<H4>Fear of death, or fear of famelessness?</H4>

Atrios has a great post about how many people both secular and religious, politically left and right, believe the "end of the world" is near, and have explicitly doomsday scenarios of this end, from a literalist Christian Apocalypse of the Religious Right to climate catastrophe of hard-core environmentalists, many of whom may be New Age or otherwise "spiritual but not religious."

He also mentions past fears over Y2K computer meltdown and "Brave New World" fears of Ayn Rand-type libertarians. He does pass over the "nuclear winter" fears of the mid-1980s, one of the first great nonreligious apocalyptic fears.

He wraps up with this comment:

"I'm not saying people really want the end of the world to happen, but I think it's the type if thing which would provide the ultimate justification for their particular worldviews."

Contrary to one poster to his site, I don't think this is so much a "transferrence of an individual fear of death" requiring the need to read more Nietzsche as it is a transference or expansion of an individual desire for 15 minutes of fame, which would suggest reading more McLuhan instead.

Think of the stories to be told, such as, "Grandkids, I survived the Great Global Warming of 2030."

I see the same in the actions of many would-be or successful suicides, the type who insist on killing 5, 15, or 50 other people, mostly to totally innocent of inflicting any of the pains in these people's lives, when they kill themselves. I know that may sound a bit cynical or hard-hearted, but it is actually these "suicides for glory" who are callous and hard-hearted.