Modern Eschatology

What moves you closer to your final destination is more than the passage of time or the traversal of the dirt beneath your feet. The far greater motivator is whatever eschatalogical reward or penance you were subscribed to as a child, or perhaps lack thereof. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to focus on the latter, the lack of eschatology or suppressed understanding due to fear.

On an individual basis the thought of death (or end) comes with an inherent installation of anxiety and fear, and having felt this fear keenly in the amygdala the human propensity is to escape whatever is causing this anxiety. This being an entirely biological reaction to a perceived threat in our environment we teach ourselves rather quickly to shut this down, and so for hundreds of years theologians and philosophers alike have been abstracting the concept of death and endings to allegories, myths, legends and religious texts so that we might approach these concepts without fear or anxiety. For those who can understand the abstract and reapply it to the human experience, we might somewhat overcome this fear and approach eschatology with a renewed fortitude rather than consternation.

What we see in our modern world is not only a rejection of eschatology, but anything that might bridge the gap between the abstract and the literal. Society no longer holds interest in ‘the end’ as it applies to their endeavours, but a perpetual sense that society is the end unto itself. On the one hand, we see examples of living within an eschatology, while at the same time society places measures on itself to eke out more time within its own perceived end. Far be it for someone immersed in the complex simulations to be able to separate the two ideas and find their own revelation in the hypocrisy. Instead the modern man is subjected to endless lashings because he brought about the end times, but worse still, the lashings continue in his constant need to save himself and society from his own crimes.

If this modern man could extrapolate his suffering onto the ideals of a greater eschatology, he would find that much like the shadows on the wall of the cave, the end that he has been struggling against was illusory. He has been plied with anxiety and guilt, a poor motivator by any metric, but one that has sustained the modern world thus far. If, again, he could extrapolate these facts onto his daily grind, he would in a moment discover the falsity of his existence within society. With this fact now fixed firmly in his mind, what reaction would he then have? Perhaps he would be filled with rage that the true end was obfuscated from him. All of his efforts and ideals, his nature and purpose were used against him for the benefit of a machination.

If that rage was bridled only by himself he might break the chains of a subversive eschatology (climate change, pandemics, white oppression etc.) and instead look to a transcendental mode of being. Man himself is, as the late Terence Mckenna said, the transcendental object at the end of time.