20 - Judgement

A Great Reckoning, Rapture, The Final Chapter

An enormous percentage of the world's population subscribes to one religion or another that calls for a Great Reckoning of some kind.

Even Flat Earthers believe in the day, some small amount of time in the future, when everybody finally comes around and realizes that the Earth has been flat the whole time and that they were right, all along.

One of the more humorous ones is the online cult of folks who've been snookered into buying Gamestop shares at many times their face value, who now believe in a vast and mythical market correction day of reckoning that will render all money on the planet moot while making them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The promise of "this will all turn around in our favor, not long from now", is extremely common in cults of all stripes.

It's again important to note that behind the Rider-Waite Tarot and its mishmash of gnostic nonsense and occult bugaboos, lies the Tarot of Marseilles, a deck of playing cards used by French Catholics: what this card depicts is judgement day.

At some point in the future, God himself, so the theology has it, is going to come down, fold up the gameboard and toss all of his pieces back into the box.

Like with most any weird cult reckonings, the date that this is going to happen is always not long, now. Even after thousands of years, the apocalypse is always just a handful of months away.

I can't imagine the effect on long-term decision making it has to assume that everything is going to wrap itself up neatly, on its own, within our lifetimes. I'd think we should check if people believe that before we let them hold public office.

So Judgement is "The End". The final boss. The high muckamuck. The climax. It's time for the story to wrap up and for all of the loose-ends to get tied up, before we put all of the pieces back into the box, and if we're going to feel like we got the most out of this experience, we want to see a grand finale to really cap it off.