- This video is brought to you by Keeps.
(upbeat music) (liquid sloshing)
What's up, guys? Michael here.
I don't know if you've caught the vibe,
but things are starting to feel a bit
like the end times are coming for us all,
and there's nothing we can do about it.
And all those books on your shelf,
you're not gonna finish those.
All the things you have cued up to watch,
you're are not gonna watch 'em.
All the foods you never thought you'd get to eat,
you're not gonna eat those.
And love, kiss it goodbye.
Indeed, in recent years,
the possibility of us all getting "Don't Look Upped"
has become an almost constant fixation in the media.
(fire whooshing)
And it's not hard to see why.
Between climate change, a once-in-a-century pandemic,
catastrophic weather events,
and the all always-looming thread of nuclear war,
we live with a perpetual sense of our impending doom.
And we know we're not alone in this sentiment.
The fact that everything is hopeless
and the world is going to end soon
practically feels like common sense,
but are the gloom and doomers right?
And if humans are totally screwed,
what does our attitude about the apocalypse say about us?
Do doomers secretly want the world to end?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition,
"Why we're All Rooting For The Apocalypse."
But before we get into it,
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Now back to the show. (air whooshing)
Almost as long as humanity has existed,
we've been trying to figure out how it's all going to end.
The Vikings, for instance, told stories about Ragnarok,
the twilight of the gods, which was a series of events
that included a great battle, the death of gods like Odin,
and the earth ultimately being flooded.
The Aztecs, meanwhile,
not only believed that the world would end,
they believe that it already had ended
on four previous occasions.
First, it was destroyed by jaguars, then by a hurricane,
then by a rain of fire, and then by a great flood.
This flooding thing is a bit of a theme.
Next, it was going to be destroyed in an earthquake.
In fact, for the Aztecs, the end of the world was an event
which had to be constantly warded off by human sacrifices
to help keep the sun alive.
But in our opinion,
no one else has ever really quite done the end times
quite like Christianity.
The story of Revelation closes out the Bible,
telling us in no uncertain terms
that when the end does come,
it'll make the final episode of "Game of Thrones"
look like child's play, including lots of fire and dragons.
Of course, at the end, Christ returns
and redeems everything. (chiming music)
And there's no more suffering and death.
But this brand new start is, of course,
predicated on a bunch of destruction,
proving that there's really no such thing as a free lunch.
Throughout the past couple of centuries,
religious leaders, fringe writers, charlatans,
and cultists various stripes have confidently predicted
that all the world was gonna end,
often on some definite date, and maybe even very soon.
In the Middle Ages,
some people got really fired up about the year 1000
with the millennium of Christ's birth
kicking off a wave of apocalyptic mania
that ended up being pretty anticlimactic.
Over the course of the next millennium,
plenty of the apocalyptic-hungry faithful
would wrongly believe that the end times had finally come.
These included the Millerites,
an American doomsday sect
from the middle of the 19th century
who prepared for the apocalypse, not once, but three times,
before given up
and deciding they'd have to commit to being alive.
All the time, you might say, was Miller time.
Members of the group
later founded the Seventh Day Adventist church,
which now claims over 20 million members,
18 million of whom have knocked on your door.
Meanwhile, over the course of the 20th century,
the apocalypse got even weirder
with groups like Heaven's Gate preaching
that the end of the world will be brought about
through UFOs, which is definitely more creative
than the terrifyingly plausible possibility
that the earth might be destroyed
through manmade climate change.
But whether or not you're in an actual cult,
the sense that we're all about to die
has steadily become more universal.
But why people always been so obsessed
with the end of the world?
One general fact about apocalypse narratives
is that even though the end of humankind would be very bad,
the apocalypse brings about an ultimately positive result.
At the end of the Ragnarok story, two human survivors
are supposed to repopulate the earth after the flood.
After Christ's second coming, death no longer exists.
After the UFOs come,
the cult members will transcend their physical bodies
and realize some sort of paradise in outer space.
Plus, matching sneakers and tracksuits.
Interestingly, one interpretation
of the Revelation narrative
is that it was actually a story told
by persecuted members of the early Christian Church
to comfort themselves.
One day, the old world would fall,
and the emperor would stop feeding you to lions for sport.
The end of the world is, therefore,
supposed to redeem humankind
or at least the people who did or believed the right thing.
And if the world around you sucks,
it's very comforting to hope
that a fresh start is right around the corner.
This is especially the case
for historically oppressed groups
who were waiting for some kind of messiah
to destroy this (beep) world
and create a new one grounded in some type of justice.
Psychoanalysts like Freud
have offered their own interpretations
on this religious narrative,
using the concept the death drive
to explain the fundamental human instinct
to revert back towards an inorganic state.
And in his work, "Civilization And Its Discontents,"
Freud argues that the reason
we have a civilization in the first place
is to contain fundamental human aggressions
caused by this death drive.
On this reading, the desire for the end of life
is just sort of wired into our unconscious.
One good boy who read Freud
was Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno.
Adorno lived through the rise of the Nazis,
escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to America, which he hated,
and witnessed the invention of the atom bomb.
For him, all of this was a sign
that life was so irredeemably bad
that he named it the wrong life.
According to Adorno, right living was no longer possible.
For him, this extended from seriously awful things
like death camps to pleasant things like jazz,
all the way down to banal things
like door handles and refrigerators.
No, seriously, he wrote about this stuff.
Adorno explored these thoughts in his book,
"Minima Moralia," a sort of philosophical document
of his experiences in exile in America.
To understand "Minima Moralia,"
imagine a book written by Larry David
if he just read loads of Hegel
instead of writing about Soup Nazis and no-fap contests.
After approximately 200 or so pages detailing the many ways
in which modern life both sucks and is completely hopeless,
Adorno declares that actually we can do one good thing.
In the book's final section, apply titled "Finale,"
he writes that, "The only philosophy
which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair
is the attempt to contemplate all things
as they would present themselves
from the standpoint of redemption.
We have to develop perspectives," Adorno said,
"that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be,
with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted
as it will appear one day in the messianic light."
So in short, if everything is terrible,
if all life is wrong, and we can't live it rightly,
there's still one thing we can do:
look forward to the rapture. (angelic music)
Now Adorno's messianism was merely theoretical.
He just thought people should try to think about the world
as if the messiah was about to come down
and finally set everything right,
but it's certainly possible to see how this sort of thinking
might translate into a yearning for the literal apocalypse.
An alternative to Adorno's messianism can be found
in the work of German philosopher, Walter Benjamin.
For Benjamin, an apocalyptic hell wasn't in the near future.
It was already here
for the majority of the world's suppressed people,
but unlike Adorno, he thought revolutionary politics
was all about bringing about a messianic moment
in which time would rupture.
This would mean the end of the old world
and the birth of something new.
In this way, theological redemption
becomes political redemption.
Of course, this argument might sound slightly odd
when applied to climate change or nuclear war.
After all, how are those potentially apocalyptic events
supposed to be redeeming?
What sort of messianism is to be found in the world burning?
And that's not surprising.
Humans tend to like being right
to the point where when something huge is on the line,
it easily devolves into moral absolutism,
like say the end of the world,
or, you know, whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
The doomer mindset makes its own sort of sense.
The doomer has abandoned any possibility of hope,
and they may find that comforting.
Maybe the world will end.
Maybe the world will end soon, but at least if it does,
the doomer won't have been wrong.
In their minds, the optimistic people,
those who thought that maybe the end of the world
might have been prevented,
will not only have to endure the end of all things,
they'll also have been very wrong.
As the flaming commits fall to Earth,
they'll know they've been played for chumps.
But this idea that the world is already definitely ending,
an idea shared by our friend, Bo Burnham.
♪ You say the whole world's ending ♪
♪ And the end is already there ♪
As explored by philosophers
and anthropologist writing about the Anthropocene,
i.e., the era of earth that has been marked
by humankind domination of geology and ecology.
Many of these theorists think the age of the Anthropocene,
and thus humanity, is absolutely coming to an end
and that it's all our fault.
Scholar, Gregory Marks, in an essay on the end of the world,
quotes Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
has saying that, "It is certain,
that although it began with us, it will end without us:
The Anthropocene will only give way
to a new geological epoch
long after we have disappeared from the face of the Earth."
So if the end of the world ever comes,
it will almost certainly be our fault.
But that that's weirdly good news.
Because even if you don't have a lot of power,
you do have some.
It might not be obvious what we ought to do,
but we do have at least some control over our lives,
and thus in some small way,
over the fate of the species as a whole.
This is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he said that,
"Existence precedes essence."
While we might find ourselves tricked in many ways,
there is something about humanity,
which makes us free to define ourselves
in relation to those restrictions,
to spot possibilities for action
and choose to actualize them whenever we can.
And what happens when we don't embrace that freedom,
when we use external circumstances
as an excuse for our inaction?
That's what Sartre called bad faith.
For him, our freedom means that we are without excuse.
We are responsible for our own actions,
for the good or bad we do
within whatever conditions we happen to find ourselves.
Doomerism, on the other hand,
seeks to give everyone the ultimate excuse.
There's no point doing anything
since we're all going to die soon anyway.
That said, even Sartre shifted his position
in his later work where he tried to fuse
the existentialist emphasis on human freedom
with a Marxist emphasis on social inequality.
He eventually argued that even our freedom can be limited
by material conditions
and that it is actually the work
of collective human projects
to affect any real change in the world.
For Sartre, the looming end of the world
would be just the type of threat
that could unify disparate humans together
into what he would call a group-in-fusion.
People who previously had nothing in common could be rallied
and united in the mission of stopping the apocalypse.
For him, this totalizing doom
might be just the sort of thing
that could lead to an uprising of real collective freedom.
So it'd be like if there was, let's say, I don't know,
a looming ecological crisis on the horizon
that was certain to radically alter all human life,
and those humans could get together
and use their elective power
to stop that thing from happening or something like that.
Does that sound crazy?
Is that a crazy example, that if the world is ending,
we get together, and we try to fix it?
Is that stupid? Am I crazy?
Are you crazy, is anyone? I don't know.
So what do you all think?
Would the apocalypse really be the ultimate excuse
to never pay back our student loans?
Do we all really secretly think
that the end times are coming?
And if so, what does that train of thought do to a culture?
Let us know in the comments.
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(upbeat music)