Dispatch Number 84 -2012 Survivalists: An Attack Piece

Alex

This past August having spent the hottest part of the year in the Amazon basin I felt the urge to get out of that sticky oppressive part of Peru and clear my head in the Andes. Set against the mountainous backdrop were indigenous Peruvian herders grazing flocks of sheep and cattle on communal grasslands. To manage the animals they would hiss and make guttural sounds while tossing rocks and slapping them with branches. It was in this setting, far from the city, I met Alex and his 2012 futurist friends at The Way Inn.

Interesting ones in this group, these New Age spiritualists that use psychotropic drugs with surprising regularity to find higher levels of consciousness and use it to get closer to their New Age ideas, one of them is the presently popular prediction of a 2012 doomsday, based on the ancient Maya calendar and scripts. It is a Western idea that modern Maya do not subscribe to.

Alex is the absentee owner of the Inn who occasionally visits to check up on things. He has a room on the remote property, but is hardly in it. Nomadic spirit is in his blood. A tall strapping Englishman with long brown hair pulled in a neat ponytail and a rich voice I imagine women are attracted to. This time he visits with his New Age friends whose focus these days is the copious consumption of psychotropic drugs like ayahuasca and San Pedro cactus; several in his group claim to be self-taught shamans providing guided drug journeys to spiritual tourists (there's an abundance of them here in Peru trying to find it again). Alex and his self-proclaimed shamans are the latest incarnation of evangelists, New Age spiritualists. People who describe most everything they do as a calling.

Alex ate fast and ate multiple plates of food while standing without seeming to pay attention to what he was doing while we talked. He had made a life in Peru and was an unabashed New Age believer in a 2012 doomsday.
Between plates of food I asked the only question that mattered, What sets your beliefs apart from other superstitions that have predicted the end of the world?
Good question, followed by a deep breath as he went on in unconvincing fashion to tell me it can all be explained away by vast amounts of information available interpreted with modern theory and joined with select remnants of Maya texts and antiquated calendar.

How information has grown exponentially since the 1960's, and thus, with this bounty of data and modern ability to interpret it, one cannot refute the signs of collapse that the Maya were telling us. Glossing over an inconvenient truth, the data he refers to came from the very Western civilization he attacks as being corrupt and unsustainable.

He went on, those who remain 'unconscious' in the trappings of Western ways are doomed and will suffer for their dependence on the system. The implication is the 'unconscious' ones will be left out of the new era expected to emerge after cataclysmic events begin on December 21, 2012. He expressed suspicion towards mainstream Western culture, believes in the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Era by individual example and group consciousness. The New Agers set themselves apart (in their minds) by practicing meditation, taking repetitive psychedelic drug journeys, while claiming to live at higher levels of consciousness. The implication is clear: They are better fit for survival.

When Alex heard my story of driving through Latin America for an extended period of time, he linked it to an increase in man's awakening and an increase in global consciousness, hinting that I may survive the coming apocalypse by being in the right place at the right time. For him, I was additional proof that something was afoot, my actions were a contribution to the collective consciousness. In books, people take what we need and not necessarily what the books principle point is, and in Alex's case it is an example of seeing everything around him as a 'sign', an environment where most everything has some sort of meaning or significance. For the 2012ers it is superstition dressed up as fact.

He flushed, I love seeing signs like this, man, it's real good, I get excited meeting people like you.
Flattered as I was, I remained unconvinced. Putting the excitement of doom aside one of the aims of the 2012 movement is to foster counter-cultural sympathies and activate spiritual activism. I'd be down with some of their ideas if they would leave the doomsday part out of the picture; in any case, their end-of-time prophecy cheapens this positive aspect and offends those with active minds. No one likes to be manipulated by threats.

What The End Looks Like

The belief, in general, is that there will be cataclysmic or trans-formative events on December 21, 2012 that will come as earthquakes, extreme climate change and super-volcanoes that will kill off more than half the population and in turn lead to the collapse of the capitalist system. Judgment day for capitalism; Western civilization punished for materialism, corrupt mores and extravagant ways. The primitive Christians more or less said the same of the Romans until they acceded the high court of Roman emperors and Rome became a holy Catholic State. Before long those same pious Christians adopted the extravagant ways of the Romans.

Catastrophe and collapse will come in a host of colorful ways, here are some (always told with a straight face): solar maximum or sunspots, (think of a barbecued earth), the earth's magnetism reversing; rogue planets striking earth, super-volcanoes and earthquakes. As if the above were not dramatic enough some of the more extreme predictions include the return of alien caretakers to enlighten or enslave us, to a sudden devolution of humans into non-bodily beings.

A researcher who has studied New Age communities and themes, describes 2012 narratives as the product of a 'disconnected' society: unable to find spiritual answers to life's big questions within ourselves, we turn outward to imagined entities that lie far off in space or time -entities that just might be in possession of superior knowledge. And this is what people around town more or less had to say about Alex, commenting that he was going through some big life changes and seemed adrift in search of answers to the unanswerable.

They excite over the Western idea of complicated data-intensive calculations, astronomical alignments and numerological formulae used to predict the end of the world based on Maya writings and the Maya Long Count calendar. After all, information is power, right? In short, because the calendar ends the world ends -lovely kindergarten logic even a child can appreciate. They believe that after the capitalist system is destroyed a new system will emerge; the new era will be based on a humanistic ethos of simple living based on the concept of 'collective-consciousness'. This basis of group thought is rooted in primitive attitudes of mechanical solidarity or herd behavior, much like the ones I subscribed to when I was a corporate guy -in that environment even though we were all fucking each other over on business deals, we chanted "Win-Win" all the way.

Others interpret it as positive physical or spiritual transformation that may spark the beginning of a new era, however, still as the result of catastrophe and massive population loss. Talking with Alex and his futurist friends about 2012 made me think back to the Y2K bug scare of the late 1990s that suggested our computers would stop working and lead to economic collapse. I knew people who withdrew vast amounts of cash from the bank and stockpiled food anticipating anarchy; at the time I worked in the computer industry and we loved it because we knew nothing was going to happen.
Skeptically I thought, Wow, those PR guys are good.
Survivalists appear in every age on the flimsiest of pretexts; like lonely singles looking for companionship and grab at anything that comes their way; the survivalist waits for a cause.

It's a Western Idea

None of the proposed alignments or formulae has been accepted by mainstream scholarship. Impending doom is not found in any of the existing classic Maya accounts, and the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history. Classical sources on the subject are scarce and contradictory, suggesting there is little, if any universal agreement to what the date might mean. The Maya I met in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala were concerned with the next rain. I could not find a local Mayan that subscribed to the Western idea of a 2012 collapse.

The destruction they crave will pave the way for realignment of world order, a simpler way of life, much like the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960's and 1970's that promoted self sufficiency and humanistic ways, which one could argue contributed to the greed of the 1980s and irrational exuberance of the 1990s. Enthusiasts of 2012 apply a moral standard of simplicity against the perceived extravagance of capitalism. With capitalism the focus of their dark predictions, I wonder if the Chinese and Russians will get a pass on the horrors that await because they made a strident go of communism.

Armageddon, my word, is not used by the New Agers who subscribe to this end of time prophecy and instead use phrases like: "When the shit hits" or "The big change coming", or "A massive realignment". New language and words to describe an old outcome -the Earth's end; an unoriginal story repeated for millenniums.

One is left to guess that when the earth's crust opens Alex's New Age friends will be spared death by the approach of an angel that will catch them just as the earth opens. Further one is left to suppose that when super-volcanoes erupt and fill the air with unbreathable ash they will find themselves atop a remote mountain in a pocket of pure air. Never mind the last time the air turned this toxic from an asteroid strike, it knocked off all the dinosaurs. Yet, listening to the superstitions they promote of 'collective consciousness', it will have them in the right place at the right time to survive. It smacks of mystical superiority and the non-believers, the unconscious who live in the capitalist system, are doomed to the hell that awaits them.

It is an age old tale that falls into a long line of similar predictions made by major religions and cults that have cropped up with each passing moral fad. Religions have always taken contemporary thought, tied it to secret knowledge and applied it to the passive masses claiming sage-like knowledge with command of the facts & data of the day. These New Agers are the new messiahs using an antiquated Maya calendar and ancient writings nobody really understands claiming to know how to interpret what the Maya were telling us.

After conversations with believers in a 2012 collapse, I came away with a wholly different opinion and point of view about them. Their actions, spirit and zealotry made them less 'spiritual' than I had originally thought. They are not New Age spiritualists. They are a new form of an old idea and in-group: they are a cult of Survivalists that fluff up their cause with dreamy spiritualism.

The survivalist movement is based on many events imagined and real, including government policies, threats of nuclear warfare, religious beliefs, and writers warning of social or economic collapse, both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books. The Maya 2012 doomsday prediction has mystical and religious underpinnings that activate the Survivalists.

It is superstition presented in its latest form and there are no shortage of writers claiming interpretive knowledge (just buy my book). They use the most effective parts of the propaganda model: fear and hidden knowledge. Alex and his friends are persuaded by these superiors to direct their vows to the reining Western resurrection of Maya deities and to propagate the latest doctrine of collapse. They are the spiritually starved who have sadly been reduced to mythic-magical thinking.

Even though they cite 'facts and data', the 2012 gang are as superstitious as the great religions of the world -Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Buddhist. Most all have made end of time predictions, while accusing their contemporaries of being morally corrupt and that if they do not reform they will suffer. Man's propensity is to exalt the past and depreciate the present. As a historical point of fact these predictions have always failed to come.

I marveled at the intelligent ignorance of this new class of spiritualist citing 'data' as the proof, yet unable to explain the smallest part of it. Data is the new power word, people get hit over the head with 'information-age' messages in mass media and the corporate environment; here the word has been co-opted to project something untrue and bolster superstition. The Christians did this all the time taking contemporary issues and fads and incorporated them into current superstitions, which in turn, were used to manipulate and control a docile populace. The New Agers are remarkably similar to those primitive Christians who renounced the extravagant ways of Rome and its privileged class, while they practiced non-participation in civic affairs claiming moral and secret knowledge as authority for their choices and proclamations.

Bruce Chatwin captures the dynamics at work of persons controlling information:

"So important were the dates of the seasonal cycle- for planting, inundating and harvesting- that you found an outburst of astronomical calculation and astrological prediction. So important was it to keep the work force in passive dependence, that this knowledge became the exclusive property of a caste of managerial bureaucrats, the futurologist of the ancient world. These were men morbidly wrapped-up in themselves and responsible to nothing but the system; they dwarfed the people with monumental architecture and threatened the people with implacable sky gods."

Alex's answer was deeply inadequate to the gravity that he subscribed to; it also told me he was the latest incarnation of what organized religion has done to people before him: a docile slave to historic interpretations he does not understand, but easily surrenders to without critical thought. 2012 theorists use the passions of the human heart and contemporary circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose.

High in the Andes, The Way Inn seemed like a good place to escape impending doom. It's a rare moment to observe an end of time prophecy playing out before my eyes, usually I only get to read about what never happens. I am sure that in the end, Alex's apprehensions will far exceed his sufferings.

David

Huaraz, Peru