Bogus Predictions Scorch Left and Right
Absurd prophecies from sleazy televangelists are easy to ridicule, especially when debacle eggs them on to greater presumption. Batting zero feeds their “confirmation bias,” with leaps of faith jumping the cosmic shark. Physics be damned: End of Times merely calls for unimaginable shifts in the time-space-matter continuum. But crackpot holy rollers aren’t the only dubious seers: how few political, economic, cultural or sports pundits outdo random chance? What truly defines nervy prophesy is how badly non-fulfillment indicts the prophet.
History dispels both secular and sacred divination (the word root here is “inspiration from a god”). In fact, self-anointed savants aren’t better at prophesying than folks unraveling a tricky TV mystery, even what’s up for dinner. Divinities aren’t so hot at prognostication either, if measured by chronic blunders from those blessed with heavenly whispers. Bingo, out of 63,129 unofficial guarantees the world will end, not one matches the accuracy of a five-dollar watch. Even with countless asteroids at large, the earth has survived billions of years (though one deflected blast spawned the moon).
Mass extinctions, huge explosions, and planetary catastrophes, par for the course; but the great fantasy UFO, the Ultimate Final Outburst, not once, not even close. That means the only big truth (aside from eventual solar demise) is that top futurists spit into the wind, yet dance around the rebound. If the future were knowable, we’d have to give it another name.
Second to Final Judgment raving, conservative ideologues win the gold with endless, sham predictions, full of sound and fury and nonsense. What in their bizarre arsenal hasn't boomeranged: trickle-down economics that trickles up, lower taxes that don’t stimulate jobs, or how MORE military and spying spending makes us LESS safe? Remember, Iraqi oil pays back our “democratic” invasion and 9/11 signaled world conflagration (thus the horrendous Patriot Acts). Dubya, however, made one self-fulfilling (if ironic) prophesy: “fight them over there, or we’ll fight them here.” In fact, brutality overseas triggers more everywhere.
The Right Does Not Stand Alone
How about prophesying Obamacare knocks America out cold, Benghazi as Hillary killer, or Ebola the incurable, medieval plague? Only the right turns progress into looming nightmares, whether civil, voting, gay, immigration, women’s or workers’ rights. Have porous borders not swamped us with swarthy, job-stealing foreigners, let alone Muslim terrorists?
And yet, increasingly, the strident left delivers its own “End of Everything as We Know It” pronouncements, certain the dollar and economy are collapsing, world capitalism and the American empire are kaput, both national parties in death throes, all aghast as the impossibility of global equilibrium. What else could happen, after all, thanks to “fascist” imperialists, glaciers melting, sneaky pandemics and, of course, imminent nuclear war? Not all fears are baseless, but why such overwrought predictions, indiscriminate cynicism about all things American, wherein no politician or corporation escapes villainy, and reducing all elections to backroom collusion that contrasts with the golden age of democracy now extinct?
What’s truly amazing is wholesale cataclysm is held at bay, even that the world works as well as it does. Unlike Cassandra, the grimmer the left-leaning naysayers, the more the despairing believe, proposing shredding ties to “the system,” shunning all debt, living the grid or departing for foreign climes. Without further ado, the whoppers of the moment:
#1) Western Civilization, if not imperialism, is wheezing its last, the finale of an awful 5000 year run.
What, all of it? In the next 50, 500 or 2000 years? Done in by Mother Nature or sons of human nature? Destroyed by world wars, radioactivity, pandemics, and/or turning the earth, sky and oceans into dumps? Capitalism, despite unconscionable waste and baneful inequality, still delivers considerable goods and services, so who or what exactly kills this golden goose? If the end were nigh, wouldn’t more revolutionary fervor disrupt more countries, “advanced” or not – or will apocalypse sneak up on us? We seem no better at knowing the future than pooling our (leftwing) insecurities to improve it.
Every civilization ultimately fails, but today’s global machinery supplies an incredible range of food, clothing, employment and housing for many billions. Yes, hundreds of millions barely get by, but fewer live at subsistence now than a generation ago. Will technology never find cleaner energy sources, decent food production, even improve ways to sustain clean water for people and plants? Why knows, but I don’t buy knee-jerk, science-fiction dystopias, especially as China helps its masses by mastering capitalism a new, in its own terms.
#2) Unadjustable climate change spells the end of our species, if not life on earth.
Well, unless asteroids hit first. Or God advances the Final Finale front and center. Agreed, everyone we know will die, and everyone they know will die. Yet complex thresholds for ecosystems are hard to fix precisely, so discretion here is the better part of valor. For air-breathing mammals, climate warming will disrupt, with no few fatalities, yet that’s no automatic species death spiral. Call me optimistic, but I posit unintended consequences good and bad, not our declared certainty, will mark the mysterious future. Some day, the rightwing juggernaut will end, preferably before the point of no return. There remains space in my world between Pollyanna and despair.
#3) Hillary is a shoe-in so progressives should just bit the bullet.
To my astonishment, the right, center and left drone on about HC as the inevitable Democratic nominee. For starters, Hillary is old (for a candidate, pushing her sell-by date), a terrible, gaff-prone campaigner, loaded with baggage, a warmonger married to Wall Street, with sliding approval numbers – and not the only option in this “year of the woman.” Snake-bitten front runners are legendary, and Hillary’s ’08 still loss hovers over ’16. Politics is fun exactly because it’s rife with improbabilities.
#4) Nuclear War is the inevitable outcome of today’s proxy conflicts, like Ukraine.
That good cheer is on par with envisioning Putin as the world’s last, great moral leader, bulwark against heavy-booted, western thuggery. In fact, Russia is getting slammed with lower oil prices, currency collapse, depletion of cash reserves, and years of hard times. A nuclear WWIII might well complete the rout, especially if Putin has no funds to rebuild; hardly the ideal agenda for this savvy autocrat. And what Yankee commander-in-chief wants to be go down, echoing Strangelove, as the “greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler”? Democrats do (even end) token wars, but massive radioactivity for Republicans ruin the range of exploitation. Sure, anything can happen, but premature certainty, “the nukes will fall,” is sensationalized headline-grabbling.
#5) A massive asteroid will crash into the earth, with bizarre outcomes.
Admittedly, not solely a leftwing fear, yet asteroid calamity isn’t expected for many centuries. And that much time allows our clever, rather young species to prepare. Beware the coming “asteroid home shelter” mania. Just because something could happen doesn’t mean it must, and fear, even hysteria, impede solutions. There is dubious good news: a direct hit by a football field-sized rock manages in a week what climate change would a century. Think asteroid heart attack vs. climate change cancer.
Delusions of Grandeur
Humanity is desperate to know, even command the future. We defy logic by presuming to read the handwriting on the wall without knowing which wall most matters. Only three years ago the left gloried that the Republican Party, crippled with contradictions and demographics, will kick its own bucket. Oddly, with major league irony, not only that not happen but today it is Democrats who are presumed dead or dying, blatantly inept, corrupt, spineless, loaded with negative baggage and a disgruntled base. My, my, could two parties implode simultaneously, without revolution?
Perennial, misguided divinations inform our human delusions of grandeur, driven by DNA, if not fondness for hilarity. The most presumptuous cads turn bad tidings into catastrophes, as if prognostication is more like calling for pizza. Prophecy addicts may well touch on paranoia: something dark is out to get us so we invent ceaselessly dire fantasies, what, to prepare for only half a disaster? As seers, we are cavemen now festooned with electronic gadgetry that dramatizes threats so they stare even brighter from our 24/7 monitors. Beware adults: I fear the true believers are beyond my range.
P.S. I strongly recommend Frank Rich’s survey of dismal, wholly unreliable predictions from the ’60’s decade, still pivotal for our times.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/frank-rich-1964-flaws-of-presentism.html
Rich details how many optimists misread that moment in time, oblivious to upcoming horrors. The message for absolutists, ideologues, narcissists, and propagandists alike: melodramatic, self-serving prophesies grab headlines but serve up cynicism and despair, hardly for me growing progressive fervor.
