Invariably hardly a month goes by here on ATS without some prediction for a false flag, or human race extinction level event, or other major calamity being visited on earth and human kind.

Many critical minded members and skeptics often scratch their heads and fail to quite understand and or consistently question why these dire and typically baseless predictions make the ATS Home Page, garner hundreds of flags and generate dozens and dozens of pages of content.

Often based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence and unsubstantiated suppositions, a clever YouTube Video, alternative media blog or article, or new member claiming inside information, or some prophetic dream prompt these discussions, and debates that 99.9% of the time have no real merit to them and never transpire.

Tempers sometimes flare between the skeptics and believers, often as a result of skeptics just not being able to understand why the believers do believe based on such flimsy evidence and far fetched outcomes being forecast.

The big question in most skeptics minds is how could anyone believe or even want to believe such far fetched outcomes based off of such limited and unsubstantiated often entirely uninvestigated information.

It’s to why so many people want to believe and why they often develop the near impenetrable wall that they cocoon their beliefs in I want to address.

The reasons are simpler than you might think.

Religion the Carrot and the Stick

Most of the world’s most popular religions have as and there base an apocalyptical construct.

Though it varies from religion to religion, it’s all designed to work on the predominant Carrot and Stick approach that those who seek or wield power tend to always employ.

A carrot of heavenly rewards is offered for those so inclined to jump for it, but a stick of an apocalyptic end of unimaginable horrors is used to keep people jumping for that carrot.

Of course any leader who understands psychology and the basic principles of the Carrot and the Stick knows that the typically the Carrot is something you want to keep just beyond the grasp of those jumping for it.

Since the Carrot is an elusive reward, that the wise or independent might get tired of jumping for, the stick becomes a critical part of the process.

Fail to keep jumping and meet your doom.

It’s a simple premise; fail to follow the edicts and decrees, and live by the base constructs put forward and humanity will suffer a horrible retribution and punishment as a result.

However because both Religion and the States that often employ the religion to political ends set standards so high so they never have to deliver the actual carrot, so the fear of the stick remains constant and palpable.

So understanding that apocalyptic doom and gloom ends are a central part to the world’s main religions and are indoctrinated into people from early childhood on with powerful psychological manipulations plays a pivotal role in many people’s propensity to subscribe to, doom and gloom prophecies and predictions.

The Militant Authoritarian State and Tyrannies

Historians and scholars have found that the more militarized and authoritarian the State becomes the more dooms day and apocalyptical prophecies and predictions become prevalent.

The reasons are sound and numerous, beginning with the fact that the militarized state often uses fear as a pretext to justify war.

Some other nation or religion wants to remove yours from the face of the earth. A doomsday of a kind in it's own rite.

So things like preemptive war, and our present war on terror all feed into the fear that is being induced by the state.

In reverse order the State seeks to always maintain a high level of fear, in order to then justify employing the best defense is a good offence mindset and strategies, giving the pretext for the rise of the militant state that aggressively seeks out and attempts to destroy or subdue any and all states or religions that the State covets its resources and lands.

Often fear of the enemy state or religion is manufactured on deliberately false constructs and manipulations and machinations to sell the people on the need for such hostile and violent policies.

However very often what the State then tasks its citizens and soldiers to do, is actually contrary to both the edicts of the religion of the masses, and the actual premises the state was built upon itself.

The ending result is people now actively living in conflict with the edicts of their religion and the founding principles of the state, then fear that their God will punish them for not adhering to the principles of their religion and an apocalyptical punishment is inevitable.

While some will make endless excuses for the militant action of the state hoping that by convincing others that God actually approves of his edicts and rules being broken in this individual case, deep down even many of those people fear that God will still punish them with an apocalyptical fate, even if it’s just the States enemies conquering their State.

Meanwhile while the State employs more and more laws to enforce and compel people to support the militant state, people submitting out of fear to the power of the state, also fear they are making the wrong moral choice, and will likewise be punished with an apocalyptical end as a result.

An apocalyptical end that becomes much more realistic in part because militant states who expand relentlessly through war, always tend to over extend, bankrupt themselves and suffer collapse leaving their citizens and the mercies of their enemies and without competent leadership and means for the now shrinking and collapsing empire and nation to defend and sustain itself.

Fears Death and Taxation

Let’s face it, we all know we are going to die one day, our mortality in a temporal world in the constant process of decay and rebirth is a given.

We all naturally would like to live to become old and gray and die peacefully surrounded by loved ones and the rewards of having lived a long and productive good life.

That’s a prospect that at times seems all to wishful when it comes to our war torn world of scarcity, war and indifference, cruelty and States that literally pursue those horrors as an outcome of their policies and systems they instill and the heavy taxation of people’s fruits and labor to that end.

While religion offers the illusion of some rewards primarily after death, based on accepting some very simple, many would say primitive and superstitious notions about the nature of our life and the universe, even most believers in their quiet and uncertain moments don’t know what to believe when it comes to the temporal nature of our existence and the vastness of the seemingly precarious universe we dwell in.

A universe so unknown and so uncharted it literally then becomes full of infinite and random possibilities that once you step outside of the faith based box of simple religious explanations and constructs for it, then open the door to unlimited imagination.

Fears are often imagined and rarely turn out as people envision, but become much harder to control on a world living in a state, where the Government, Media, and Religion are all using fear as a stick in the Carrot and Stick based performance system that they govern, manipulate and some would say enslave the masses through.

The Stick always seems more real than the Carrot as a result. The possibility of an untimely death or horrible end always seems just a heartbeat away as a result.

Drama and Poverty, Bread and Circuses

Since Roman Times we all know people love their bread and circuses, their day time soaps, their gladiatorial sports, their idols and heroes, pageantry and pomp and circumstance and viewing the lives of others that seem so much richer, exciting, meaningful and fuller.

Often poverty or a lack of means, the responsibility of a inadequate paying job, and the duties to spouse, children, home, family and friends, prevent most of us from coming anywhere close to living out our dreams.

So we take exceptional interest in those Fairy Tale weddings between royals, the vagaries and brutality of war, the duplicity and intrigue of politics and the mystical and fantastical notions of religion, to in essence make a dull life more exciting.

Life that in many ways passes us by as we live out staid, conservative existences, based on limited means and opportunities where our dreams are very much alive but our fears of never realizing them remain ever palpable and present.

So we embrace the free things that the state provides or we can provide ourselves to create dramas where we too are now on the stage, we too are living in that glorified or frightful moment, we too have finally become relevant, even if that relevance is the notion that someone or something would like to take what little bit we do have and enjoy away from us in one awful moment or act.

In that last construct, suddenly our lives become something precious again, something to celebrate, something of real value, as nothing makes a person feel more alive than when they are on that precipice of death.

In Conclusion

While a host of things above not often considered or discussed make up the basis for the belief in doomsday and Apocalyptic predictions and prophecies the one thing not likely to deter people from believing in them is skepticism or scorn.

The reasons and the temptation are ingrained and powerful and the circular logic often employed by the religious minded as part of faith based systems can’t easily, often or ever be defeated, with history and logic and socio economic and political reasons.

People who subscribe to these predictions and prophecies likely can’t ever be deterred from entertaining them for those reasons.

Yet those of us who don’t subscribe to them, would be well served, to at least ourselves understand the powerful appeal they have to so many people, so we can understand what many won’t, can’t and don’t want to.

After all knowledge is power.