December 21, 2012 - End of the world, as we know it

December 21, 2012 is gone and we are still here. Time for conspiracy theories people, here is mine. The Mayans were trying to predict the end, not of "the" world but of “their” world – meaning “their” civilization – by this date. Now as a person who does economic modeling and predictions for a living, I can tell how horribly wrong we can be in predicting. The Mayans were predicting the end of “their” world – how ambitious – and of course, how horribly wrong they turned out to be. I am sure they had a solid set of assumptions on their population growth, cultivable land and how their bankers will run wild when entrusted with self-regulation.  But, as Naseem Taleb would chuckle, the Mayans couldn’t have seen the barbarian-European black swans swimming down the ocean.

But why in Lord’s name would someone try to predict the end of their own civilization? I think – as part of my conspiracy theory – they believed that every civilization has a full-stop. The old way of living has to give way to new way of living. Old beliefs need to be drowned; new beliefs need to be crowned. There is an expiry date for every old way of living and beliefs i.e. a civilization. That expiry date, in case of Mayans December 21, 2012, signals the culmination of the great ideological battles and time to declare the new winners. I am uneducated on the ideological battles that Mayans were fighting, but I can illustrate a few examples from our times – racial discrimination in America; caste discrimination in India; discrimination against women in both. We know the winners – all we got to do is to accept the winners as our new way of living and beliefs – and we end the world, as we know it, and start a new world. At least, that’s what I think the Mayans thought when they predicted the end of "their" world (or maybe ours?) on December 21, 2012.