The Psychology of “Mayan Apocalypse” Hysteria

 

By now, most people who have not lived in a social isolation experiment for the last 50 years have heard about the so-called “Mayan Apocalypse,” the idea that, with the completion of the full cycle or “long count” of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, the world will end or be transformed in some kind of catastrophe.

Exactly how the world is supposed to end differs from account to account, as shown by the way the theme has appeared in popular entertainment. The very last episode of the television show The X-Files featured a scene in which it was revealed that December 21, 2012 would be the date of an invasion of Earth by extraterrestrial aliens (see screen shots from “The Truth,” Season 9, Episode 19, broadcast 2002); as it happens, alien invasion is a popular Mayan Apocalypse scenario. 

(The X-Files, "The Truth [Pt. 1]," 3:26 into the episode)

(3:56 into the episode; image reversed for readability)

The 2006 movie 2012 posited that the increased solar flare activity during this“solar maximum” year would boil the Earth’s mantle, provoking mega-scale earthquakes and tsunamis (see poster, left, where a tsunami takes out a Tibetan Buddhist temple, hundreds of miles inland); this is another popular Mayan Apocalypse scenario. Other theories currently popular hold that the Earth will be demolished by a star / planet / comet / asteroid known as “Nibiru” on a very long orbit around the sun; claims about the Nibiru cataclysm are detailed in many YouTube videos.

 

On one level, the most important thing to know about this is that there is absolutely no basis in reality for the belief in the Mayan Apocalypse, including the Nibiru cataclysm. This fact is the subject of a recent post on the United States government’s blog, an extensive FAQ page on the NASA website, a detailed article on the website of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and, according to an article in The New York Times, a public website of the Russian government. This is the subject of John Michael Greer’s book, Apocalypse Not (see cover; available through the widget above and to the right). The Nibiru cataclysm in particular has been debunked thoroughly in two well-written YouTube videos by “3WME” (available here and here). (UPDATE: NASA has created a video, supposedly for December 22nd, which debunks the Mayan Apocalypse in less than four-and-a-half minutes. Watch it here.)

Put simply: no, the world is not going to end on December 21, 2012, and there is no reason to think that the world will end anytime soon.

However, that is not enough, for a student of psychology.

It is not enough to know that there is no basis in reality for what can only be described as a mild social hysteria regarding the Mayan Apocalypse (a hysteria that apparently has even driven some to suicide, according to the Times). No, as students of psychology, we must ask: Why has this social hysteria occurred? Why is this notion so widespread? What maintains this belief?

As it happens, different theories in personality psychology and cognitive psychology have something to say about the psychological underpinnings of the belief in the Mayan Apocalypse. Below, I give brief descriptions of how some of these theories might approach this issue, roughly in the chronological order of each theory’s emergence. (Note: these explanations are not mutually exclusive! And, yes, I know that I am applying theories of individual personality and cognition to the social realm.)

Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology

Beginning in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, pictured) posited that humans had a “death drive,” expressed in self- and other-destructive impulses, expressed socially in war. Why this should be so would require a lengthy consideration of Freud’s work (including Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id [1923], and Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]—all written many years after Freud gave up cocaine in 1896, for those who are wondering). In brief, part of the idea here is that an organism seeks to discharge tension, and death is the ultimate tension-less state.

The applicability to the Mayan Apocalypse is clear. The world in the early 21^st century, especially in the industrialized countries, is heavily overstimulated with electronic media and the weight of hyperconnectedness. In addition, the normal anxieties of life are amplified on a global scale, what with concerns about multiple wars; the potential for terrorist attacks (let alone their nuclear or biological variants); climate change and its consequences (extreme weather, rising ocean levels); pandemic disease. In a very broad-brush way, the end of the world would end the overstimulation, end the anxiety, end the tension: Death, the great simplifier. I see this as a deeply deficient solution, of course. But on a primitive level of the mind, perhaps it seems otherwise; the Mayan Apocalypse would appeal to that primitive level of mind.

Jungian Psychology

Freud’s contemporary and one-time disciple, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961, pictured), took depth psychology in a very different direction than Freud did. In particular, Jung thought that humans were born with certain fundamental cognitive structures, the archetypes—impossible to apprehend consciously, but appearing in symbolic form in myths, dreams, and legends. One such archetype is the Self, the apex of a person’s fully developed individuality; it is often symbolized by circular objects, such as mandalas, or spherical objects, such as the Sun. Another archetype is the Shadow, which represents the traits one has that are not acceptable to society or to oneself; it is often symbolized by dark and destructive beings or objects. (See Man and His Symbols by Jung and his associates, an accessible—if unfortunately titled—introduction to Jungian personality theory.)

In the language of the archetypes, the Mayan Apocalypse represents a fear, and perhaps a warning. In many ways, the 20^th and early 21^st centuries have shown humankind rather at its worst, in terms of large-scale violence and oppression, environmental damage, and the commodification of human life, that is, the reduction of everything to economic terms. (The recent scandal involving a cover photo in the New York Post—where the photographer apparently declined to save a man’s life in order to photograph that man facing a subway train a moment before it killed him—is an extreme example of this commodification.) The notion of the Earth (in Jungian terms, a spherical symbol of the Self) being destroyed by chaotic forces (in Jungian terms, symbols of the Shadow) is a sort of archetypal nightmare. Having it clothed in the garb of Mayan myth (embodying another Jungian archetype, the Old Man or Woman who bestows wisdom) would make this nightmare all the more powerful.

The Nibiru cataclysm—where some celestial body, the agent of chaos, literally comes out of the ‘Shadow’ of outer space to destroy the Earth—is, if anything, even a neater archetypal nightmare in Jungian terms. Jungian individuation—the process of becoming one’s best possible self, in a sense—involves a “conjunction of the opposites” in which the Shadow becomes reconciled to and incorporated within the Self. In the Mayan Apocalypse, the Shadow demolishes the Self. As a vision of our potential societal future, the Jungian reading of the Mayan Apocalypse obsession poses quite a serious warning. No wonder these matters would be on society’s mind, from Jung’s point of view.

[Note: See what The Jung Page has to say about all this.]

Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychology, as embodied in the work of such psychologists as Rollo May (1909-1994, pictured), is concerned with how issues of meaning, freedom, human connectedness, and mortality are worked out in the life of the individual. In humanistic counseling and psychotherapy, dream analysis concerns itself with how these themes expose themselves symbolically in the life of the individual.

From this perspective, one can read society’s obsession with the Mayan Apocalypse as demonstrating a fear that the world of the 21^st century offers little support to the individual when it comes to the weightier matters of life. The decline (especially in Western Europe and some American locations) of traditional religion leaves some people with little sense of the greater meanings of life, yet “doomed to freedom,” in the phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre (an existentialist philosopher, of some note among humanistic/existentialist psychologists). I find it instructive that two recent films—Melancholia (2011) and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)—explore the meaning of human connectedness in the face of an inescapable Nibiru-type cataclysm. And what better vehicle could one have than the Mayan Apocalypse to force unresolved issues of mortality and life’s ultimate meanings to the very forefront of our thoughts, on a planetary scale?

Cognitive Psychology

There are a couple of ways in which cognitive psychology might be applied to society’s obsession with the Mayan Apocalypse, both of which deal with why people might believe in ideas, like the Mayan Apocalypse, which have such a poor body of supporting evidence.

First, one might consider the matter of systematic, ‘hardwired’ biases in cognition. The study of such biases was pioneered by the psychologists Amos Tversky (1937-1996, pictured left) and Daniel Kahneman (b. 1934, pictured below left), as documented in their seminal 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” (Science, 185, 1124-1131; widely anthologized).

Consider what Tversky and Kahneman labeled the availability heuristic: People consider those things most probable that come to mind most easily. Hollywood has been feeding movies about alien conquest of Earth into the public consciousness since the 1950s; for recent examples, think of Independence Day (1996), War of the Worlds (1953, remade 2005), Battle: Los Angeles (2011), even Battleship (2012)—this could easily become a very long list. Hollywood has also been producing movies about global catastrophes since at least the 1970s; for recent examples, consider The Core (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2006), Sunshine (2007), and Knowing (2009). Two major motion pictures about planet-killer asteroids hit the screens in a single summer (Armageddon and Sudden Impact, both 1998), and in this vein we should remember the aforementioned Melancholia (2011) and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012). Global catastrophe is thus easily imaginable for anyone who has been to the movies. This feeds into the bias of imaginability, one aspect of the availability heuristic: that which is easily imaginable is considered all the more likely.

Second, one might consider the matter of critical thinking itself. In a tradition going back at least as far as Socrates (5^th century bce, see bust), philosophers have emphasized the need for vigorous testing of claims, to explore the solidity of evidence and the soundness of logic—and, of course, psychology as a discipline rose from within philosophy.

However, the literature and media (videos, etc.) that support the idea of the Mayan Apocalypse utterly fail any standards of critical thinking. (This topic would require an extremely long essay in itself.) In the face of this, one has to wonder aloud what research might be constructed to test for critical thinking skills, what programs could be devised to improve them, and what program evaluation research might be applied to those programs. (Students take note: There are many bachelors’ and masters’ and even doctoral theses topics in here, I’m sure, not to mention an entire professional research program for any enterprising psychologist.)

Transpersonal Psychology

Transpersonal psychology was largely founded on the late work of Abraham Maslow (1908-1970, pictured)—earlier a leading light of humanistic psychology—who, near the end of his life, realized that self-actualization was not the true top of the hierarchy of human motivations for which he was famous: actually self-transcendence was. That is, when needs lower on the needs hierarchy are met, people seek to connect up with something greater beyond themselves, be that a Deity or Power, a cause, or the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. (See my 2006 paper on Maslow and self-transcendence.)

From a transpersonal perspective, the societal focus on the Mayan Apocalypse reflects a widespread inability to access the transcendent. To put it bluntly, Western civilization is materialistic to a fault. In this context, although people have an inchoate sense of a transcendent reality, without a way to access that reality, they can conceive of it only in terms that are utterly unreachable, even alien, chaotic, even malevolent. And, of course, that is the Mayan Apocalypse: cosmic forces that are literally aimed at Earth and result in its destruction. It is a vision of fear, borne of the spiritually vapid nature of modern Western culture.

Conclusion

Before we can address damage—whether in the disordered function of a patient or client, or in the fears or imbalance of a society—we have to have a way of conceptualizing the problem. A brilliant psychologist and mentor, Douglas H. Heath, once taught me to memorize this saying of Margaret Mead: “A clear understanding of the problem prefigures the lines of its solution.” Perhaps one of the personality theories above will give the reader some insight into how to address our society’s issues, given that those issues are manifest in such a phenomenon as the Mayan Apocalypse hysteria. Although I have emphasized research in the Cognitive Psychology section above, in reality, research may be conducted from within each of these perspectives. I wish student theoriests and researchers well in addressing these issues.

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[The opening image was found on the post “Mayan Apocalypse?” of the blog SiOWfa12: Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversy, the blog for a Fall 2012 course at Penn State University. The post was written by Nicholas H. Oliver; it was unclear to me whether Mr. Oliver authored the image. The remaining images are either in the public domain or are the property of their respective copyright holders.]

Copyright 2012 Mark E. Koltko-Rivera. All Rights Reserved.