Countdown To Armageddon

The Mayan Calendar

Well, here we are, counting down to whatever it is we are counting down to.

To hear some folks talk, by this time next year, the Earth will be a cinder, all Mankind will be extinct, civilization will vanish, and it will all be because of some carved stone wheels in Mexico.

Rubbish.

It is the nature of all entrenched power elites to make people afraid of some external force, from which they will protect us...at a price.  Fear is a great motivator, and when used as a weapon, can cause great numbers of people to do really stupid things, like trust someone else to watch out for their interests.  It never occurs to us individually that anyone we put in a position to guard our safety is going to watch out for their own safety first.

The great Roman poet and historian Ovid famously said, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?"  Who will watch the watchers?  Once you establish an individual or group to protect your interests, then you must place another over them to watch them, and yet more over them to watch the former.  It's an endless cycle of layers of watchers checking on other watchers, and in the end, the only one who is truly motivated to keep me safe is me.

If I have a pile of gold and I hire someone to watch it for me, eventually they will figure out that job security comes from keeping me afraid of losing my gold.  But at some point, I will become paranoid and hire someone else to keep an eye on the first one.  And on it goes ad infinitum.  The watchers will inevitably place their own self-interests above mine.

If we expand this to a global scale, then we have certain minorities who have been placed in positions of trust to watch out for our interests.  To protect their interests, they have instituted various programs to keep us afraid, and thus continue paying them to watch our interests.  When they are caught red-handed lying and dissembling, we blythely pay more to install another layer of minorities to watch the first group, who in turn ally themselves with the first layer in order to enrich themselves at our expense.  We call this process 'government'.

In the age of the 'security' state, we the sheeple herded around by the noses by a small group of people who use our fears as weapons against us.  By its nature, fear is irrational because it rarely rises to the level of our expectations.  Yet the mere anticipation of something bad happening causes us to become pliant and docile at the hands of anyone who will promise to protect us.

The state apparatus has a vested interest in keeping us afraid.  It doesn't matter what the fear is, so long as a sufficient majority of the masses are afraid of it.  It also helps if the fear is something that is much larger and inevitable that we are powerless to change.  We will still throw money and power at anyone who steps up and says they have a plan to protect us.

Global cooling, global warming, Y2K, 2012, Apocalypse...name your irrational fear, and you will find some group standing up to take money to protect us from it.

Pandora's Box

Climate change?  Well, we have this anonymous group of 'scientists,' without names or faces, who are working diligently with their laptops and recording stations to do what we all can do by standing outside.

Apocalypse?  We have this massive bureaucracy called a church that claims to intercede on behalf of all Mankind with an angry and wrathful God to prevent His wiping out Humanity.  This particular gig is very effective, since it's lasted about 500 years or so.  Never mind that wrath and vengence are two of the seven deadly sins, and it makes no logical sense what-so-ever that this God would act on them.

2012?  This one is particularly rich, since no one seems to take the time to read about seven or eight paragraphs in a scholarly paper on Mayan calendars.  It's particularly effective, since people can project just about any fear they have on to it, and it has grown to encompass climate change, apocalypse, space invasions, and pretty much all the other fears and expectations of our collective subconscious.

In simplest terms, the Maya envisioned all of time as a series of interwoven cycles running endlessly into the future.  Each progressing cycle was exponentially longer than the first, with the final cycle lasting a bit over 5,000 years.  This final cycle had 13 iterations before it would itself recycle.  The whole thing was based on various celestial events, particularly the movements of Venus, Moon and Sun.

The cycles also coincided with Maya myths and legends regarding various Ages, not unlike the Yugas in Hindu tradition.  In fact, a brief effort on the part of the curious reader will reveal that the recycling of the Mayan calendar, as well as the Hindu tradition, and even the Bible itself, call for the beginning of a new Golden Age, when Mankind will become enlightened once again, and will throw off the fear and loathing that has kept Him in darkness and ignorance.

According to some scholarship, that new Golden Age begins about this time next year.

So what are we afraid of?  Could it be that all this fear-mongering is actually a reflection of the watchers' internal struggle to keep us all compliant and fearful in the face of a new Awakening?  Are they trying to engineer a new Dark Age in which they are the Masters of All They Survey, while we are the writhing masses cowering at their feet?

If all your wealth and power were the result of everyone around you being deathly afraid of their own shadows, and you knew that they were waking up and taking back their birthright, what would you do?  Considering you will lose everything and most likely all those people will lash out in anger at you for what you've done, my guess is that you would do everything in your power to keep them ignorant, fearful and dependent.

In fact, every tradition, without exception, that forecasts a violent and nasty cataclysm states that this event is the birth pangs of a new Golden Age of Humanity.  We will finally conquer our fears and self-loathing, and usher in an Age when Mankind will appear god-like, when peace and harmony will reign, when we no longer live in ignorance.  All of them, be they Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Mayan, Hindu, Greco-Roman, Cherokee, Hopi...doesn't matter, they all predict that the destruction of the Old Ways will lead to new glories for our species.

The Golden Age

So, when you look at it the right way, what we are seeing is deep, agonizing fear on the part of the watchers who are losing their power and status.  The only weapon they have is to transfer that fear onto the vast majority of humanity to keep us dependent on them.  Every one of the traditions hold that this will happen, that the entrenched powers will utter destroy themselves in their effort to maintain their positions.  In the end, the Enlightenment always wins.

2012 will likely be an eventful year.  There will be some remarkable events in the heavens and on Earth.  But the only people who have something to fear are the one who benefit most from fear.  Because, when fear is conquered, they no longer have power nor status.  They will no longer be able to manipulate the masses, since all their tools and tricks will have been rendered useless.

Every winter brings death, but spring is not far behind.  What was hidden by the snow will be revealed by the thaw.