Going berserk over 2000 AD
By Lisa Sabbage

WHILE some people are predicting the new millennium will herald an Armageddon in which airplanes fall out of the sky, others believe our biggest problem will be queuing for money.

There’s something about a round number that seems to drive ordinary men and women a little bit barmy. On the eve of the last millennium, some Europeans were so convinced the world was going to end in the year 1,000 AD that they burnt their crops, slaughtered their animals and prepared to die.

Now, as the year 2,000 fast approaches, similar examples of millennial madness are cropping up all over the world — not all of them as far-fetched as they sound.

A thousand years ago, prophets warned citizens to make ready for a great plague. Today scientists and computer programmers wrestle with the Y2K bug, a modern virus that may or may not disarm everything from stereos to elevators and cause airplanes to fall from the sky as the clock ticks over on 1 January, 2,000.

In the USA, near panic has set in among some people who believe that there will be such a catastrophe resulting from the failure of computers to recognise the year 2,000, that civilisation will temporarily come to an end.

These doomsayers fear that — like the anarchic hordes in Mad Max and Waterworld who fight over petrol and land — violent gangs will roam the world, prepared to kill in their search for food, water and shelter. Some shops in the Pacific Northwest of the US are already selling out of firearms and ammunition because of fears of such a collapse, and sales of honey have apparently gone through the roof as survivalists stock up on food to wait out possibe shortages.

In Britain, authorities have warned nurses working near the Millennium Dome in London to expect a spate of patients suffering from similar cases of end-of-the-century psychosis.

According to Nursing Times magazine, at least eight patients have already been admitted to hospitals in south-east London, where the Dome is situated, suffering from varying degrees of millennial madness.

One man believed he had swallowed the potentially dangerous millennium bug and that if he kept it in his body until 2,000, he would save millions of lives even though it might kill him.

"Round numbers are very poetic numbers," explains David Kessler, of the Centre for Millennial Studies. "They have power over imaginations."

The Romans, for example, made much of the completion of large units of time, as did the Nazis, and Shoko Asahara, the leader of Japan’s Aum Shrinrikyo sect, who taught his followers that a final war between Japan and America in 1997 would destroy the 20th century civilisation, after which Aum would rebuild Japan into a kingdom that would last 1,000 years.

Modern social scientists, too, often use a new decade, century or millennium as an opportunity for analysis. Ironically, this academic search for perspective is not dissimilar to the desire for meaning that often motivates the fanatics they study.

According to Ted Daniels, editor of the Millennial Prophecy Report, apocalyptic cults — like Aum Shrinrikyo and Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland — "tend to emerge when society is undergoing rapid change. No one knows what the future holds, so it is a breeding ground for nihilistic ideas.

"At such times people turn to the certainty that prophecy offers a place in the world, a meaning for life." At the last count in America alone, there were about 350 organisations that predict the new millennium will bring ‘some form of Armageddon’, says Daniels.

For the more rational among us, the year 2,000 may not herald the end of the world, but it may very well yield some more practical problems — like getting money out of the bank.

International banks expect the public to withdraw up to 50 per cent more money from cash machines over the holiday season leading up to the new year, and while they claim they have come to grips with the Y2K bug, they may not be able to cope with demand.

This could lead to queues and panic. Indeed, Britain’s Institute for Social Innovation is recommending that households have enough cash at home to last for three weeks.

"Our advice for the first six months of 2,000 is that people should have three weeks’ supply of food, cash, medicines and water," warns the group’s chairman Nicholas Albery. "Panic close to the time would be a disaster. But a bit of organised anxiety at this time might pay dividends."

He even says the merchants of doom and gloom may have a point — if a little exaggerated — but puts the chances of "social catastrophe" at 5 per cent. While a bad Millennium Bug experience probably won’t end the world, he says it could lead to a three-year recession, including a 50 per cent drop in the stock market, a fall in house prices and a rise in unemployment.

Many banks believe the biggest threat comes not from the Millenium Bug but from external failures, such as a cut in the electricity supply. Indeed, the Portman Building Society in England has taken the precaution of issuing all its branches with battery-operated lights and calculators.

However, just in case the bug does bite, banks are warning everyone to keep bank statements, cheque stubs, and all other records of their financial transactions.

"No one really knows," admits Don Cruickshank, head of the British government’s Action 2000 taskforce. "You can make up your own mind how to behave."

For employers, the problem may be a vanishing workforce as their employees celebrate the special occasion with overseas holidays. In London, for instance, bosses are being warned about a huge exodus of the city’s sizeable population of Australians and New Zealanders as they head home for the millennium.

The impact of such a mass evacuation could leave "a very big hole" in London’s market of temporary workers, says Gill Stewart of Tate Appointments where up to 35 per cent of the workforce are antipodeans. Panic over food, money and a vanishing workforce? The good news that if history repeats itself, we’ll all wake up on January 1 to nothing worse than a headache.