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When this is all said and done, a case study similar to this one could be really fascinating. The Qultists embody a near-textbook definition of cognitive dissonance. We could learn a lot from them.

Shits and giggles?

Or...suppose you wanted to conduct the ultimate sociological and psychological experiment on the nature of belief, but said experiment was unethical as all hell. In 1950s, sociologist Leon Festinger and some of his students infiltrated a Chicago-area UFO cult that had made some very specific predictions regarding an imminent apocalypse. Festinger wanted to observe firsthand what would happen to the true believers when their prediction absolutely and unequivocally failed. The result of this experiment was the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance which today forms the foundation of the study of pathological belief.

However, Festinger and his students were hampered in one important respect - they absolutely could not do anything to actively discourage or encourage the believers in any way, since that would obviously have invalidated the experiment. They had to walk a fine line between feigning interest while being as passive as possible.

Suppose someone wanted to repeat that experiment, but this time be in complete control of all aspects. How would they go about it? Well, they could start by picking a group of disaffected people who were also renowned for their intense gullibility and profound inability to reason logically. The alt-right/nationalist/racist conspiracy crowd fit that bill pretty much perfectly. Second, this person would then weave a conspiracy theory that tied together all the disparate threads that the alt-right delight in gathering, while at the same time perfectly meshing with their alternative reality. Essentially, you would tell them that everything they believed was in fact true, and that those people who had been responsible for humiliating and disparaging the alt-right for years were about to get their just desserts. The experimenter would then throw out a random collection of vague and mostly gibberish statements, secure in the knowledge that the notorious alt-right propensity for aberrant salience would allow them to fill in the blanks with whatever incredibly asinine thoughts happened to be floating around their fevered imaginations.

The experimenter would carry on this baiting game for a long as possible, allowing any number of 'predictions' to fail spectacularly. He would then carefully observe the results, note the circumstances under which the marks became disaffected, as well as those lies and disconfirmations that nevertheless retained true believers. The aim, of course, would be to see exactly how long a true believer could remain a believer, despite literally every event and happenstance running counter to their expectations and predictions.

This would be by far the most important inquiry into the nature of belief so far undertaken...but also by far the most unethical.

But it's probably just for shits and giggles.

History does seem to repeat for sure.

Sometimes I think we are making progress on this issue. Then I remember this very old book:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Prophecy-Fails-Psychological-Destruction/dp/0061311324

We don't know exactly how his immediate followers reacted, but based on the gospel traditions that were later written it's clear that they struggled with it.

We can see already in gMatthew and gLuke how the rhetoric shifts and changes to “pushback” both the imminence and tone of this Doomsday.

Eventually early Christians postponed it into a hazy, abstracted event at some point somewhen. All doomsday scenarios in history suffer the same fate; see: <em>When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World.</em>

Unfortunately, allowing the Day of Judgement to become “unstuck” from its original cultural context has the noxious side-effect of letting it crop up randomly throughout history as a nutjob-magnet, leading to <em>real-world harm</em> pretty much every time it rears its ugly head.

> Is this an unfulfilled prophecy?

Depends on what kind of Christian you are. This question is more of a theological question than a historical one. I mean it can be a historical question, but the answer wouldn't satisfy most people—Prophecies, within a historical-critical analysis, are outside the bounds of methodological naturalism—i.e.: They're not part of any equation, i.e.: Un-ask the question.

This book made things a lot clearer for me, and explained some of the weirder aspects of Cognitive Dissonance. The book was written by Professor Leon Festinger who, along with some of his students, infiltrated a UFO doomsday cult in Chicago in the 50s.

The cult leader, a charismatic woman by the name of Dorothy Martin had given a specific date and time for the arrival of the Apocalypse. Clearly, it didn't happen. Festinger observed that instead of abandoning the group, the True Believers clung even more strongly to their beliefs, even after she made a second failed prediction.

This was the first formal observation of the so-called 'backfire effect'. When presented with incontrovertible evidence that their beliefs are wrong, true believers will simply double down and cling even more tightly to their beliefs. Often, the disconfirming evidence becomes incorporated into the conspiracy itself.

An excellent modern example are the so-called 'Birthers', those who believe that Obama was born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be President. When he presented both his short and long form birth certificates, the Birthers simply doubled down and claimed that they were forgeries. Articles written by self-appointed amateur document examiners pointed to all manner of 'anomalies' in the PDF, such as the fact that it contained layers, evidence of kerning, letters and other elements such as check boxes that were identical down to the pixel level (something that shouldn't happen on a scanned document), etc.

Eventually, it was demonstrated that nearly all of these artifacts were a result of Mixed Raster Compression applied by the Xerox scanner, and that a scan of any similar document, with the same compression settings, would produce the exact same artifacts. So what happened? Suddenly, the conspiracy widened to include Xerox and the researchers who performed the experiments.

Cognitive Dissonance, according to our modern understanding, arises out of a conflict between our older (evolutionary speaking) part of the brain and our neo-cortex. The older limbic system, including the amygdala is not capable of being self-fooled. It exists to maximize our chances of survival, and, as such, must take the real world at face value. Meanwhile, the neo-cortex is capable of abstract thought, and is also capable of fooling itself - to a degree. True Believers have evolved several strategies for dealing with dissonance. One of the most obvious is to avoid, consciously or unconsciously, any situation that might threaten their beliefs - which perfectly explains why they will perform no real experiments. Subconsciously, they know that there is a high probability that their beliefs are wrong, and that fact terrifies them.

When prophecy fails. A highly entertaining book that also introduces Festinger's theory of Congnitive Dissonance.

If you like that, you'll also like this one.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Prophecy-Fails-Psychological-Destruction/dp/0061311324