the population spiked up, only to flatten out later. Commoner thought the same thing would happen on a global scale, and events so far have borne him out.
But the Ehrlichs’ scaremongering worked. Their book helped raise consciousness about the perils we face.
That brings us back to your question, Gabriel. How do doomsayers cope when predictions go south? In When Prophecy Fails, a landmark 1956 study of cultists awaiting a world-ending flood, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed his theory of cognitive dissonance, which describes how people rationalize continued adherence to disproven claims.
The shrewder doomsayers do this too, but their rationalizing is often something like: all in the service of the greater good. They’re just making practical use of the paradox known to every politician who ever walked the earth: people listen when you lie to them, and ignore you when you tell the truth.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2011.
Harold Camping sounds like he plagiarized Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Jehovah Witnesses are a spin-off of the second Adventist which all came from the Millerite movement.American war of 1812 army captain William Miller is ground zero for Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Yes,the “great disappointment” of Oct 22 1844 has never died out… it lives on in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The central CORE doctrine of the Watchtower,yes the reason the Watchtower came into existence was to declare Jesus second coming in 1914.When the prophecy (derived from William Miller of 1844) failed they said that he came “invisibly”.
Watchtower reckless predictions of the (1914) (1975)….. second coming of Christ hardens skeptics in their unbelief and provides new fodder for cynics to mock the Christian faith.
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Danny Haszard been there
Thank goodness none of the predictions of mass doom and gloom has yet come to fruition. The author better hope that doom and gloom predictions remain unfulfilled because all it takes is one being right. Personally I’ve been an economic doom and gloomer for many years after seeing all the debt excess build up over the decades. Mark down my prediction from here. The future is going to be worse economically than the past. That means that the financial crisis of 2008 was only a precursor of what is yet to come.
Longer term I think that Erlich’s concerns were right on the mark, just very premature. Climate change is the real deal and population growth is contributing massively to climate change. Climate change is one of those slowly developing catastrophes that will take generations to play out. But with the droughts and fires and hurricanes and tornadoes growing more pervasive and destructive by the year, it is only time before the skeptics cave and say whoops, we are wrong. Ultimately climate change is going to be much worse than current predictions postulate. There will be mass migrations northward as the southern climates of the world become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions will die off. Eventually the seas will rise tens of feet and all of the coastlines that house man today will be gone under the sea. The oceans will be so acidified that much of the sea life existing today will be gone. Climate change will change life for future generations beyond anything we can imagine today.
Climate change catastrophes can only play out if humans don’t kill ourselves off with a nuclear winter first. Nuclear weapons proliferation is a more immediate threat than climate change. Pakistan is building nukes like there’s no tomorrow. Iran next on the fanatic list of countries moving towards nuclear weapons. What is going to stop the next Hitler from using these dastardly devices on humanity?
Doomsayers may not have been right to this point in human history. But personally I’m not very confident one of these predictions is going to turn out to become reality. I know climate change will. The question is can human beings adapt in time?