End of the World Rhetoric Continued...The Problem of Demanding Utopia

Throwing money at the problem--not a solution.

The ultimate problem with end-of-the-world rhetoric, no matter who is using it, is that it utilizes a "get into heaven" paradigm.

The "get into heaven" paradigm is antithetical to the "prepare for heaven" paradigm although the two often exist in tandem.

The "prepare for heaven" paradigm states that the purpose of a social structure or a religious ritual or a lecture or a group meeting or a cause or a political program or a set of behaviors is to enable people in the present to gain skills/knowledge/discipline/humility/relationships with the hope (faith, belief, trust) that these skills, etc. will help them live well in the future. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't cure addiction; it helps an individual manage it, so, hopefully, that individual can thrive. Democratic systems can't guarantee that everyone will get everything they want, only that (hopefully) most people will be able to read without censorship, vote freely, and reach the goals that they set for themselves.

A "prepare for heaven" approach is honest since any religion or cause or political group is quite literally unable to promise heaven, which falls within God's purview (if "God" makes you uncomfortable, think "Time's purview") and judgment. All the paradigm can do is get people ready.

That is, the "prepare for heaven" paradigm doesn't eschew heaven--one can still be a believer (and studies find that religious people tend to be quite charitable--in the literal money sense--when it comes to the "now")--it simply doesn't focus on heaven as a given. The "prepare for heaven" paradigm is inherently humble since we humans don't completely understand each other, don't know what will happen next, can't read the mind of God, aren't always prepared for Black Swans, don't know what parts of history will or will not repeat themselves, and so on and so forth. 

You can exist within the "prepare for heaven" paradigm and still love the potentialities of Star Trek.

The "get you into heaven" paradigm, unfortunately, focuses on precisely that: getting people into heaven. The focus changes from preparing idiosyncratic individuals to handle a complex and uncertain world while hoping/readying for a better future . . . into laying down strictures about the following:

• What precisely a person should do or say to get into heaven (i.e., one must give money to THESE causes, one must jump through THESE hoops, one must declare THESE people sinners, one must be offended by THESE events/ideas)
• Who deserves to be in heaven
• Who won't be in heaven (which determinations are often so entirely temporal in nature that an organization can tie itself into knots by making them)
• All the punishments for those who don't get into heaven

I maintain--like a number of Bible scholars--that neither Jesus nor Paul were all that concerned with the above issues. They spent a stunning amount of time ignoring them (Jesus) or battling them (Paul). "The Kingdom of Heaven" is spoken of as a current, ongoing "now."

I write more about that elsewhere. For the purposes of this post, the above bullets are not exclusive to religion. They appear to be part of the human condition. Just watch a bunch of high schoolers. These bulleted behaviors show up as well in political and social groups, ranging from atheists to environmentalists, from social justice types to tea partiers (I know people on the right whose rhetoric--and penchant for jumping on another person's "wrong" rhetoric--is indistinguishable from that of people's rhetoric on the left: another good reason to avoid Twitter).

When a group begins to believe that it can deliver utopia through sheer willpower and rhetoric, it is adopting "get into heaven" thinking. In some ways, the secular version is worse since the religious version at least (supposedly) depends on the mystery of divine intervention, which is outside human control/manipulation. Unfortunately, sometimes religious groups act more secular than religious.

Doomsdaying feeds all this. Doomsdaying rhetoric paints a bleak picture of a downward turn that can only be handled, thwarted, balanced by...

Actually, I have no idea. The people I know who engage in doomsdaying rhetoric--with a few exceptions--don't behave any differently than anyone else. But boy, do they have the "correct" rhetoric! And they know what rhetoric everyone else is supposed to use! If only people would get on-board with the rhetoric, utopia would arrive! 

Consequently, the two get paired: Everything is getting worse--if only people would accept X or Y or Z, we would be living in utopia already. (I guess a return to the Garden of Eden is an expectation that dies hard.)

Ultimately, of course, doomsdaying rhetoric and "get into heaven" rhetoric fail. Indulgences backfire. Marxism continually collapses. News readers become so skeptical of overblown rhetoric, they grow indifferent. Abstracting the human experience to pursue an ideological unknowable "win" can inspire people; humans are notoriously restless in their unwillingness to "settle for" the present. Truthfully, it may be impossible to excise the desire for utopia from the human soul.

As a single-minded goal, however, it can leave people wanting.

Best to help people handle life's ups and downs while preparing sensibly for a best-case-scenario future than to guarantee perfection if only you would...