Death and Doctrine, Part 6: The Allures of the Anti-Christ

I spent four years working as a therapist at a psychiatric hospital. You learn a great deal about the human mind working with the very worst of our mental breakdowns. Very little about human behavior now surprises me. I've seen it all.

To start this post, I want to share with you one of my big realizations about the human mind that I discovered during those years working at the psychiatric hospital. To begin, one of the things you notice about people in very bad and miserable life circumstances is that they often refuse to make changes. Think of the classic case of domestic abuse. You work with the battered wife, laying out a plan for her to leave her abuser and move toward a new and happier future. But after discharge she heads right back into the same situation. Why?

Many therapists think the woman's refusal to leave is due to some kind of co-dependent dysfunction or "battered woman syndrome." I'm not denying that those dynamics may be involved on a case by case basis. But I think there is a less exotic, a more workaday explanation. I think this because this explanation works not just for the domestic abuse situation but applies to all kinds of "failures to change"; those situations where people stick with a miserable Present and refuse to move toward a happier Future.

So what explains the inertia, the hesitance to move toward happiness? Here is my analysis:

The brain desires predictability over happiness.

To wit. The brain evolved to be a prediction machine. The brain is not a happiness machine. The brain doesn't exist to make you happy. The brain exists to keep you alive and to find your next meal. And it does this by making associations (learning) to create predictive expectations about the organism's immediate future. As cognitive scientists tell us, the brain exists to answer one simple question: What should I do next?

The point is, if the brain puts happiness versus predictability in the balance the brain will choose predictability. Which means we would rather live with a miserable but predictable life than venture out toward an unpredictable future, even if that future is potentially happier. We know our dysfunctions well. They are not fun and they are unhealthy. But they are KNOWN. And in that knowledge is a bit of biological comfort.

Okay, I bet you are now asking, "What does this have to do with the anti-Christ?" Let me explain.

Our world if filled with terrifying events. Hurricanes kills thousands. Tsunami's bring devastation. Earthquakes level nations. Terrorism and wars surround us. And global warming is going to put New York City underwater. In short, CNN brings us, on a daily basis, one global disaster after another. The world is a scary place.

But what if all this chaos was predicted? What if these events were not disasters but SIGNS? Signs of the End Times?

Many Christians are fascinated, transfixed even, by the Signs of the End Times. Numerous books and study Bibles fill Christian bookstore shelves on the subject. In recent years, this interest has been captured by The Left Behind series, a fictional imagining of the rapture, the rise of the anti-Christ and the battle of Armageddon.

If one reads these materials, some fictional and others purporting to be serious biblical scholarship, one is struck by the exegetical and hermanutical pyrotechnics. In a word, these readings of Scripture are very poor. And that is putting it nicely.

So the psychologist in me wonders, "Why would these poor readings of Scripture find such wide appeal? They can't be succeeding on intellectual grounds. So, what's the attraction?"

I think the attractions are existential and emotional. End Times theories take something chaotic, scary and unpredictable and turn it into something tamed, Providential, and predictable. Tsunamis become signs. Never fret, God is in control. Schematically, we can summarize:

(Scary World Events) = Unease and Fear

(Scary World Events) + (End Times Theory) = Security and Peace of Mind

Ah, the allures of the anti-Christ!

Recall my earlier point about the brain and predictability. The End Times theories are feeding this craving of the brain, the need for order and predictability.

Interestingly, this need for predictability goes haywire in paranoid disorders. As G.K. Chesterton noted, a sane person lives in a world where most things are random and meaningless. Like swinging a stick at some tall grass. We do it because it is pointless. For Chesterton, pointlessness was the hallmark of sanity. By contrast, a paranoid person sees TOO MUCH meaning in life. Nothing is pointless or random! That person swinging a stick is sending signals to malevolent forces out to get me. In short, when we see meaning in meaningless activities/occurrences we grow increasingly suspicious and paranoid. We might not have a psychotic break but we'll spend lots of time spinning or consuming conspiracy theories.

Perhaps this is why End Times thinking is so similar to conspiracy theories. Signs are everywhere. You see them in tsunamis, wars, and the resolutions of the United Nations. Nothing is simply what it is. It is MORE. And it is CONNECTED. The rapture is upon us! The End Times are NOW!

But at the end of the day, this is all just really about existential comfort. The need to render the inexplicable explicable. To tame the chaos and, as a result, attenuate the anxiety the chaos creates in us. We live in scary times. So it is okay to be scared. It's courageous to admit it. It's a form of lament.

But that might be too scary a prospect. So here's an alternative: Seek the comforts of the End Times Connect-the-Dots game. It's a game, like most games, that will allow you to pass the time.

Plus, it will make you feel better.