"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" by Albrecht Dürer (1498)

Personally, I gravitate to the question of "why" than "when", "what", or "how".

Before I get into it, I want to apologize for grammatical errors and run-on sentences that might confuse you. I'll do my best to make my point clear.

So why do humanity spend so much of their time and creativity in apocalypse?
I suggest that one of the segment need to focus on this matter.

The quick answer is because we all FEAR the end. "The end" we all fear is death, the end of individual's life. But is this really the end? Some religious people will say "no." The fact is the heart stops and your physical being is no longer functional. But does that mean it's the end? So "end" is merely a concept that can vary between individuals. We know 100% that we are going to die, and that's a fact, but when it comes to "end" of self, or consciousness, we all have different idea. In another words, when it comes to the "end" it is no longer a fact and we are not 100% sure about what it means.

When we are not sure about something, we get scared. We fear darkness and future. Unlike other animals who waited hundreds of thousands of years for natural selection and evolution to take care of it, (gazelle's speed, rabbit's ears, turtle's shells, etc) humans created religion and science. For first several thousands years, human relied on religion to cope with these fear, but when science caught up with religion, may be around the time Edison shed some lights on darkness of the night, we started to think the science can answer some of our questions too.

The trick about science is that more we know, more we don't know. In science we even got to calculate distances to every stars we see. But when we found that out, we figured how small and insignificant we are to the universe, and we got even more scared. In math, back in 500BC, things only Greek scholars could figure out, today we learn them in an elementary school. But regardless of our advancement, mathematicians today has a computer that are still calculating Pi. We have a such hard time to simply accept something could not be finite, and realm of unknown will always exists.

The science gave us much more broad possibilities of world's end than religions ever did. On top of that, that very science is providing us with new probability of self destructions. So when we try to get an answer to something like "how will the world end?", the scientific imaginations gave us answer so much more vivid and horrific than Dante could ever imagine of hell. So why do we continue with this endless cycle of fear?

Once a wise man said "fear is given to us by God for survival." This is true to certain extent. Some people may fear the end of the world, because they can't bear the feeling of the death hanging above their head and not knowing when it will strike. Typically, these people will continue to frighten others by digging a bomb shelter and buying gas masks. Some people even fantasize fear and almost as if they masochistically indulge on images of apocalypse, but that is just another way of escaping from facing more immediate danger which require hard work to resolve. These are irrational fears and we are smart enough to use our deconstructive thinking to point that out.

On the other hand, people fear not specifically the end of the world, but possibility of the world continuing to deteriorate. In another words, it may sounds cheesy like NBC's public announcement, but we hate to imagine our next generations to come will suffer in result of our poor judgement. This type of fear can lead to the real changes and positive outcome.

In today's world that filled with fear based propaganda (Fox News, Bush, Mel Gibson, etc.) which are backed up by some pop cultures that feed on them, it is getting increasingly harder for some people to sort out rational and irrational fear. And I think ultimately, what we can do as artists is to give them clearer view to the issues we face.

Personally, I don't believe in heaven or hell. I believe that influences will continue to live on after my death. My hell will be at the moment of death thinking that my life was in vain, or knowing that I had grater negative influences to humanity than positive ones. And it will be a tragedy if I don't have a grain of hope left for the condition of this world. May be a that's what we fear the most, more than the end of the world. With so much craziness around the world, we sometimes forget what we fear the most.

That's almost all the thought I have for today, except some trains of thought that didn't stop at this station long enough to hop on.

See you on Sunday.