If you believe it will be a good year for you personally, but a bad one for the world in general, you’re in good company.
Most of us think that, as pollster after pollster for 2014 has discovered.
We all apparently believe that ours and our kids’ lives will continue to improve throughout the next year, with occasional relapses, but overall get better.
This is a rational belief as people in general now live longer and have healthier and more fulfilled lives than our forebears did.
In other words, Playstations are more fun than being chased by woolly mammoths.
Yet despite all that, we don’t seem to believe that the world in general is getting any better.
We are haunted by doomsday scenarios – that the end is indeed nigh.
And who can blame us?
We are continually being told that we are killing the planet stone dead; the economy is in freefall; we’re all going to fry in a man-made hell – or failing that, we are going to freeze because a new ice age is imminent.
We’re told we’re long overdue for another asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs, or failing that, we’ll succumb to a mutant killer virus that is immune to antibiotics.
And if that fails, what about a crazed terrorist with an A-bomb?
Sadly, all this doomsday talk is not just some bearded hippie carrying an ‘end of the world’ placard.
It’s the establishment itself that’s scaring the hell out of us.
Proper Charlie
For example, do you remember the swine ‘flu epidemic that was going to wipe us out five years ago?
Turned out to be one of the biggest bogus threats of all time – and the gullible British Government spent a whopping billion pounds working out ways to stop imaginary swine from killing us.
Even royalty is not averse to doom-mongering.
Indeed, 55 months ago Prince Charles went on record proclaiming that we had less than 100 months to save the world.
So far, with 45 months to go, nothing he predicted has come true.
But if proved wrong, will he will say, ‘Hey sorry guys, I was speaking a load of cobblers’?
Yeah – dream on.
However, the Prince does not have a monopoly on being a proper Charlie.
Consider what Steven Guilbeault, the high-priest of Greenpeace, said in 2006. “Time is running out to deal with climate change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time.”
That would have been news to his predecessor Chris Rose, who said 10 years before that (1996): “Time is running out for the climate.”
Thus even the gurus of Greenpeace keep updating their 10 year plan when Gaia refuses to collapse in a heap.
The main reason the eco-handwringers keep rabbiting on about how Gaia is getting very, very cross is because there’s a lot of money to be made saying just that. No-one’s going to pay you to say we’re not going to fry or freeze in 2014.
If you want lucrative research grants, the key requirement is to be a prophet of doom.
So back to my original question: If you think 2014 is going to be better for you, you’re probably bang on target.
The global economy is picking up, you won’t fry in a man-made hellhole or freeze in an anthropogenic ice age, and you won’t have to flee woolly mammoths.
You probably won’t get sick, or if you do, medicine is advancing at such a rate you’ll most likely get better.
There’s soon to be a cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s, so there’s little fear of going senile.
But if you think the world is going to get worse, well … just consider Prince Charlie and how disappointed he’s going to be in 45 months time.
