✨ okay SO
First, we need a quick and dirty definition: 'what is eschatology?' In very short terms, eschatology is a field of theological study concerned with, bluntly, endings. These endings can be metaphorical, literal, they can concern individual lives or phases of a life, countries or the world. Basically, when we talk about eschatology, we are talking about the eschaton: the final events of something. Most commonly, this is going to come up in Judeo-Christian conceptualizations of the End Times. So why does this interest us, you might ask? Well, because Christian eschatology leaks into a lot of the policy failures of the present day, even when it doesn't seem like that should be something that is happening.
So we've discussed what 'the eschaton' is. What does it actually mean? Bluntly, it means the end of the present world and the beginning of the next. In most conceptualizations of the final days, the 'next' is perceived as the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, wherein the faithful are rewarded with endless riches as the new masters of the world, and the unworthy, unfaithful, and heretical find their power upended. In all versions, there are usually a set of specific conditions set for how to identify the end of the world, a sort of road-map to the apocalypse. A LOT of Revelations is concerned with this. And there's a lot of theological debate, actually, about whether or not this already happened, with common postulates being the conversion of Rome to Christianity, the fall of the 'debased' western Roman Empire and the rise of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian(oh, so, so, SO many messianic comparisons does Justinian get), the Protestant Reformation itself... basically, anytime there's a major shift in the political and social authority of Christianity, somebody will probably proclaim the apocalypse is right down the road.
At its core, underpinning the idea of the eschaton is anxiety. It's an expression of doubt in the future, an expression that things are unsustainable as they are. And that's all well and good. A lot of faith relies on the belief that if you hold true, things will get better, that virtue and charity will pave the road to a kinder, gentler future. But what about people who get impatient, who feel it's not happening fast enough?
Well, then you get the idea of immanentizing the eschaton; that it is the job of the faithful to force the conditions of the end times, that by bringing about the material conditions of the end of the world, the new, better one will get here faster. This is where you get Christian doomsday cults, Dominionists, hardcore theocratic accelerationists, and all sorts of other nasty stuff. But it doesn't really stop there, because even secular groups in cultures where Christianity has been a dominant moral and spiritual framework are vulnerable to this kind of thinking. Which is where we get into the 'esoteric' part of this. I feel like I should provide an example, and in recent memory, I can think of no better one:
Memestocks/Stonks/the Ape community are an esoteric doomsday cult rooted in Christian eschatology structurally, even if they are fully-secularized dogmatically.
The entire THEORY they have of the Mother Of All Short Squeezes, wherein they'll crash the stock market and force the government to hand the reins of power over to them via poorly-understood legal loopholes, is an eschatological belief structure. And their practices(which, comically, amount to buying stock in bad companies), while rooted in profound misunderstandings of the stock market, are an explicit attempt to force the conditions of the end times. Their entire movement is rooted in narratives of sin and divine redemption; doubters are ostracized for pointing out the obvious failure modes of a philosophy that purports that Gamestop is going to somehow topple governments, while praise is heaped upon those who commit more of their resources and energy to maintaining the rituals of faith. Hodling is an explicit attempt to make things worse, in the hopes that if things get bad enough, it will hit a critical mass of badness that forces the world to change to one they'd like better. That same core anxiety, that the future is in doubt, that their hopes are being trampled, is still there. They've replaced the Beast and the Harlot straddling Babylon with hedge fund managers refusing to rebuy overinflated stock in worthless companies, but the fundamental scaffolding is definitively rooted in Christianized visions of the end times.
That they're incompetent, shortsighted, and gullible doesn't change that their beliefs are rooted in a warped, distorted view of biblical apocalypse. It's just that they care about this more overtly to the tune of dollars than they do to the tune of divine reckoning. This kind of stuff leaks into everything, because the very real anxieties about our modern world are a ripe market to peddle false hope, particularly false hope that doesn't really require believers do anything but send in their money. Megachurches operate in this same space, often with a distinctly fire-and-brimstone eschatological take on matters. Flat earthers, QAnon, it's all the same strain of apocalyptic faith.
We study these kinds of eschatology as a form of inoculation against them. These kinds of belief structures are more and more common, particularly due to the conditions of late-era capitalism, and in many cases capital has a vested interest in selling these beliefs back to us. It's why we urge people to be really wary of anyone selling a 'solution' to the complexity of the world that involves making the world less complex, because at the end of the day, anybody who thinks that the world would be better off if it ended? They're really, really, really not your friends.