The 2012 Meme

The 2012 meme is getting increasing play as the end date of the Mayan calendar comes ever closer. Speculation abounds as to what will happen on or near the due date. Ideas range from a transcendental ascension to death and destruction on a massive scale and everything in between. These ideas have been around for a long time now but only fairly recently have they started seeping into mass consciousness. You know an idea has entered the cultural mainstream when school kids can have a knowledgeable discussion about it.

Most people tend to fall into two mutually exclusive and largely antagonistic camps regarding these alternative ideas. The skeptics camp peremptorily dismisses these ideas and memes as being fantasy. According to this camp, adherents of such ideas or even people who keep an open mind about them are running away from reality and retreating into a fantasy world. It helps that a lot of such ideas smack of conspiracy theories which helps the skeptics to dismiss them as fables. It also helps that there are a number of people who espouse genuinely strange ideas that cast a shadow over the whole genre; the most recent example of this being Mr. Harold Camping who famously proclaimed the rapture and the beginning of the end of the world on May 21, 2011. The skeptics are helped along with the "official" media which is also firmly on their side and largely tends to dismiss the 2012 meme and related ideas as being essentially absurd.

The other camp can be labelled as the true believers. Their attitudes are frequently conditioned by the fierce rejection of their ideas by the skeptics. These people have over the last decade or so been able to disseminate their ideas to a wide audience thanks to the worldwide spread and adoption (specially in the urban areas) of increasingly high speed internet access. The Net along with ever more powerful computers have enabled almost anyone to upload high quality video and audio on any subject they choose. A quick search on Youtube on 2012 or any subject for that matter  will quickly illustrate this point. The interesting thing about these ideas is that they are usually extremely well presented - frequently much better than the skeptics who have a tendency to fall into polemic.

Read both sides and one will think as if both are living in parallel universes. They frequently talk past each other and seem unwilling to listen to the other side's arguments. This is unfortunate because it is only through an open debate that wrong ideas get exposed and expelled from the mass consciousness.

I hate conspiracy theories. They reek of paranoia to me. People who ascribe to them seem to me to be living in a fantasy world where there are vast impersonal forces out to get them or their country or their religion or whatever. Name any group in the world and there are people - seemingly sane, rational people - who will fervently subscribe to such beliefs. There are a vast number of such conspiracies. So many that the Daily Telegraph has a list of the top thirty. There is nothing that one can do to dissuade someone from believing in a conspiracy theory. Such people will always find some small alleged anomaly or string of coincidences and thereby build a mountain out of a molehill.

Yet, events in the recent past have led to conclude that there is a conspiracy to isolate Pakistan internationally and damage it economically. There seems to be not one grand conspiracy but a nexus of them which may be operating independently but the effects of one are reinforcing the effects of others.