World speeding up
Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.
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Albert Swearengen writes:
You wrote:
“Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.”
AUSTER—Try to let this in—I’ve studied your habits, and I know it won’t be easy for you :
There is a 7000 year plan for salvation. This is the ENTIRE story contained in the Bible. The apostle Peter implores his readers (hearers) to remember that with YHWH, 1000 years is as a day, and a day is as 1000 years.
I know you like to quote Matthew 24:34 and say that Messiah was mistaken or that the events of which he spoke must have already come to pass. This is a PROFOUND mistake. The apostle Peter refers to the entire lineage of believers as a “generation.”
In Matthew Henry’s A Commentary On The Whole Bible, he does the math and calculates the birth of Adam at 4004 B.C. (+/-)
Six thousand years are almost up. The time of Jacob’s Trouble (Tribulation) is very soon to begin, followed by the 1000 year (Sabbath) reign of Messiah.
Please do not discard the above words as nonsense. The time we have left is a gift.
Brad C. writes:
I think it will only get worse (or faster, if you like). Because of rising food prices we are only months away from food riots in poorer countries. Governments are being forced to make significant cuts in the developed world. Unemployment is high and still showing no signs of improvement. The rising gas prices because of instability in the Middle East will also delay or destroy economic recovery. Inflation is rising in the US, and the Fed will have to either allow it or raise interest rates and create even more unemployment.
Interesting times.
Malcolm Pollack writes:
You asked: “Is some sort of intensification of the world going on?”
Your question led me to some interesting thoughts (which I summed up in little blog post). I think the answer is yes, and I think that physics provides a very apt metaphor in the laws describing the behavior of gases in closed vessels:
As you reduce the volume of a container, or add more molecules of gas, the average distance between particles decreases, and the energy density of the system also increases. Pressure increases, because collisions with the walls of the container become more frequent, and because collisions between particles inside the container happen more energetically and more often, the pace of chemical reactions also increases.
This is exactly what has happened to the world, and very dramatically so, in the last few years. Not only has crowding increased in the world’s crowded places, but far more importantly, the revolution in electronic communications—in particular, the advent of massively interconnected, global social networks that operate with zero latency with little regard to political boundaries—has decreased the average distance between individual human beings by orders of magnitude in a very short time. In effect, the world has been compressed to a small fraction of its former volume, almost in the blink of an eye—and what we see now is the sudden increase in pressure, temperature, and chemical reactions that the gas laws tell us should happen under such circumstances. And as those reactions happen, they in turn liberate even more energy into the system, creating shock-waves of localized increase in pressure, and raising the overall temperature and energy density.
So yes, a very rapid intensification of the world is underway, and we should expect it to continue.
N. writes:
The ripples of the crisis stemming from various bad decisions are simply becoming more obvious. Food prices, as Brad C. notes, are a big factor in countries such as Egypt where 40 percent of the population is poor. Food prices are affected by many things, including weather, but also by policy: the ethanol boondoggle in the U.S. has clearly affected the price of corn, for example.
Beyond that, the bills for decades of binge spending have come due in the West. Wisconsin is the first, but will not be the last, state to have to grapple with public unions. As long as the economy seemed endlessly to expand, there was a great deal of slack with which to buy off various constituencies.
Now that is no longer true, in part because a great deal of debt will have to be worked down around the planet. So there is no slack to buy off constituencies any more.
It is probably no coincidence that many of the vote-buying schemes date to the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers were in college or starting their jobs. And it is no coincidence that the collapse of those schemes is occurring as the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire, because many of the defined-benefit pension schemes have been insolvent for years, but it did not matter because more were paying in than were taking out. With Boomer retirement, the demographic reverses.
So it’s not that the world is speeding up, rather than a number of issues, problems, even currents of history that have not been obvious enough to make front page news are now prominent. And indeed, we can expect more of this, not less.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Illinois and California admit they are essentially bankrupt. Just as it will be interesting to see what happens when the Saudis face their own demographic issues.
Stewart W. writes:
Hello Lawrence,
You know, I’ve never been a particularly religious man, although I would generally describe myself as a believer and at least as a “Christian sympathizer”. Despite all of the excellent analysis on this site regarding the root causes of the alliance between the evil left and evil Islam, I have for several years not been able to shake the feeling that there is something more happening here.
When I look at the events happing now during this quickening, the phrase that springs to mind is, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
Mercedes D. writes:
There does indeed seem to be some kind of intensification going on in the world.
Like Stewart W., I have the feeling that ‘there is something more happening here.’
To be more specific, and at the risk of sounding like a sandwich board worn by a corner prophet, it feels like THE END IS NEAR.
The Bible contains many passages that describe signs that will be seen just before the end of the world, and many of the events that are now taking place in the world seem to fit the descriptions of those signs. It would take too long to list them all, but as a Christian you are surely already familiar with the passages to which I refer. It’s hard to imagine that it hasn’t crossed your mind that we may be on the verge of Armageddon.
“And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” Luke 21:28
LA replies:
In a December 2010 entry, “For then shall be great tribulation … ” I quoted the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 24 in its entirety, preceded by this:
By way of introduction I will say just one thing, which may help remove an obstacle to understanding. Jesus is not speaking of a single historical event, but of a pattern that exists eternally and manifests itself recurrently, both internally, in the lives of individuals, and externally, in worldly events. If this were not the case, then there are only two possibilities: that the events he describes are all external events that happened once and for all, during the lives of his disciples, and are irrelevant to ourselves; or, since they plainly did not occur as an external event during the lives of his disciples as he seemed to say they would (“This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled”), that his prophecies are false. The correct view is that Jesus is describing an eternal pattern which recurs internally and externally, in a variety of ways, throughout space and time and in the history of every soul. It was true for the generation of the discliples; it is true for us.
Also, in an April 2005 entry, “The ambiguous thing that America now is,” I wrote:
The strange American consciousness I discussed in relation to the legless Maj. Tammy Duckworth and her husband, this completely calm, taken-for-granted attitude that people now have toward putting a woman in a combat theater where she gets both her legs blown off, represents something new and uncanny in the world, a truly post-modern phenomenon: the seamless joining of the finest American qualities with the abomination of desolation.
What do I mean by this? Though the abomination of desolation, or the desolating sacrilege, is spoken of by Jesus as a single event that will occur in the last days, there is not a single desolating sacrilege, there are many (just as there is not a single anti-Christ, but many, who can be seen as precursors of the anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation), and one of these desolating sacrileges is putting women in combat as a discretionary choice and then treating it as normal and even a thing to be proud of when women are killed or receive terrible injuries. This is what I mean when I say that the finest American qualities are now in service to the abomination of desolation.
Here are a couple of other entries where I discuss the last days and Matthew 24:
Waiting for the asteroid (March 2005)
We are seeing liberalism morph into totalitarianism (Dccember 2009)
Andrea C. writes:
Is the world speeding up? Or, more specifically, is the bad news accumulating faster and faster? Yes.
We are currently in the winter season of the four-part seasonal cycle that has characterized modern Western history (the crisis season, the inevitable season of death before the renewal.) This season of crisis will continue for at least another 10 or 15 years and it will culminate in an event on the scale of WWII, the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War. This is according to The Fourth Turning by Howe & Strauss, 1997.
Quote: “Historian Gerhard Masur explained “crisis” to mean “a sudden acceleration of the historical process in a terrifying manner,” sufficient to “release economic, social, and moral forces of unforeseen power and dimensions, which often make return to the status quo impossible.”
“The next Fourth Turning—America’s next rendezvous with destiny—will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty.” -1997
“Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes—and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and WWII.”
Ultimately the seeds of this cycle come from nature itself. The paradox is that it is in modern societies—the societies that have seemingly harnessed nature most completely—that are the ones in which the seasonal cycles of history are the most cataclysmic. The book explains all. I highly recommend it, it’s helpful.
March 1
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:
I thought I would chime in about the “end times” feeling that your correspondents are expressing.
I first started to get that feeling when the Toronto Zoo began to advertise snow and polar bears this summer, and during a heat wave, no less (they were just being practical, but I saw something more ominous).
I don’t know what really triggered this feeling. Perhaps it is Toronto’s now (in my opinion) inhospitable multicultural society. Daily, I hear half a dozen languages, from Somali (and of course Amharic) to various Chinese and Indian languages—never Swedish or even French. And the streets are full of Third Worlders who don’t know simple sidewalk protocol, although I think that they just don’t care about such protocol (if I keep walking straight, as an experiment, I will bump into as many people as I hear languages). I don’t drive, but whenever I’m in a car on the highways, there’s invariably a near altercation with another car—a quick glance at the driver shows me an Indian or a Chinese, blithely driving on. At stores, I have to repeat things twice, three times, enunciating each word, to accented saleswomen. It’s hard to get coffee in a hurry. I think, soon, all these different peoples will just start getting antagonistic toward each other.
I recently wrote at my blog:
I think we are at the cusp of tremendously difficult times. I’ve mentioned in a post the strange summer we’ve had, and my reaction to it both physiologically and psychologically (yes, polar bears in the summer is surely an unnatural event, albeit tinted with humor).
I’m also talking about end times to people—not to scare them, but in a matter of fact way. Even today I mentioned it. Unlike your correspondents, I don’t think it is simply the end of an era—and death-mongering has never been my trait. But we’d better get prepared.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 23, 2011 12:16 PM | Send