The conspiracy theory/superstition lover that I am, I’ve found myself speculating that 2012 could be the end of the United States as we know it. Don’t worry though, I’m not planning on trying to snooker anyone out of their hard-earned money with any of my dad-inspired recreational crackpot theories.
Ron Rosenbaum argues in a Slate.com article that talk about something significant occuring at the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012, is nothing more than a “silly scam”:
It’s a harmonic convergence all right, a harmonic convergence of ignorance and superstition—a tsunami of stupidity—worthy of the millennial cults of the 19th century most enjoyably anatomized in Leon Festinger’s famous study, When Prophecy Fails, a look at the way end-of-the-world cults grow even stronger after their prophet’s end-of-the-world date flies by and the world confoundingly continues to exist. (Festinger’s study gave rise to the term “cognitive dissonance.”)
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