The First "End of the World" Scare
Let's give credit where credit is due. Maybe we spent the turn of the millennium freaking out over our computers and hoarding bottled water and canned goods and mechanical can openers, but at least we didn't go nuts like some people. After all, as the news media tells us, these millennial freakouts happen every thousand years. You may have heard during the Y2K panic that back in the year 999, the Christian faithful were so sure that Jesus was returning that they prayed obsessively, forgave debts, gave all their possessions away, pardoned criminals, and stopped tending their fields. Some even flocked to Jerusalem in anticipation of the return of Christ .
With all this hype, we'll be lucky if it isn't a bigger disappointment than the Star Wars prequels.
So while a few crazies today obsessively prepare for the apocalypse, we're not exactly shutting everything down in a blind panic as a society. Not like those dipshits back then.
The Reality:
European Christians were too busy with the day-to-day business of not starving to death to get caught up in an apocalypse-prepping panic. For one thing, they could barely agree on which year it was, so it's kind of hard to get worked up over the next round number on the calendar when you thought the fatal day had already passed a few years ago. For another, these people were always anticipating the return of Christ. It was kind of their thing, ever since John scribbled down some incoherent ramblings about horsemen of the apocalypse and a whore of Babylon.
His motivation is lost to time.
Which is why historians have been dismissing the notion of widespread panic at the last turn of the millennium for more than a hundred years now. No one went crazy. No one flocked to Jerusalem. People just went about their ordinary business of being dirty and hungry, maybe with an occasional look to the sky, just in case.
What's really interesting is how the rumors of collective millennial shit-losing got started in the first place. The stories actually began in 1605 when a Catholic cardinal mentioned the panic in his history of the church. Protestants later used the stories as evidence of how unenlightened and superstitious Catholics were. Finally, a politically motivated 19th century French historian embellished the accounts as a final indictment against the church. By the time he was done with the first millennial scare, a retroactive mass hysteria had seized all of religious Europe. We almost wish we could be here in a thousand years to see what our ancestors have to say about our handling of the year 2000.
Getty
"It's probably a good thing the robo-syphilis outbreak of 2016 killed most of 'em."