Knowing... but Still Not Doing Anything About It?

Well-behaved excitement of a public holiday, in contrast with a stereotypical presentation of a scared and disturbed little girl scribbling unstoppably numbers over numbers. Knowing is part of the wide-audienced catastrophe movies which are so popular lately, mixing the invasion-stereotype with the strange-little-children-acting-spooky thriller-genre. Interesting enough, it brings some philosophy too into the whole thing, and this is what makes me feel entitled to try to read into it another story entirely.

My first point: why is this apocalyptic genre so well known and preferred lately? Of course, there was the end-of-the-world "prophecy" of the millennium, where everyone half expected to get abducted by a huge, bright and alien light while doing their last shopping for a happy new year, but since that never happened, nor did the sky crush over us, there must be some other reason for getting such nice little goosebumps all over our body when we hear of yet another movie coming out with a similar trailer.

According to my theory, apart from the well known fact that people enjoy being scared and afraid as long as they know that nothing actually could happen to them, so apart from this, we can't help noticing that there indeed exists a parallel discourse about the "near" end of the world as we know it, which also gives us the creeps, but looses its effect after leaving the premises where we heard it - just like the movies do. This narrative, however, comes from a quite different paradigm, one that is considered opposite the artistic or entertaining one, and was supposed to represent the only "real" and "objective" way of understanding our world. I'm talking about science, and the stories we hear more frequently every day about our way of life's and more importantly: our living environment's imminent doom and destruction in case of continuing our present lifestyle.

The philosophical line in the movie revolves around the question of determinism. This problem, however, isn't just of a philosophical or religious nature. One of my favourite scientists, the cell-biologist Dr Bruce Lipton developed a whole concept around how learning at school the (false) theory that genes control our bodies and lives, make us go through life thinking that we are predestined to certain (of course: unfavourable) things and can't, but more unfortunately: won't do anything about it.

So it might not hurt to take a second glance at things so natural to us as preferring movies which show humanity in danger of extinction from a force we can't fight (and unlike most of the similar movies, this one doesn't end in a "last warning" or an improbable but highly expected triumph of mankind) and accepting the message Knowing as well puts in front of us: we are perfectly contented by being determined to particular things, without ever trying to change it - and trying to understand the hidden meaning of this: are we really so dumb that we see these movies, feel the urge of warning but just "don't" understand the hint, or mainly just too comfy to act anything that would require changing our daily habits? Because there is a near peril, even if not threatened by aliens.