Apocalyptic Phenomenology

The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
Lithograph by Daniel Stolpe and Philip Wankier

I’d like to work through some more thoughts on the eschatological streak in woo. There are a lot of people in our world, not just woo-woos, who think the end is nigh. It is important, and I should say, very difficult, to keep in mind that the truth or falsity of this belief is not what is relevant, bunkologically speaking. The robustness or lack thereof of a particular apocalyptic narrative in the face of apparent disconfirmation may be an important clue to its inner dynamics – but it is not the primary object of investigation here.

What I am interested in is what the experience of a person who is living the apocalypse is like – what apocalyptic narratives do for them experientially. As usual, it may be useful to start at the Jonesian level of woo, and work our way up into esoterica from there. I will expand this analysis into the Ickian/Wilcockian levels another time.

Take laughing-boy on our right, for instance. If you check his website, you may find as I did adverts for Survival Garden supplies, Food Insurance emergency packages, and most importantly: Gold. These are the sort of things you really want in the case that the government either collapses, or in fact rises up against their own citizenry – the case of a Jonesian level apocalypse. It goes without saying, this is all part of his narrative. The same story is told in properly woo-woo circles – the same style of ads can be found prominently displayed on the site of woo guru Jeff Rense.

Stop a moment to think about Gold, and what it means to us. Money has become an enormously abstract thing, in an important sense. Most of my money has no physical presence for me beyond a few (all too few) numbers on a screen. I am alienated from it in a profound way. It is also a precarious thing, being created out of thin air by fiat.

This precariousness has not gone unnoticed by the woo-woo world. In a follow up to the widely popular film Zeitgeist, the federal reserve system is explored:

[Note: The content starts after about 7:00 of spooky music and such]

I have to admit, knowing how currency is added to the money supply kind of weirds me out, even without the spooky music. It is profoundly alienating, but in a way that maybe doesn’t impress itself constantly on the mind of you or I. When I stop thinking about it, I use money unconsciously – it becomes the transparent medium of exchange once more.

I would like to suggest that for woo-woos, particularly those who are constantly living the apocalypse, this kind of transparency is impossible. The alienation between them and the source of value has become visible to them, in a permanent and terrifying (or for some liberating) way. The response is to keep at least tokens of the source of value around them – Gold is the perfect image for this.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I think this is a purely financial thing. Think for a moment about how alienated we are from all of those basic things that keep us alive. I turn a tap and clean potable water comes gushing out. Rather than being astounded every day by this incredible achievement, I see right through it. I don’t even notice what is happening. The depth of this alienation can be measured by the feeling of shock we get when this transparency is unexpectedly disrupted.

Suppose you went to the grocery store, and there was no fruit from other countries there. Just out of the blue one day, most of the space where juicy grapes and strawberries were was empty. I can’t speak definitively for you, but I would be spun. Stunned. It would be a world upside-down.

But how absurd is that? How transparent has the materiality of my world become to me, where oil was pumped from under the sea, and taken to a refinery where it was turned into something burnable, then shipped to a shipyard and put in a boat, which used it to cross the ocean and bring me a banana for breakfast, and if that doesn’t happen, that is when I’m surprised?

But if you’re living the apocalypse, you are surprised when it all goes smoothly. You have at least some experiential relationship to the material conditions that are keeping you alive. That connection is bought at a price, of course: you feel your place in the world through anxiety and fear. You appreciate the potable water streaming out of your tap every day because you’re constantly worried about it going away.