The Deviancy Spiral
Unpacking the psychological roots of today's ubiquitous doomsday cultism
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Leon Festinger
was a prominent American social psychologist who originated the concept of “cognitive dissonance”. He is the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Festinger established some critical precepts that can help explain where we are today.
In a world of escalating and psychologically devastating doomsday-ism.
Prior to Festinger, “behaviorist” theories said that human behavior could be attributed simply to stimulus-response conditioning.
In other words, people operated mechanistically, forming attitudes based on objective factors.
Through his work at M.I.T. and elsewhere, Festinger proposed by contrast that
People actually depend on “social reality” to determine the subjective validity of their attitudes and opinions;
People look to their reference group to establish their “social reality”; and
An opinion or attitude is therefore valid to the extent that it is similar to that of the reference group.
In other words, people decide what they think based on what their group seem to be thinking.
If, for example, the group thinks it is suddenly imperative to stay in their homes, wear masks, disinfect vegetables, and inject untested substances, all simply to try to avoid an annual seasonal respiratory virus, then this becomes the “social reality”.
(OK, OK, let’s pile on. This paddleboarder was arrested for the crime of not wearing a mask while out on the ocean)
Mind control expert Jason Christoff provides fascinating etymology and an explanation of the subconscious mechanisms behind this “social reality” phenomenon:
(When he refers to “poison” he means everything from Pepsi and Macca’s to lipid nanoparticle C-19 countermeasures).
Festinger stressed the importance of studying real-life situations.
He practiced this principle by personally infiltrating a doomsday cult himself.
The result was a benchmark study entitled WHEN PROPHECY FAILS, which chronicles a doomsday cult awaiting the arrival of superior beings from the planet Clarion.
Festinger described why people fall for doomsday prophecies in the first place.
He also described what happens when those prophecies do not come true.
He coined the term “deviancy spiral" to denote the process whereby people turn to doomsday cults after repeatedly failing to find meaning in mainstream society.
Rather than abandoning their beliefs after failure, adherents actually increased their convictions.
This aligns with the findings above, since the group-created “social reality” insulates the believer from the social embarrassment of being wrong.
We can bear this in mind as we review today’s dominant doomsday cult.
The adherents to this cult believe that human activity has already somehow set in motion a planetary climate collapse.
True to form, they persist in this belief system despite the constant drumbeat of evidence, piling up over decades, that it is all just a big hoax:
November 1967, Salt Lake City Tribune: “It is already too late to avoid global famine from the coming Ice Age”.
April 1970, Boston Globe: “Air polution will obliterate the sun and cause a new Ice Age in the next decade”.
July 1971, The Washington Post: “The world has at most 50 years before the coming catastrophic Ice Age”.
October 1978, The New York Times: “An international team of experts says there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years”.
October 1979 (just one year later), same newspaper: "People in their infancy today will see the ice at the North Pole entirely melted away”.
May 1982, New York Times, citing the Head of the U.N. Environment Program: “The world faces an environmental catastrophe as complete as any nuclear holocaust by the year 2000”.
We could go on and on.
November 2007, New York Times, quoting the Head of the U.N. Climate Panel: “If there is no action before 2012, that is too late for humanity”.
Doomsday predictions were also made related to the Mayan calendar.
But the actual cause of the extinction of Mayan civilisation is worth noting here:
“The collapse of the civisation was because the non-productive members of the society, including the aristocracy and the priesthood, exhausted all of the resources”.
And we can also draw some relevant parallels to the analysis of Aum Shinrikyo.
This was a Japanese doomsday cult that carried out a deadly Tokyo subway poison gas attack in 1995.
12 of its members were later executed for their roles in the attack. But the analysis of the group concluded the following:
“Aum Shinrikyo should be understood not as a quasi-religious sect with a set of apocalyptic beliefs and a cadre of deluded followers…but rather just as a run-of-the-mill profit-making racketeering gang”.
We agree.
Lie down with dogs, get fleas,