To cope, we devise elaborate cultural traditions and worldviews that lend us a sense of symbolic permanence. Greenberg, one of the theory’s founders, whose birthday happens to fall on December 21st, explains that humans, like other animals, have a basic survival mechanism wired into us yet unlike other animals, we are aware of our eventual death. This “Terror Management Theory” sprouts from psychologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-winning "The Denial of Death," which posits that civilization is humanity’s answer to the threat of impending mortality. “We need these things to heroically battle against to get past our anxiety and helplessness.” “There’s always something – the nuclear bomb, Communism, and now terrorism,” says social psychologist Jeff Greenberg.
Perhaps because popularizing Armageddon is a safe way for us to express an underlying anxiety about our own mortality and the state of the world. In the exasperated words of Boston University archaeology Professor William Saturno: “Why do we keep trying to kill ourselves off?!” But the real question is not when, it is why. There are many droll examples of prediction and subsequent back-pedaling (remember the May 2011 rapture and then the quick recalibration of the Last Day?). Lorenzo DiTommaso says this Doomsday worldview has been present in all cultures and in all eras, though it first appeared in the Book of Daniel, a Judaic text from the 2nd century B.C. This “2012 phenomenon” may be more creatively developed than most apocalypses, but the death-wish zeitgeist has been part of the human experience for centuries – 23 to be exact. Massive solar flares will burst off our sun, scorching our planet’s surface, sparking gargantuan earthquakes, monstrous tsunamis, and the end of humanity. This will also be the day that a rogue planet hurtling through space is scheduled to smash into Earth. It will also be a historic “year zero” according to arcane Mesoamerican texts, signaling, some think, a “great end” to the world as we know it. A galactic alignment 26,000 years in the making will realign the Earth’s equator with the sun at the same moment our planet will be directly centered on the Milky Way’s galactic plane. (AP)ĭecember 21st will be the day to end all days.
A frieze of skulls adorns the side of the Tzompantli, the platform probably used to exhibit sacrificed prisoners at the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza, with the main pyramid, El Castillo, in the background, in Mexico. Twitter facebook Email This article is more than 9 years old.
0 kommentar(er)
