It seems as if our popular culture has been completely saturated with dystopian, "Doomsday" & disaster narratives and imagery. Two recent tragedies have been directly linked to this mentality: the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, and the school stabbings in China.
We now know that Adam Lanza, the autistic child who killed 26 people last Friday, had a mom who was obsessed with "surviving" the apocalypse. From The Daily Mail:
"Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse. She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.
Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges. That backfired horrifically on Friday when Adam Lanza began his killing spree by shooting his mother dead in bed."
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| Nancy Lanza: real-life "Doomsday Prepper" |
From HuffPo:
"A statement from the Guangshan county government said Monday that police would evaluate Min's psychological state, but that initial investigations found that he was strongly affected by "doomsday rumors."We can blame the current insanity on the Mayan calendar and the 2012 prophesied date looming, but pop-culture -- and segments of the "New Age"/Evangelical movements -- have been heavily using the "Doomsday trope" for decades.
One of the most popular shows on TV is "The Walking Dead," which can be seen as a metaphor for a crumbling, economically-collapsed society in which one can only defend oneself from the "zombie hoardes" (refugees, the starving masses who might want your food, looters, Socialists) by using guns and setting up "forts".
Recent/upcoming movies such as "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Hunger Games," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Oblivion," "Looper," "Total Recall," "Melancholia," "4:44 Last Day On Earth," "Red Dawn," "Resident Evil: Retribution," and others feature end-of-the world scenarios and/or horrible dystopian futures and/or striking disaster imagery.
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| From the Alex Jones video "2012 Doomsday Secrets Revealed" |
There are a stunning array of Apocalypse theories presented on blogs and YouTube that syncretise all sorts of far-flung theories from widely disparate (and often contradictory) sources: a "melting pot" of the Book of Revelation, alien invasions, the Illuminati "New World Order" plot, Mayan culture, Native American folklore, channeled information, and more.
But by far the biggest culprit in the "scaring to death" of the world populace is the news media itself. I point to this Roger Ebert review on the movie "Elephant":
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.Even an end-of-the-world theory as ludicrous as that of Harold Camping's a few years ago got the "mega" media coverage treatment, with round-the-clock news coverage and front pages everywhere. Have you ever listened to Harold Camping's radio show? I have. How any major news organization can possibly feel his predictions were worthy of front-page status is beyond me. He sounds like a complete (albeit grandfatherly) loon.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
But all these "Apocalypse" narratives keep the populace's energy in a fear-state, a pliable, nervous, continual vibration of helplessness and hunger. It keeps them from planning for the future, instead purchasing a whole lot of useless stuff. It keeps them from getting involved in their government and work towards societal change -- because what's the point, we all gonna die anyway? It keeps them attached to various gurus and leaders and "saviors," instead of believing in themselves. It keeps them buying guns. And, of course, it keeps them buying newspapers, tuning in, and glued to their computer browser.
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| "oh well in that case, I'm gonna need guns, lol whut" |
Living in this state of perpetual fear of the sky crashing down on our heads -- it already robs us of precious life.
“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.” ― Robert Anton Wilson, "Cosmic Trigger"
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