Apocalypse's Eternal Return

Hipster guru predicts: Capitalism will destroy the world!

Brian Doherty from the December 2006 issue

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Human beings have a fairly decent history of meeting the needs of a growing population while using less (per capita, at least) of the earth’s resources. The technologies of the 20th century’s “green revolution” have allowed us to grow more food on less land. Burning coal—not to mention splitting the atom—puts more energy at our disposal than burning wood, and with less impact on the earth. So whether or not its wildest extrapolations come true, Kurzweil’s vision of a technological rescue from environmental and human limits seems more plausible than either Pinchbeck’s apocalypse or his alternative Quetzalcoatl ex machina of a sudden shift in planetary consciousness.

What is more likely than either the Pinchbeck or Kurzweil visions of a planet utterly changed is that 2012 will pass into 2013 with the world a little bit different and a lot the same. But the kind of slow, gradual betterment in overall human well-being—the sort that has swept the Western world in the last century—lacks that shot of emotional drama that human beings crave. Some of us don’t fear a vivid, certain end to the world we know; for various psychological reasons, some of them quite creepy, we want it. In an essay written after 2012 came out in June, Pinchbeck acknowledged this about a certain element in his own fan base: “A lot of people in the radical and progressive cultural realm, on some level, are actively looking forward to the destruction of the present system and then a truly horrendous and volatile passage before we potentially come out the other side.” Pinchbeck means that as a criticism, but it’s no surprise that such people would find his book attractive: He frequently sounds just like them.

Put another way, he frequently sounds like that other apocalyptic tribe, the Christian fundamentalists. His book lays into fundamentalism early on, but both he and the religious right are offering variations on the same ancient mentality—the one that’s always finding new reasons everyone else deserves to get it good and hard.

Such people see our Western world of unprecedented wealth and opportunity as based on something akin to sin and thus deserving punishment. The richest culture on Earth includes a substantial minority who despise its economic basis even as they benefit from it. That is a dark emotional truth worth understanding.