It is about 1994, picture a 15 year old Hendrik, bending over his bikes handlebar cycling against the wind in flat and rectangular reclaimed Netherlands. I’m cycling with gloom, it is the season, the Dutch autumn is dark, dreary and wet. But that is not the only thing bringing me down on this day. I just read that the world is going to drastically change in 1997, major disasters are going to send back humanity to the stone age, and there is nothing we can do about it. A rather shocking piece of information for an otherwise happy 15-year old with his entire life in front of him.
Not long before I had discovered the esoteric section in the local public library, and had feverishly started to read through every book in it. This time I ended up reading a book about progression an innovative reversal of regression, a hypnotic technique to help people experience their childhood memories and according to some their past lives. Thus instead of hopping back into the past lives, progression allows you to access your future incarnations. A technique, that at the time seemed quite plausible to my young mind, hindered by few pre-conceptions about these matters. However the news from the future, as mentioned, was not very good.
The years passed by and nothing happened. The earth kept circling the sun, and life on it kept muddling through with all its complexities. In fact I had almost forgotten about the whole thing, the distractions of teenage life, school, girls and parties, certainly helped with that. But those gloomy weeks, if not months, where I was under the impression of impending doom, stayed with me. And each time a prediction of collapse comes by, wether it was in 1997, 2000, (y2k), peak-oil, bird-flue, climate chaos, financial collapse, 2012 I’m reminded of my youthful reckoning with the impending apocalypse.
Maybe because of this early encounter I’m fascinated with this recurring theme of societal collapse or more starkly the end of the world or the apocalypse. At first I thought this is a particular tendency in post-Christian spiritual and environmentalist circles (where 2012, peak-oil, climate collapse are big themes). However the expectation of collapse has deep roots, and shows up in Christian, Shia Islam and before that Zoroastrianism (a pre-Islamic Persian religion). The Iranian president Ahmadinejad is supposedly a fervent believer in the immanent apocalypse and the return of the twelfth imam. The evangelical Christian circles that former president George W Bush belonged to, the coming apocalypse is equally real. As was it to many believers of ’the end the Mayan calendar equals end of the world’ thesis. This line of thinking, also called Millenarianism, the belief in the thousand year reign of peace preceded by the apocalypse, has many manifestations in different cultures and times. And as I discovered in 1994, prominently shows up in our sub-conscious beliefs about our future lives. Apocalyptic scenarios feature in many, if not most, Hollywood movies about the future, and one of my favourite Japanese animated films Akira ends in a massive blow-up of Neo-Tokyo, a theme not uncommon in this popular genre of films.
Societal or ecological collapse are no illusions, don’t get me wrong, and some of the ecological and social challenges we are facing are very serious. And just like our individual lives will ultimately end, civilisations have their shelve lives as well (read Jared Diamond’s Collapse to find plenty historical examples). But what is it that makes us see the collapse around every corner? With every release of financial, epidimological or environmental data? With every iconic calendar date or astronomical constellation? What is it, that makes us fill in the big black gaping hole that is the future with this particular story line? What makes this belief, even in our educated and scientific age, so attractive?
If you delve deeper and start looking at what are the beliefs that underlie this story-line, it often starts with a recognition that there is something fundamentally wrong in our society, something broken in the world. Something that is evidenced by the amount of injustice we see, and that we ourselves might have been the victim off. Or the sheer suffering and environmental destruction on this planet. Our systems of modernity, capitalism, industrialisation and before that pre-modern forms of civilisation, are fundamentally flawed and broken. If this is something that speaks to you, that something is fundamentally wrong and broken in our world, than the logical conclusion of this line of thinking, that if something that is broken, it at some point must break-down. In fact the collapse of something fundamentally wrong is the only morally right thing that could happen. And only after the collapse of the broken system, there will be the clean slate to rebuilt the utopian society or to collectively rise to a higher consciousness. The down-trodden proletariat, the morally upright, the spiritually evolved that retreated to the mountains or the 44.000 chosen ones from the book of Revelations resurrected by Christ, will be proven right. Whatever the form, the brokenness is fixed, justice is done, all the wrongs are being righted, once and for all. A new dawn arrives, entering a new age, a new consciousness. All pain and suffering will end and love will rule supreme. It is a very appealing and logical way of thinking.
The question however is what do we miss out by our attraction to this apocalyptic narrative? What do we overlook? Simply replacing it with naive optimism in linear never-ending progress might equally lead us astray. During the course of my philosophy studies and subsequent studying with various spiritual teachers I learned to question this assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong, broken or lacking in our world. In fact I learned to question pretty much every assumption that I hold about myself, the world and the future (which is an infinite task requiring ongoing questioning as I keep discovering and acquiring new ones). What I discovered is that living in a world without assumptions is infinitely more exciting and meaningful. It opened me up to the fundamental mystery that life is, however daunting it sometimes seems. It allowed me to be surprised by random acts of kindness, even perform them sometimes, savour moments of joy and mundane happiness and equally to learn, bit by bit, to be ok with anguish and anger, to open my heart to injustice and frustration. I found that by giving up my assumptions about the future, I started to create it. Taking risk and responding to invitations and opportunities I otherwise might have overlooked. Taking me to places I would’ve never imagined. Giving up the beliefs about the future forced me to fully live it, right now, no matter what might happen, nuclear war, climate chaos, or planetary alignments.
Living the future rather than assuming it, accepting the risks of suffering, injustice and god knows societal or environmental collapse, raises the stakes of living. It raises the intensity of meaning, of care, I dare say love of life. The gaping dark hole, the dark abyss of the future, does not require filling in with any story, it dares us to live life to the fullest. To embrace the darkness and love the apocalypse, not for my own sake, but for the sake of the life and creativity that wants to express itself through me, no matter what apocalyptic future or new age might await us.
Hendrik Tiesinga is a researcher, writer and facilitator of multi-stakeholder dialogue and innovation processes.