Doomsday in the Golden State

It all begins very swiftly in the glorious late-afternoon California sunshine. A short time after the earth starts to shudder, the huge, 20,000-sq.-mi. land mass west of the San Andreas fault wrenches itself free from the continent. San Francisco is quickly reduced to piles of rubble, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges col lapse, skyscrapers topple like children's blocks, the freeways crumple into bent, twisted auto graveyards. The lush Imperial and San Joaquin valleys are in undated by floods unlike anything since the days of the Ark. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego all disappear beneath the rampaging Pacific. More than 15 million people die in California's Great Earthquake--one of the worst natural calamities in the history of man.

It sounds like the scenario for a low-budget sci-fi flick, but thousands of Californians now actually believe that these horrible events will soon happen. For months, astrologers, fundamentalist preachers, telepathists, clairvoyants and assorted mystics have been predicting the imminent demise of California by a giant earthquake; many of them are convinced that doomsday will occur some time this month.

Where Can We Go? Last week doomsday talk reached fever pitch. Disk jockeys were spinning a hit calypso tune called Day After Day, which asks: "Where can we go when there's no San Francisco?" A book called The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, which gives a jolt-by-jolt preview of the disaster, was a bestseller.

So was a large gold, black and orange poster showing the city being swallowed up by earth and sea. Convinced that California is a den of iniquity that is overdue for divine retribution, a few apocalyptic preachers have already led hundreds of their disciples out of the state (TIME, Sept. 13). A telepathic organization called the Fellowship of the Ancient Mind has solemnly applied to Los Angeles officials for a salvage permit in order to rescue art works from the ruins after the Ultimate Quake. For the first time in years, civil defense officials report a run on survival kits, consisting of first-aid pamphlets and instructions about what to do in case of fires, floods or earthquakes.

Naturally, the vast majority of Californians are treating the doomsday talk as a huge, macabre joke, but the fears of the gloomy visionaries are not entirely without justification. Seismologists say that California has been long overdue for a major earthquake, although a fissure that would split the state in two along the length of the 600-mile San Andreas fault is in their opinion inconceivable. Nor, they add, can anyone predict the time, place or magnitude of the quake with absolute certitude. In fact, one of the quake dates predicted by soothsayers, April 4, passed last week without a tremor. But neither scientific reassurances nor disappointments have much impact on the true believers. When radio stations reported that noted Caltech Seismologist Charles Richter was leaving the state in April, disaster rumors swelled anew--until Richter explained that he was only going away for a few days to attend a scientific meeting.

California's psychiatrists are not surprised by the spread of millenarian fantasies. They have long been accustomed to dealing with their state's peculiar predilection for the occult and mysterious--a phenomenon that they attribute in part to the rootless, often unstable quality of life in a society largely composed of newcomers. "There is a kind of apocalyptic quality to the anxiety here," says Los Angeles Psychologist Harvey Ross.

Measure of Comfort. In this particular instance, the anxiety that exists in every human psyche has, and in certain gloomy minds, become focused on the earthquake predictions. "To believe in the imminence of such a disaster," says Dr. Edward Stainbrook, psychiatry department chairman of the University of Southern California-County Medical Center, "is to localize this free-floating anxiety. For the people who live with the vague notion that there's danger around, it is a relief for them to be able to put this dread onto the possibility of a natural catastrophe."

Not only does this provide the worried with a measure of comfort--they are able to trace their anxieties to a single, comprehensible source--but they also feel a certain brotherhood with others who share their psychological problems. This dual need is especially evident among the young, which accounts in part for the participation of many hippies in occult and mystical movements. What if the earthquake fears prove unfounded? That is of no real importance to those who fear impending doom, argues Beverly Hills Psychologist Leonard Olinger. "None of the believers is really dismayed when his fears do not materialize. It's the will to believe that he's really after."

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