Posts Tagged ‘end of the world’
End of the world
And I feel really fine. No it’s not about the R.E.M. song, it’s about a genuine problem: stupidity. People, to put it simply, are idiots; you only need to look at the whole “2012 End of the world” craze to see it. True, it can be argued that change is a form of death, that death of the old world brings about the birth of the new one, which is the same as the old one just changed… this requires that you stretch the meaning of the phrase “end of the world as we know it” pretty thin.
So, if we accept the premise that change equals death, then the world as we know it is indeed ending, for us. You can see it in the phrase the “end of the world as we know it.” If you think philosophically, the same has been true of every generation that came before us. They saw those new-fangled trinkets, loud music, computers or whatever as sure signs of the upcoming apocalypse. They used phrases like “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” or “the young don’t respect their elders anymore,” or some other variant of “get of my lawn.” Same will happen to us, we will live to see the end of the world as we know it, and it will be fine, there will be a new world, a world we may not fully understand, but few things will actually change, new generations will enjoy it, old ones complain about it, life will go on… and the it will happen again. So, yes the world will end metaphorically, the end of the world as we know it in the sense that everyone will die or the planet being blown up? Yeah, not happening.
What Mayans were talking about, was the ending of a cycle of history. The whole “2012 end of the world” crowd is latching on mistranslated and simply wrong idea that this is the last cycle in the calendar. It would be the equivalent of saying that the year 1000 would bring about the end of the world as we know it, or as they knew it in this case, because years would have four digits. Look above, people are idiots. There will be no real end of the world, as we know it or otherwise, well, not until the Sun goes nova but that’s not scheduled for 2012 so we’re probably ok.