Protecting and Ending...
One of the interesting human instincts that kicks in after “making it” is “protecting it”. Soon after a person feels they have made a significant contribution and assembled a significant nest egg comes the thinking about how to protect what has been acquired. (And often, just thinking about those eggs hatching into chickens can kick this mentality into action.)
Closely related to this is the feeling some people get that the End Is Near, and it is time to change how one treats the people and possessions around them.
Both of these thinking styles relate to possessions, and when these from-the-heart-feelings get vivid enough, they are acted upon in wasteful ways. These actions become goat sacrificing.
The Neolithic Village lifestyle is a semi-nomadic one. The people of the community would settle in, build a village in one location, and live there a while. Then something vital to living would run short, the village would pull up stakes, and move to live in another location. This could be due to something anticipated, such as a season change, or a surprise, such as a drought which decimated an important food.
This lifestyle meant that people could store and save successfully for a while, but then “end of the world as we know it” would come, and it was time to move on. At this point harsh choices were made about what to carry to the next location and what to leave behind. And if something was going to be left behind... might as well use it up. Party time! It is quite likely that “end of the world” parties were a routine celebration. And they would have been bitter-sweet celebrations - a lot of uncertainty and hard work lay ahead, and a lot of sweet things were left behind.
This semi-nomadism also meant that ownership of the possessions that were taken along was considered in large part communal - what was taken along was going to benefit the community as well as the person who was carrying it on their back.
Then came the Agricultural Age. In the area of possessions this was a night-and-day game changer. People would live in just one place for an entire lifetime, so their relationship with possessions changed dramatically. But the Neolithic Village semi-nomadic instinctive thinking did not die, instead of dying it has been adapting.
Two categories of strange choices center on believing the end of the world is coming. The root strange choice here is getting excited about some prediction that the end of the world is coming. These predictions are made constantly by prophets of all descriptions. Every so often a handful of these get paid attention to by the larger community, people get excited, and start talking and acting differently.
A few dramatic examples of the last fifty years include:
These strange choices taken in response to getting excited about an end of world prediction can be lumped into two broad categories and one interestingly specific one:
Let's talk about each in turn.
Hunkering down is a from-the-heart version of protecting one’s assets. The simplest version is burying money in a secret spot in the back yard. Many people get a lot more elaborate about how they hunker down, and each generation seems to produce its own iconic version of this. When I was an older boy in the late 1950’s, backyard fallout shelters in preparation for a nuclear holocaust got lots of news time. Ayn Rand also produced Atlas Shrugged in this era - a lengthy apocalyptic novel about leading business people hunkering down to weather the coming collectivist storm. To some, this book is an objectivist icon. To others the elaborate hunkering down strikes a sympathetic chord. The result of both thinking styles is that it is a book that still sells well to this day.
Following generations have produced “survivalists” and “preppers” who come up with their own elaborate versions of hunkering down. (Interestingly, each of these groups says, “Oh, I'm not an [X],” referring to the icon of the previous generation. “Those people are silly.”) In all of the above cases the time, money, and effort spent on building and stocking a well-equipped safe-haven can become substantial.
Some famous examples of End of the World partying are the Y1K celebrations that looked forward to the coming of Christ, the Y2K celebrations that looked forward to the coming of catastrophic computer glitches, as well as the Millerites of 1843 and Harold Camping followers of 2011 who were both popular Christian End of World groups.
In all of the above cases some people dramatically changed how they conducted their lives as End Day approached. Many sold their possessions and gathered into large support groups. In Y2K many computer related activities, such as ships sailing into ports, were temporarily halted, “just in case”. When the end arrives and passes without incident, these people have to get on with their lives. Most do so in some fashion, but often with some change. Many Millerites, for instance, went on to form the core of the Seventh Day Adventist church.
A less well recognized behavior that accompanies End of World events is a rise in risky investment behavior as the event approaches. I first noticed this connection when the “Asian Flu” bust spread over East Asia after the “Hong Kong joining China” End of the World event in 1997 came and went with little incident. Likewise, the “Dotcom Bust” followed the Y2K event of 2000. The excitement before the event seems to spread into the investment arena and poorly thought through, overly risky choices are made there.
(And it's not just End of the World events that are affected by this phenomenon – the Olympic Games produce a similar investing mania in the cities where they are held.)
Dealing with possessions is a powerful mix of instinctive and analytic thinking. Possessions have been around a long time, so instinctive thinking has grown strong. But that thinking is well adapted to a semi-nomadic lifestyle. How possessions can be handled has changed so much as mankind has transitioned from semi-nomadic to sedentary that instinct is not working well.
The result is the peculiarities I have mentioned above and will be talking more about in the following sections.