The Apocalypse – Always Just Around The Corner And Yet It Never Arrives

I have not researched every branch of religion or philosophy, but the oldest apocalyptic tale I can remember is Noah and the flood.  That’s a tale that predates the written word – it is thousands (in written form), if not tens of thousands (in oral form), of years old.  The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is between 2000 and 3000 years old and it talks of the end of everything in apocalyptic terms.  Let’s keep going with this…

The Revelation of John is 2000 years old, give or take a decade or two, and it too is all about an impending apocalypse.  In medieval times, when Halley’s comet showed itself in the night sky, many were convinced the end was nigh.  Oppenheimer was pretty well convinced he had invented mankind’s end.  The Population Bomb was supposed to have starved us all to death by now.  Climate change is supposed to see to our demise any minute now.  And just six years ago – a measly six years – we were all going to die a horrible covid death – every last one of us.

That shortish list is just me working from memory.  I am sure if I researched it, we’d be here all day.  Better yet, I’ll have AI research it for me. – WAIT! – I can’t do that, AI is going to murder us all, maybe even using Oppenheimer’s invention.

I hope my point is obvious here.  As long as there have been people there has been the belief that our total and complete annihilation was just around the corner – and yet here we are.  But over these millennia there has been a change in that conviction.  You can see it in the list I just presented if you are astute.  For thousands of years of man’s existence, those visions of an apocalypse represented the judgement of God, or “the gods” if that is your bent.  But sometime, really just in the last couple hundred years, the apocalypse became no longer the product of deific judgement and morphed into some sort of self-destruction.

This change needs analysis on two levels – a religious and philosophical level and a political level.  On a religious and philosophical level this change marks the descension of God and the ascension of mankind.  In other words, we are in charge, not God (or insert the deity of your choice.)  And I don’t care to which religion you subscribe, when you see yourself as supplanting the deific it is deeply disrespectful and therefore fits the definition of “blasphemy.”  I am just going to leave that laying there – our apocalyptic visions have morphed, in just the last couple of centuries, into expressions of blasphemy.

Politically; however, this change is nothing short of a naked power play.  Scare a lot of people – convince them you are the only one that can stand between them and the demise of everything – suddenly you are in charge of everything.  Do we need to look any further than the covid pandemic to understand that?  That event was particularly naked about the playbook.

The host notes the powerplay inherent in the latest AI scare in his Fox column this morning – rightly proclaiming Congress as the only place with the necessary power to regulate the technology.  Late yesterday, a piece from The Free Press looked at an ideology called ‘effective altruism.”  It is a mess and not worth unpacking here, but it boils down to the simple fact that these AI mavens truly believe they are the only thing that stands between mankind and the AI apocalypse and that they should therefore be put in charge of everything.  They move from playing for power to being just delusional enough to think it is theirs by right.  Which brings us back to blasphemy in a big way.  But I do not have any more words to spend on that in this piece.

As long as there have been people, there have been claims of an impending apocalypse.  And yet here we stand, more and better than ever.  There could be an apocalypse – someday.  But there are two things I know with certainty, it is not ours to know when that will be and it most certainly will not be by our own hand.