This is excellent by Ricard Seymour on the social suffering underpinning enthusiasm for messianic theories of impending disaster, reflecting the trauma generated as the promised parameters of life unravel; the world gets smaller, things get harder and it never stops. I take Seymour to be saying the eschatological impulse is a fantasised stop to this process, where adherents imagine getting off the moving train of history so judgement can finally be served:
This should give us pause when we contemplate reactionary catastrophilia. Consider the glee with which reaction contemplates the violent end – an end which, for those fatted on fundamentalist readings of John of Patmos, is meted out by a divine dictator. They can’t get enough of it. They are so voracious for the motivating power of disaster that they invent it, from FEMA death camps to Satanist child-traffickers. This is always a latent potential in eschatological forebodings. Thomas Merton, firmly distinguishing such human forebodings from Christian eschatology, writes of “the pathological fear of the violent end which, when sufficiently aroused, actually becomes a thinly disguised hope for the violent end”. What if that torsion, of fear into desire, can function as a kind of therapeutic discharge, a release from the metaphysical hell in which nothing and no one is to be trusted, in which there is neither love nor hope nor comfort for pain? What if the recruits to disaster nationalism, those who lap up the eschatological enthusiasms of Left Behind and QAnon, are already in many cases survivors of their own chronic and acute disasters? What if their trust, their basic ontological security, has already been ruptured? What if they are already the bearers of an unbearable disclosure?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/catastrophilia-86790575
Mark Carrigan 