2012, Are You Worried?

The Mayans. Aren't they crazy, with their crazy creepy calendar? I remember one point, after I first learned about that calendar, that I actually worried about it. I mean, the Mayans were incredibly clever. How could they be wrong about the end of the world? Then I started thinking, what if they just got tired of carving centuries of dates into a big rock? It's not as if they needed the information that far ahead anyway. But, you know, there are always the people who believe it, and the predictions of Nostradamus, totally and completely. After all, it's not as if we've been looking for the meanings to these prophecies (and fitting events to them as necessary) for several decades, if not for several centuries.

In my mind, it "works" in the way that horoscopes and astrology work; everything is just specific enough to gain your trust, but vague enough that it's easy to find something that fits. People are so focused on finding patterns and attributing symbolism to random objects/events/whatever, that they end up with a lot of false positives. It really is like astrology; here we've attributed meaning to random clumps of stars and then divine how they influence our mundane lives in an effort to predict the future. It's not as though every culture sees the same clump of stars in the same way, so how could we possibly ascribe meaning and import to them?

Really, what worries me about 2012 is just people. Maybe it will be the end of the world, but the real question is: will it be because it was always going to happen, or will it have been a self-fulfilled prophecy? Is it some sort of divine will, or just people with itchy trigger fingers?

(P.S. Do you really trust the prophecies of a civilization which did not forsee their own demise?)