By Allen Myers
In March, much of the world was shocked by the suicides of a group of 39 people in California. The members of a small religious cult, they believed, not that they were ending their lives, but that they were being transported to a higher plane aboard a spaceship associated with the Hale-Bopp Comet.
This bizarre religious group attracted attention only because of the tragic end of its members. The belief that supernatural beings regularly intervene in human affairs is quite widespread.
According to a 1994 survey, 72% of people in the United States believe in angels and 65% in a devil; 79% believe in miracles. The same survey found that 27% believed in reincarnation and that 28% thought it possible to contact the dead.
I am not aware of similar surveys in Australia, but the results would probably not be qualitatively different; belief in angels might register a bit lower and belief in astrology, crystals and Tarot cards a bit higher.
Why are such beliefs so widespread among people who ought to know better? After all, we live in a society with a high average level of education, and in which science is continually finding rational explanations for phenomena that puzzled our ancestors, and for which they therefore invented supernatural causes.
One reason is that our scientific knowledge often appears quite limited when it comes to human affairs. Astronomers can describe events a million light years away and can reconstruct the beginning, and forecast the end, of the universe, but next year's price of cotton is a total mystery. It seems easier to provide everyone with access to the internet than to provide everyone with a job.
It's as though the rationality that we are capable of applies only to external matters, to things outside ourselves.
It's particularly in the human areas excluded from rationality that belief in the supernatural thrives. So, if you're poor in the midst of plenty, and there seems to be no rational reason for your predicament, why not blame "bad luck" or declare, "It's in the stars"?
In fact, whether our "luck" is good or bad, most of what happens to us seems largely outside our control — due to accident, "fate" or some supernatural force. So the question of why superstition flourishes becomes: why do we have so little control over what happens to us?
In a capitalist society, the element of accident is very real. What happens to us depends very much on how much money we have — that is, on something quite external to us. This determinant of our existence can, quite literally, be lost or found in the street.
Money is also what provides our connection with the rest of society.
In societies in which money economy is little developed, customs and tradition prescribe norms of behaviour: cooperation with other members of the group, or hospitality extended to strangers, for example.
But in a capitalist economy, no-one owes you any thing or action simply because you are Australian, a Presbyterian, a red head, a visitor or the descendant of a common ancestor. Your only claim on others is what you can pay for.
Money is both the means of our survival and the means of our "belonging" to the society we live in.
And for the big majority of us, even if we are adequately supplied with money at the moment, our ongoing ability to obtain it is largely outside our control. At any moment we can lose our job, and perhaps never find another one; indeed, we know that around 10% of those who want and need jobs can't find them, no matter what they do.
Human beings are above all social creatures. But in a society ruled by money, our social connections have been handed over to an external, accidental object. This is a major source of the deep-seated uncertainty and insecurity which drives so many of us to seek an illusory security in the supernatural — even when, like most of the US cult members, we are materially well off.
One of the Hale-Bopp suicides said in a video he left to explain his action: "Maybe they're crazy, for all I know. But I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I've been on this planet for 31 years and there's nothing here for me."
The society worthy of human beings he was looking for starts not with spaceships but with changing things on earth.