yuki_onna

I've been reading Slacktivist for awhile now. I like it for the same reason everyone likes it--it's fun to see the Left Behind books shredded and discredited, and Fred is a really great writer. But almost every time I read something over there, I am struck by the fervor of the eschatologically inclined, the naked need just below the (usually) belligerent surface.

I think about the same thing every time I watch football.

I think the urge behind the two, and many more things besides, is essentially the same. Because of course eschatology (fun with the end of the world) is fascinating and not unique to Christianity, but the utter conviction with which some portion of almost every generation since Christ himself said Dude, be less harsh has declared the end of the world to be well and truly nigh is astonishing. The eagerness to see the world burn--a sort of fascination with that fascination is a big part of what fuels Slacktivist as a site and the cultural interest in fundamentalism in general. But how different is that from geeks looking forward to the singularity with terrible enthusiasm, so ready to see this world pass away, for the veil to be lifted.

And all I can see is how desperately people long to be part of a story.

Not just a workaday story either. Something extraordinary, something with high drama and high stakes. Everyone wants it, even craves it. When parents tell stories to their kids, they so often begin: "Once there was a child just like you..." We all turn towards story like sunflowers. And sometimes those stories are full of elves, sometimes they are full of computers, and sometimes they are full of gods, and everything gets so blurry and confusing.

No one wants to be the quiet faithful waiting in relative peace and security for the Great Event--which will occur long after one's grand-children are dead. That's not fun. And while rivers of fire and the moon as red as blood and famine and sackcloth being the new look for spring doesn't sound fun on the surface, it is deeply fun to know that your choices are being made on a universal, gorgeous stage where every step is either prophesied or utterly necessary for the correct dispensation of the world--to know you matter, to know you're real. No one wants to miss out. On the End Times, on the Singlarity. On Peak Oil, which I see certain folk talking about in the same eager terms, looking forward to it in some bizarre subconscious way, disappointed every day civilization does not fall. No one wants to be the generation that just missed being part of the greatest story ever told.

So people try to make the story happen now, so they can be a part of it. So it can be a story about them. So they can be Tribulation saints and road warriors and code ninjas. It's the same reason, I think, people get so into sports teams--you get to be part of their story, and there are colors to let you know who your enemies are, and your identity is theirs by this magical proxy, and you are personally invested in the very war-like actions of the team, the tribal activity that answers something very deep in us. Triumph and defeat--it elevates the every day to feel you are part of a greater story.

Don't think this isn't why The Secret and other self-help books are so popular--they tell a story wherein you, yes you, are a wizard of extraordinary power and strength who can literally shape the world around to to your whim. That, of course, is usually the villain's part, but why dwell on that? What's a villain but a hero in black?

And of course, there are stories happening every day in the real world, birth and death and marriage and betrayal and love and all of it. But it's so much harder to feel those stories, to see the narrative shape of them. Would you rather have a pleasant life in the suburbs or an action packed thriller where you are persecuted, and there are explosions and gods and heroes and villains? We're trained to understand those stories, to think the decisions in them are easier and more obvious. That's why the Tea Partiers are so full of passion and fervor right now--they're part of a story, and they've convinced themselves that the story in their head is the same as the story in the world, and the choices are as easy as picking the side with the white hats. And no one thinks their hats could look black in the right light.

Ultimately, I look at passionate eschatologists and I see cosplayers at a con, dressed up in Biblical drag, wishing so hard that it was all happening just the way it does in their favorite books, quoting the best lines, acting out the most exciting parts, arguing over bits of trivia. I'm not belittling them--I don't look down on cosplayers and I don't sneer at conventioneers. It's an impulse, a terribly human one. And I see in both such desire for extraordinary experience, to stand at a precipice, the way heroes always have. I see the same impulse in the constant handwringing over the death of the American novel, which has been going on since Americans first started writing novels, and the death of traditional publishing--we all want to live at the tipping point, to preside over something amazing. And destruction is so much easier than creation. So much easier to position yourself at the end rather than in the eternal middle, keeping on trucking, doing the work.

We want it so badly. And who can blame us--we start reading and internalizing story, narrative, almost as soon as we can talk. We want everything to go that way, the way it does in stories, where the book, the movie, is always about the most exciting moment, where the protagonist is never one generation too early--and obviously we are protagonists. We must be. Aren't we alive, aren't we living in the best and worst of all possible worlds? If we weren't protagonists, we'd be bit players, offscreen, messengers, fools. Most of us, especially those in the West who had also taken in the narrative of manifest destiny with our mother's milk, would prefer to be protagonists. Would prefer to be part of something. In the Great Events, we rarely cast ourselves as part of the inevitable Mass of the Dead. We are rogues and saints and prophets. Because it's a better story. And if the end of the world came, if the resource apocalypse came, if the singularity came--at least we'd feel like we knew what to do, what our parts were. We'd feel like we'd been prepared on some level for the world to call on us that way. Then, we would know that paleolithic primate thrill of having survived something harrowing, having been marked as special by dint of survival, marked as the fittest, and for the privileged classes who go about praying for the end of all, that thrill, that sense of being vitally, intensely real is hard to come by.

But every day it doesn't happen, and the water bill has to be paid, and the rent still goes up, and no one has a flying car, and we can't even see the magic of our handheld, world-networked devices because if we were living in the future it would be a better story, and no one would feel lost the way we do, and no one would be confused as to where they stood, and no one would be unsatisfied, or afflicted with ennui, and everyone would be a hero.

And if we were the final generation, cradled in the hands of an angry God, no one could ever say we were ordinary.