When Prophecy Fails: The Muellerites

In another proof of God's existence, I have just obtained the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It's about a millennarian group prophesying the end of the world in the early 1950s.

These researchers were investigating end-of-the-world groups when all of a sudden a report of an actual group prophesying the end of the world got reported in the paper. How could they get so lucky! Now they were not just researching second hand using other peoples' reports of historical end-of-the-world movements. Now they could get the straight scoop. They could get right into the middle of a millennarian group and see how it worked. And, most important, they could see what happened when the prophecy failed.

But first researchers Festinger, Riecken, and Schascter treat us to the story of an earlier group predicting the end of the world: the Millerites, who predicted the second coming of Christ in 1843, after the prophecy of William Miller, a New England farmer.

Let us call these Millerites the Muellerites.

The interest of the researchers in When Prophecy Fails is this: What happens after the predicted Second Coming of Christ or Day of Judgement comes and nothing happens? When, as we would say, the Mueller Report is published and No Collusion?

The answer is perfectly simple. The fervor of the Muellerites is doubled and redoubled. That's because they all talk to one another. They agree that, well, good old Bob just got the day wrong. Hey! Maybe it wasn't Collusion, but Obstruction. Yeah! That's it!

But now, you'll notice, we are onto the third possibility, offered by Our Nance, prophetess extraordinaire. It's "Cover-up." Yeah! That's it. At her age, it is easy to get confused by all those C-words and O-words. I know, 'cos I'm only 5 or 6 years younger than Speaker Nance.

What is going on here? The researchers tell us. What we have is "disconfirmation" and the disconfirmation produced "dissonance" in the minds of the believers: the dissonance between the predicted End of the Trump and the fact that he is still here!

[T]he central belief and its accompanying ideology are usually of crucial importance in the believers' lives and hence the dissonance is very strong -- and very painful to tolerate.

At some point the believers are going to have to abandon their beliefs. But not yet. So what happens in that the Muellerites talk to one another and tell each other that all educated and evolved people like themselves cannot be wrong. Why everybody who is anyone agrees that there must have been Collusion -- no, Obstruction. Wait! It's Cover-up! Yeah! That's it! Cover-up!

If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.

The point is that increased proselytizing after the disconfirmation of the prophecy puts off the evil day when the whole world of the Muellerites collapses in ruins.

So you can understand what is going on in Muellerville. We are in the early stages after the first disconfirmation of the prophecy. And so the Muellerites are doubling down.

Of course, when the original Mueller prophecy was disconfirmed back in 1843-4, the scoffers had a grand old time.

The world made merry over the old Prophet's predicament. The taunts and jeers of the "scoffers" were well nigh unbearable. If any of Mueller's followers walked abroad, they ran the gauntlet of merciless ridicule...

The rowdy element in the community would not leave them alone.

You'd have to say, in another proof of God's existence, that President Trump is just the "scoffer" or the "rowdy element" needed in our national hour of need.

And I am afraid that it is not likely that he is likely to leave Our Nance at peace in her dissonance. He is going to continue scoffing. The naughty boy.

But for the True Believers, there is still Climate Change. Only 12 years to go, says Prophetess AOC.

Fortunately, the Climate Change Believers always predict the End of the World about 10 years in the future. So the future never comes.