Failure™ Magazine

The End is Near, No?

Two-thousand years and we’re still here.

Written by Damon Orion   Filed under History, Life

At the same time that apocalyptic imagery reflects this instability, it is also telling of our hope for transformation. Our dissatisfaction with modern life, our disconnection from nature and from one another, fills us with the desire to tear it all down and start fresh. Tonay notes that our collective hope for societal transformation can be seen in another theme currently prevalent in popular culture: that of finding “a new world somewhere out in space, which is [symbolic of] the far unconscious.” Citing Avatar as an example, she adds, “Along with all that destruction, there is the creation of something new, or the finding of what has maybe always been there, but we didn’t see it.”

If, as Tonay and Brown’s statements suggest, the concept of impending world destruction goes hand-in-hand with that of the imminent discovery or creation of a new world, then perhaps this says something about the power of human perception to make things appear positive or negative and/or about the choices available to us as co-creators of this planet’s history.

In the early ’80s, when Prince vowed to party his ass off before the world ended in 1999, he helped set the tone for a decade steeped in cocaine abuse, material excess and self-interest. Here at the start of the ’10s, it might be useful to view the prophecy that 12/21/12 will bring the end of the human race—or, as the New Age version has it, the dawn of a more enlightened era—as a modern answer to “1999”: an anthem urging us to adopt saner values and practices as an alternative to self-annihilation.

That said, things are seldom as clear-cut in reality as they are in mythology. Rather than becoming a paradise or a wasteland on a specific date, our planet is likely to continue displaying aspects of both. As Brown puts it, “There’s always going to be a mix of light and darkness. It seems like right now, the light is getting brighter, and the dark is getting darker. And it may continue that way. It just may be part of the laws of physics, Yin and Yang, that there are always positive and negative forces. It may be that everything seems like it’s on the brink of chaos or the brink of a new order, but really, it always stays perfectly balanced.”

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