In times of transition, when everything is in flux as uncertainty and apprehension prevail, bewildering the mind and rendering it incapable of processing the strange and uncanny hotchpotches popping up everywhere, superstition and fraud become widespread, with an exponential rise in the number of people claiming to see the unseen.
Religions, major turning points in history, were not frugal in their calls for caution against such phenomena. In the New Testament, Christ repeatedly warns his disciples and apostles to be wary of false prophets and the Antichrist, and he regularly urges believers to vigilantly question their aims and intentions. The message they bring to humanity does not come from God; indeed, it opposes God’s commands. Their message, even when it speaks to our desires and passions, yields nothing but “rotten fruit.”
Before Christianity, the Book of Kings relayed a story told by the prophet Micaiah in which God asks the divine counsel what should be done with the false prophets. The “Period Of The Judges” was notorious for spiritual chaos, with the people abandoning Yahweh and turning to idols, clinging to them as the neighboring pagan peoples did.
After Christianity, with Islam, false prophecies and false prophets are prohibited, as Prophet Muhammad is the “Seal of the Prophets.” Accordingly, Musaylima is characterized as “the Liar,” and so were the many others who shared his claims during the “Wars of Apostasy.”
All civilizations have witnessed similar phenomena. In sixteenth-century Florence, for example, Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola took hold after the Medici, architects of its great Renaissance, were expelled. Savonarola proclaimed to be a divine messenger and sought to turn the city into a “New Jerusalem,” burning- “purifying by fire”- books, manuscripts, paintings, jewelry, and every other precious object that he believed to reflect its owner’s hubris and pride.
Sabbatai Zevi was one such figure to emerge during the Ottoman era, in the seventeenth century, claiming to be the Messiah before eventually claiming to have converted to Islam. As for his “Dönmeh” community of followers, its rise coincided with critical challenges to the Ottoman state and the Inquisition in Europe, which led many Jews there to believe in the arrival of the “Messiah” they had been awaiting. As we know, Zevi and the Dönmeh later became prominent themes of an emergent Arab and Islamic antisemitism, offering an abundance of material for future conspiracy theories.
Russia witnessed the same; as the Tsarist order was crumbling, the charlatan mystic Grigori Rasputin declared himself a holy man and worked his way into the Romanov family by convincing that he was the doctor who could save their child and heir to the throne, Alexei, who had been suffering from hemophilia.
These are only a few cases of what mad eras can do to humanity and reason, and there are several reasons to think that we are currently living through one. Anticipation, both innocent and construed, collides with bizarre worlds like that of Elon Musk and other high-tech pioneers. No sooner does the bewilderment recede a little than another world- filthy, racist, and brimming with machismo, a world with Jeffrey Epstein and his island at the center of it- looms and raises questions about the intersections of politics, wealth, and public relations, as well as politics’ own relationship with morality. From a third vantage point, our own countries, the penchant for self-absolution and self-purification surges among those who insist that such things do not happen “here,” or “in our authentic culture,” only in “capitalist Western society.”
Before the wounds opened by the COVID-19 pandemic have had time to heal- wounds that exposed the fragility of humanity and undermined its reassurance in its capacities, and showing that it had globalized its fragilities faster than its strengths- our declining ability to distinguish truth from falsehood is only growing. After the emergence of a “post-truth” world in which social media fueled the falsification of facts, the artificial intelligence revolution, for all its virtues, is undermining our ability to make these distinctions further and entrenching the weaknesses we had previously accumulated, as well as perpetuating anxiety about the repercussions of scientific progress for human prosperity and happiness.
As we are repeatedly and relentlessly told that the Enlightenment did not enlighten and that modernity did not modernize, and amid escalating and increasingly perplexing questions around sexual identity, “scandals” and “deals,” crude racism, and reports of eugenic “enhancement” dominate global news cycles. As we individually sink into isolation, apocalyptic images of massacres in Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere weigh on the world’s chest as the number of casualties in the Russian–Ukrainian war approaches two million. As human helplessness becomes apparent in the face of impending desertification that threatens to leave vast swaths of our world uninhabitable, Europe, the jewel of the world, is rearming and raising military spending decades after it was thought to have turned that page and become an oasis of peace. With the expiry of New START, the last remaining treaty on nuclear arms restrictions between the United States and Russia, serious fears of an open-ended arms race return to center stage.
Accordingly, we are facing massive leaps backward that penetrate and hinder huge leaps forward as we enter a transition period whose riddles only conspiracy theories can claim to solve.
This seems like a long tunnel, and no light can be seen at the end of it. This is the contemporary state of our world, and it is awaiting false prophets and antichrists of every kind to crash down on it.
