Stuff Low Status White Males Like: The End of the World

Since there have been low status white males, there have been end of the world prophecies. The most famous low status white male, a rabbi known as Yeshua -now said to be dwelling in boiling excrement by his detractors- notoriously told his followers that among their generation would be those who would see the end of the world before they would pass away.

The failure of the prophecy did not lead to the end of his status as a revered prophet, but rather, rapidly gave rise to a new religion that continues to hold sway around the world today. Christians is what they are called and among them are many who continue to believe in end of the world prophecies. It’s often even possible to launch a new successful Christian movement, simply by coming up with new end of the world prophecies that subsequently fail to come to fruition. The Jehovah’s witnesses have been quite successful at this.

This is the mesmerizing part of apocalypse prophecies: Their failure to come to fruition oftentimes simply results in further growth in the movement that peddled these prophecies. This was first noticed by social psychologists in the 1950’s. If a belief plays a big enough role in your life, then you find yourself unable to abandon it, even after it fails to come to fruition. Instead, you’ll seek to convert other people to your belief, because their belief then becomes validation that you must have been right all along.

Every end of the world prophecy seems to suffer from this phenomenon. Recently the AI doomers, who prophesied that Artificial Intelligence would take over the US Government by 2027, delayed their prophecy to 2030. This doesn’t seem to cause people to reevaluate the belief, but rather, people tend to double down and become even more convinced the world is about to end due to artificial intelligence.

It would be a mistake to conclude that civilization can’t collapse, because history tells us these things do in fact happen. Sometimes an evil empire just suddenly collapses, like happened to the Soviet Union. Sometimes half the population just drops dead from disease as villages are swallowed by nature, as happened during the Black Death in Europe and in America upon Columbian contact.

But I think it’s worth noting what Lacan said:

If you didn’t know that it will all end one day, how could you bear the burden of life?

What happens to low status white males when they can’t maintain faith in their own doomsday prophecies anymore? Well, there was a notorious example, a man called Michael C. Ruppert. He checks basically every low status white male box: 9/11 Truther, Peak Oil theorist, enemy of the CIA after exposing their drug-trafficking shenanigans and founder of a rock band called “New White Trash” (I didn’t make this up).

In 2009 he was the subject of a documentary called Collapse, about the imminent end of the world as a result of peak oil. We all know how that ended up working out. Americans today are driving around in SUVs, oil is 55 dollars a barrel and the IEA now projects that demand will peak before the supply will peak.

But Mr. Ruppert is no stupid man, make no mistake. He is certainly an archetypal low status white male, but not a low IQ low status white male. You might say he was an optimistic man. The most horrifying scenario, was the alternative to the peak oil catastrophe he prophesied. He explained it in part four of the documentary Apocalypse, Man.

The alternative to peak oil you see, is climate collapse. It’s humans taking the whole biosphere down with us, as we destroy the environmental conditions we and the other species on this good Earth require to survive. In a sense I have more respect for the low IQ low status white males who deny climate change with their poor arguments, than I do for the people who know about the problem but seem unaffected by it.

Back in Mr. Ruppert’s days, there was still hope that we would simply be forced to stop by nature, by finding our oil fields empty. Today that hope is mostly gone. I continue to cling onto that hope however, that nature will force us to stop. I like to think the pandemic viruses infecting our species these days will stop us during the years ahead from generating a dinosaur atmosphere. I could be wrong of course. But tell me, how is a man supposed to live without hope?