Oh my aching credulity

Oh my aching credulity

I was around for the first wave of silliness about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world in 2012.

Now there is a whole new resurgence in this theme, with several new books and popular coverage of the idea that Dec. 2012 will bring, if not an apocalypse, at least a major "shift" in human affairs.

As if that were not bad enough, I just saw that someone is trying to stitch together Nostradamus and 2012!

Of course, it is a perfect match -- the ambiguous maunderings of a famous "prophet", glued to the ambiguous "end of a cycle" of a mysterious lost people. Nostradamus' enigmatic quatrains perfectly lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations (I have seen the same passage claimed to predict a female U.S. president, and a financial collapse), and anything "Mayan" excites new agers to drooling.

But I have to ask two questions:

1) Why is it people are so willing to look forward to an apocalypse in their lifetimes?

and

2) Why do people feel so lost that they will accept any framework, even a pessimistic one, to hang a belief system on?

I have my theories, but for now I just have to shake my head.

Personally, I am looking forward to 2013. And I wonder what satisfaction they get in believing it will not arrive.