Apocalypse Now

the technocratic managerial elite becomes a millenarian cult

Spend a minute of your life looking at a chart that shows how much countries spend on their militaries as a percentage of GDP. The US spends about 3.5%, while Germany spends about 1.4%. For years, hawks have argued that the US should spend 4% of GDP on defense, in a well-known debate about reasonable funding for security. NATO members commit to a target of 2% or better, and many don’t make that goal. Donald Trump says he told the leaders of NATO countries that they should make or beat their military spending targets to ensure their own security, and as a negotiating ploy he poked at them and said that he wouldn’t bother to defend people who wouldn’t bother to pay for their own defense.

You can agree with his argument or disagree with his argument, and make whatever argument you want about the carefulness or recklessness of Trump’s rhetorical style, but none of this is obscure.

And so now we’re living through an ORANGE MAN LITERALLY HITLER CRISIS, as Orange Satan Drumpf tells the Putin Devil to absolutely MURDER all the Europeans and the world teeters in agony at the very brink of a harvest of slaughter. Here, let Forbes just give you the news, straight and factual and to-the-point:

THE MEAN MAN SAYING FOR THE PUTIN DEVIL TO MURDER ALL THE LITTLE BABIES professional journalists calmly explain, absolutely biting through the rubber nipple on their pacifiers. Sackcloth, ashes, endlessly refillable SSRI prescription: journalist starter kit.

In the car a few minutes ago, I turned on the radio mid-interview to hear a hysterical NPR anchor begging a European pundit to agree that Trump is a vicious monster, and the European — I missed his name — sighed and said that look, this is a debate that we’ve been having for a while, it’s a pretty normal discussion. BUT DON’T YOU THINK HE’S AN ORANGE MURDER DEVIL!?!?!? Then they played an important clip of Slow Joe Biden slurring and fake-shouting about Trump’s un-American cruelty, sounding almost as angry as he was when he talked about how many actual chips they put in the potato chip bags. This is why I listen to NPR in short bursts, like a gun run from an A-10. Brrrrrrrrrt, and off.

But what’s inescapable about this extremely dull moment, yet again, is that an allegedly elite layer of political, academic, and media figures are taking something routine and willfully inflating it into a five-alarm global crisis. It…must be a day ending in -y? Nothing is ever bad, or disagreeable, or arguable; every event is The Absolute Worst. Every development must be discussed in hyperemotional terms; every objectionable act is devastating, terrifying, destructive, ruinous, treasonous, unforgivable. No one disagrees with us; rather, they are ENEMIES OF EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR!!!!!

But let’s go farther. There’s a theme developing in Davosworld, and it’s the end. We’re living in the end times, a secular final days. Trump is about to blow up the world, Putin is about to invade literally everything, Covid-19 is ACTUALLY MUCH WORSE THAN THEY WANT YOU TO KNOW BECAUSE IT’S REALLY JUST LIKE AIDS, and Disease X is coming soon in an even more horrible pandemic, and anyway it’s too late to “act on climate,” the decision point is simply gone. There’s nothing left now but “global boiling,” and the rivers will run with blood. What is this person but a prophet who tells you to put on your purple shrouds and prepare to meet the end?

Complicating this narrative, we have dueling end times: Donald Trump is also telling crowds that World War III is near, as we teeter on the brink of global destruction. Eschatological brinkmanship is a sure sign of a healthy public sphere.

Millenarian sects appear regularly throughout history, following a preacher who tells everybody to be on the hillside at dawn on October 22 to watch the final moments of life on earth. Then, pretty soon, it’s October 23, and the preacher is saying that maybe he was a little off on the date, and everyone shrugs and goes to breakfast.

As I’ve written before, the line between religion and politics isn’t that clean in a secularizing society that feels a spiritual hole and goes looking for something to worship. The aggressively secular sociologist Émile Durkheim thought that religion was just us, talking about ourselves:

We can say, in fact, that the worshipper is not deluding himself when he believes in the existence of a higher power from which he derives his best self: that power exists, and it is society… Religion is above all a system of notions by which individuals imagine the society to which they belong and their obscure yet intimate relations with that society. This is its primordial role; and although this representation is metaphorical and symbolic, it is not inaccurate. Quite the contrary, it fully expresses the most essential aspect of the relations between the individual and society. For it is an eternal truth that something exists outside of us that is greater than we are, and with which we commune.

A historian of religion, Yuri Slezkine, is the author of a brilliant book about the Old Bolsheviks, in an analysis of the Russian revolution as a religious moment: after us, everything is reborn. Like Millerites on the hillside, they lived long enough to see that their revelation had failed.

The illusion that we are the group that makes the end, the people who remake the world and change everything that came before and start the new age, is old. We’re here again, in a secular religion with sins and heretics and saints and prophets and demons, and be sure to read here to learn how to speak to unbelievers. Tucker and Elon are enemies of everything we stand for, and time is running short to cast out the heresies of these demonic monsters, brothers and sisters, before Orange Satan destroys the world.

The catch is that I doubt many of the prophets of doom believe any of it, warning about the urgent challenge of climate change from their multiple oceanfront homes and private jets, which suggests that it’s all just a language of emotional manipulation — the vocabulary of crybullies.

Endorsed:

Look for it. Be conscious of political figures selling doom and telling you that the end is near. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the doctrine of the secular end times is becoming our state religion. If Trump wins, IT’S OVER.