The headline here says the world will end in 1843 — that’s Jesus you see up at the top of the page, literally returning to earth on some clouds to clean the world from sin.
Of course, it didn’t happen. This was the belief of the American Baptist preacher William Miller, whose evangelical movement convinced as many as 100,000 people to give up their worldly possessions in anticipation of the end times. Miller changed his prediction afterwards, keeping his followers’ hopes up with a new projected advent of Jesus, this time on October 22, 1844. Whoopsy, though. Again, no endtime.
Miller’s followers were devastated. They were so shattered (“I lay prostrate for two days without any pain – sick with disappointment,” wrote one Henry Emmons) that they named this moment “the Great Disappointment”.
In the world of psychology, cognitive dissonance is a theory developed by Leon Festiger in the 1950s to argue that we humans so yearn for internal psychological consistency that when our sense of how the world works is challenged, we will feel so much stress that we will seek to reduce it through extraordinary measures: for instance, rejecting the evidence of the new challenge, seeking the company of other people who also have their pre-challenged beliefs, or by explaining the challenging information in a new way.
Some witnesses to the Great Disappointment solved their cognitive dissonance (Jesus was supposed to end the world and bring about a new era) by arguing that Jesus *had* come, and was conducting a Divine Invesigation out of worldly view until it was time to really get the apocalypse in gear.
The propensity to alleviate the stress caused by cognitive dissonance is not relegated to distant religious movements from the mid-19th century, of course. Psychologists have been able to document it in all sorts of interactions. From equivocating about our dietary choices to de-prioritizing news we don’t want to hear, we all do this at some point or another. (Except me, of course. Hahaha.)
Source(s): _The Atlantic_, “The Role of Cognitive Dissinance in the Pandemic,” Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, July 12, 2020. Wikipedia, “Cognitive Dissonance” and the “Greay Dissapointment.” _Medium_, “The Great Dissappointment: 22 October 1844 Came and Went without the Second Coming,” by Nick Nielsen, March 30, 2019. _Time_, Kayla Webley, “The Millerites,” Friday May 20, 2011.
