Thoughts on the Apocalypse

As I sit here, the two-year anniversary of the immolation of David Koresh’s Rancho Apocalypse has passed, along with the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that was intended to avenge it. Simultaneously, the Aum Shinrikro “doomsday cult” trial has begun, apocalyptically-minded Freemen are holed up in Montana, and two Georgia militiamen have been arrested for bomb-making (ostensibly to “protect and prepare” themselves from the coming American dictatorship of Jews and evil Federal workers). As someone who has been investigating apocalyptic thinking for over ten years (specifically regarding Hitler and the rise of Nazism) I am left with mixed emotions. I feel a sense of detached bemusement and intellectual satisfaction as the many predictions I’ve made to friends and colleagues about the proliferation of such incidences have come true. However, the often brutal reality of apocalyptic thinking made manifest harkens darkly for our future.

While researching my PhD dissertation (“Nazi Apocalypticism as a Response to Rapid and Radical Change,” Pennsylvania State University, 1995), I discovered four aspects of apocalyptic thinking that needed to be addressed. The first concerns its ubiquitous nature. Apocalyptic thinking, and the movements behind it, has arisen all over the world for over two thousand years. It is neither solely the intellectual spawn of Judeo-Christian beliefs nor, as Norman Cohn recently proposed, Zoroastrianism. Secondly, contrary to widely-held belief, apocalyptic movements are most often socially heterogeneous and do not originate solely or even usually with the oppressed of the world. Thirdly, scholars have mistakenly proposed that varying stimuli such as war, natural disaster, economic upheaval, or culture contact, in varying social situations, have somehow generated strikingly similar symbolic thinking. Finally, the psychological link between messiahs and their followers has yet to be adequately explained. These problems elicited four fundamental questions. How do we explain a phenomenon that transcends cultural and temporal barriers? How do we explain a phenomenon that transcends social determinants such as class, occupation, gender, and religious background? How can we explain a recurring phenomenon that appears to be caused by radically different social events? And finally, how can the individual psychology of messianic figures possibly be linked to that of a large heterogenous group? I concluded that the only common element shared by movements from dramatically different times and places, by a heterogenous segment of society, and by individual messiah figures and their collected followers, is a phylogenetic brain structure — one that has changed little for millennia. And to understand those phylogenetic aspects of the brain I turned to the psychological theories of C. G. Jung.

I further concluded that it is not any specific stimuli like war, natural disaster, or culture contact, that gives rise to apocalyptic movements, but the rapid and radical change that each engenders. It is this radical change, perceived as a

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state of chaos approaching the annihilation of being, that stimulates the brain to reconstruct a sense of order via the production of a standard set of unifying symbols. I have termed this process the “apocalypse complex.” The ego normally adapts to external change by creating new relationships of order and, consequently, new patterns of meaning. However, when change is so radical and occurs so rapidly, the ego may be incapable of restructuring its perception of external reality. Order appears to have become chaos, and all sense of meaning — a subjective perception of order — is lost. It is at this point that the Self, what Jung called the archetype of wholeness and order, asserts itself. Without such a compensatory mechanism for reconstructing a sense of order, humans would be incapable of adapting to change.

The symbols of the apocalypse are those of eternity, immortality, and invincibility — and therefore of immutable order. The messiah figure is that individual whose particular expression of this symbology not only accurately conveys the archetypal, but clothes it in ways that strike a contemporary or culturally-specific chord — for Hitler it was his soteriology [salvation doctrine] of race. Large numbers of individuals searching for a new conception of order to replace their perception of chaos may accept this visionary as their longed-for savior — the messiah figure itself being a symbol of the Self. Therefore, while most individuals who feel the call of the apocalyptic project it outward and look for a savior to create the new order, the messiah is that rare person who introjects the messiah symbol, identifies with it, and accepts the call as his or her own. Seen in this light the apocalypse complex is not so much a psychopathological response to rapid change, but an instinctual attempt to reconstruct a sense of order in a chaotic situation. The apocalypse complex, therefore, can have therapeutic results. Unfortunately, the dualistic vision of a battle between good and evil (the forces of order and chaos), combined with a fear of change and a heightened paranoia, often leads to tragic consequences.

When prophesized apocalyptic events fail to occur, true believers often enact, consciously or unconsciously, the End Time scenario themselves. Hitler’s Armageddon, the final battle for world domination between Aryans and Jews with the extermination of the losing race, became a horrible reality with World War II and the Holocaust — both the Endkrieg and the Endlösung were conceived as eschatological events. For David Koresh and the militiamen who see in him a kindred spirit, it was and is the fear of being attacked by evil government forces. In Waco the stockpiling of arms in preparation for the apocalypse led directly to the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] assault. One could argue that the assault justified the arming, but in reality it was the stockpiling for an event that was never going to happen that precipitated the event’s actually occurring. In the same way, Asahara Shoko, obsessed with Hitler’s gassing of Jews, developed a paranoid delusion that the CIA (it could just as well have been a secret association of Freemasons and Jews) were about to gas his compound and, consequently, he struck first. The mass suicides at Jonestown and, recently, the Solar Temple, as well as Charles Manson’s attempt to precipitate the “coming” race war, likewise followed the induced-apocalypse pattern.

When I hear about militiamen who justify their arming and bomb-making because they believe that a conspiracy of Jews and government officials will one day line them up and shoot them into trenches — they often betray a fear of having done to them what their hero Hitler did to the Jews — it sounds frighteningly like the reasoning of Asahara Shoko. The next step to getting “them” before they get “us” is a short one indeed. The need to understand this apocalyptic mentality is more important now than ever. For, if modern life is marked by anything, it is the ubiquity of rapid and radical change. Apocalyptic thinking may become more a social norm than a social aberration.

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