Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 11:05 pmNo, I wouldn't say that was fair.
The deciding factor is not subjective...it's either objectively true or objectively false. The only way a prophecy can "be what people want it to be" is if it's so vague as to describe nothing...like daily horoscopes. If it's at all specific, then a prophecy is simply true or false.
That is not what I meant. What I referred to is that for thousands of years the prophecies to which we refer were suspected, intuited, imagined and perceived as being close, just around the corner, and in every period where there were wars, conflicts, disasters, and other such events, it was imagined that
the end of the world was nigh.
I did not say that prophecy was what people wanted it to be, but rather that they in fact had no choice but to try to attempt to interpret the prophecies they read about, or which other people talked about, as having direct bearing on their lives, the situations around them. And as always this sense of foreboding had a 'Christian' function: to induce a sense of instability in them. If they were complacent about *the world* and themselves in that world they would not be able to find the motive to sever their hopes and longings from a mutable platform and turn instead to God and higher metaphysical ideas (or realities).
It is now, and in a sense *once again*, that the events of our world and what goes on around us seem to us similarly devious, unsustainable, as if portending momentous changes of a dark sort. For some the *climate crisis* is a physical manifestation rising out of the Earth itself, or more properly the *atmospheric gods*, that communicates to them that life is not secure, but also that something is fundamentally wrong, and indeed that their is something fundamentally wrong with
them. It then becomes a question of application of *interpretation* (in that sense I used the term hermeneutics) to try to 'divine' what the meaning of all this is. But the essential factor is the sense that the foundation, the understructure of life in so many areas and senses is unstable.
It seems to produce a form of desperation.
But all of this has been felt, in greater or lesser degrees of course, depending on the moment, for hundreds of years, and it was all of the same 'species'. Obviously, with advent of the Great War and the destruction that followed (so I have read) faith in the continuity of *civilized* life was severely affected. I read not long ago someone who had written that the sense of trust in life itself as a stable platform in Europe changed dramatically as a result of that shock. He said that one would have had to have lived prior to 1914 to have known that sense of faith and comfort that life offered, which as substantially shattered after that terrible war -- and of course those that followed it.
In my view it is clear that the modern era seems to be one of acceleration in all areas, but though it is said that life improves and gets better with every passing advance, it does seem to me that people generally sense that things get that much more insecure, and that it is not really possible to have great faith in these developments.
This interests me, of course, because I sense that (certainly in the US, I am uncertain how other people perceive it) the loss of faith in an understructure the world provides leads to a tremendous and mounting psychic insecurity. It seems to me this insecurity and angst lead to an internal condition of susceptibility to *hysteria*.
