psychology

You Think We’d Kind Of Be Used To It

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So as I write this in 2025, a predicted Rapture just didn’t happen. I know, failed Raptures have been predicted ever since a few people made up the idea in the 1830s. But this Rapture, it felt different, more present in the media, more widespread, more manic. I honestly think the internet part of the phenomena.

Suddenly religious and cultural commentators I followed, podcasts I listened to, and so on were talking people getting ready for the Rapture. Of course that quickly turned into people disappointed the Rapture didn’t happen. It just all happened so fast it was a crash course in crashing eschatology that was pretty widespread.

By the time you read this who knows how many other failed Raptures will have happened. Maybe we can get a Rapture of the Month club going.

I wondered just how could people fall for this again? The failed Rapture prediction is a fixture of Christian history, a long-running cautionary tale that people still need to be cautioned against. I mean the weird 2012 “prophecies” didn’t happen, assorted failed predictions have dotted the American cultural landscape for decades, and don’t we go through this every few years?

After some analysis while writing this column (which mutated from its original intent as I wrote it) is that The Rapture predictions aren’t about the Rapture – and today’s technology has hit a point that changes how and why information spread.

Once you poke around history – and watch the most recent Not-Rapture – it becomes very apparent how much psychology is involved. A person or people under crisis. A time of change or turmoil in history. Historical happenings raising questions that lead people to want simple answers. Personal issues and large-scale social and economic issues leading people to want an out.

The Rapture isn’t a coming event, it’s a sign something’s gone on, that people are troubled or seeking something. It’s the echo of a scream shouted into a world that’s not the way people wanted. There was a desperation I hadn’t seen before.

However, as I watched this spread across the Internet, it’s also a reminder of how our social media provides a vector for ideas to spread. Long gone are the days of books of prophecy and media figures preaching The Rapture. A single idea can spread from person to person, person to crowd, crowd to crowd in ways that weren’t imaginable 30 years ago.

Moreso, there are people whos goal is to be an Influencer – even if they call it something else. So many of us are taught to crave social media hits and a widespread audience, and the benefits that entails. I think for many this desire is unconscious or semi-conscious.

The Rapture is a great way to get attention, pure Influencer bait.

Combine troubled times and Influencer Brain and you’ve got a great recipe for the latest Rapture story to spread to people’s brains. Even if there are skeptical people, skepticism isn’t spreading while the latest Influencer Idea is. They network around any skeptics.

What do we do with that? I have no idea. But it’s a reminder any communications strategy we may need to address such viral ideas is going to have to take motivation into mind as well as the technology that boosts it.

Because we’ll go through this again soon enough.

–Xenofact

The Place Of Death

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In The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 50, there’s a line about people who’ve attained the Tao that translates as “they have no place of death to enter,” “they have no place of death in them” or “for them there is no place in the land of death.” I’d not thought much about this chapter or this line until recently until a mix of meditation and stressful events gave me a new understanding.

In analyzing my own fears and concerns, I saw how they would obsess me. I’d worry about things, and thus my fears, from death to petty things, were actually part of me. I’d carry my concerns with me constantly, and as you doubtlessly know that was a heavy burden.

But being isolated, worrying, etc. just cuts me off from myself. It keeps me from engaging with life – with the Tao. It keeps me from being truly alive, freezing me in place. Honestly we all know too well how fears and worries can lock us down and even lead to bad outcomes – sometimes the very ones we feared.

There in my head, is the Place of Death.

Life, I realized, is a dialogue. You’re constantly reacting and interacting with places, people, ideas, food, etc. You make judgements and evaluations, changing or maintaining your course. Being alive, really alive, really there in the Tao, is a conversation.

And you can’t really have a dialogue when you’re hiding away. Life has to be lived, engaged. You can’t freeze yourself in your head or loop with scenarios to “protect” yourself.

Before I had talked about what I call “The Escape Capsule” in psychology and psychoanatomy. We build a walled off part of ourselves, shoving our supposed “self” into a box inside of us to protect it. This produces tension, warps our concept of ourselves, creates physical discomfort, and is quite miserable.

The “Escape Capsule” and “The Place of Death” are close to or are the exact same thing. Trying to get away from a changing world means you carry the changes you fear with you.

Life is a dialogue, really embracing yourself and the universe means you’re engaging. You can’t hide away in that case, you have to be open and vulnerable – because that’s how you have the dialogue with the world. The attempts to escape just lead you to build a mausoleum in your head.

It might be hard, but we can’t run away or stew in our fears. Why have a place for Death in us? Death has its own place in the world. We might as well find our place as well.

-Xenofact

A Different Kind of A-Hole

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As regular readers know, I consider myself a Taoist, and am using reading some Taoist literature or other philosophical or artistic writing. Often I find myself fascinated at how much brilliant wisdom people had thousands of years ago – and how often they tried to get someone to listen to them.

Today, I try to imagine exposing certain people to the wisdom of, say, the Taoists. Would they pay attention to warnings about being overburdened with desires? Could advice on not wrecking the environment from fifteen hundred years ago still reach someone wrecking the environment now? Could people maybe not screw everything up for everyone?

I mean how many Business A-holes got The Art of War and tossed it as it wasn’t what they expected There’s a reason I see many copies at used book stores. So I kind of am of the opinion “lots of so-called leaders would ignore good advice.”

So as I contemplated the plight of the political Taoists and their like, something struck me. I was thinking about people who lived thousands of years before me, in vastly different environments. As I’ve written before, such people lived in different worlds, and they dealt with a different kind of A-hole.

I thought about the political Taoists and others like the Confucians attempting to convince some feudal lord of the rightness of their teachings (and the personal benefits). Such a person might be royalty, but because their father or grandfather overthrew the last guy. They still have relatives who may be in the fields or the military or in the mercantile professions. This imaginary feudal lord may hear, see, and smell everyday life in their province – which might be as small as the real-estate of a small city. Droughts, harvests, weather, floods affect them as well as the people under them and they get to fear assassination or conquest.

Oh they may be a-holes. They may be violent, they may not be nice, they may have a strong hand in rulership. But they exist as human a-holes, they have human contact, human feelings. As abstract as royalty may be, there’s a chance they’re still as human as others, even if not nice humans.

There’s a chance such people might listen to your ideas, after all even if they’re a-holes.

Now today, how many leaders exist in bubbles that feudal lords of China and ancient kings could ever imagine? How many people with power exists inside a media echo-sphere worse than any group of sycophantic ministers? We have leaders and supposed rulers who never worry of hunger or pollution, who can’t see, hear, or smell the everyday lives of people.

Such folks seem much harder to convince because they’re not just abstract from people but abstract from humanity. There’s a point where insulation becomes inhumanity or at least mental illness. No wonder some supposed elites suck down psychedelics trying to feel something.

This does not decrease my enthusiasm for the wisdom of the Taoists and those like them. It’s just a reminder that much advice requires you to reach someone’s humanity.

The problem is you have to know how to find that humanity first, and that can be a challenge. Worse, it may not be there.

– Xenofact