On the whole, Russians are perceived as pretty darned pessimistic. If you don’t believe me, just read some Dostoyevsky, Chekhov or Tolstoy. More contemporaneously, read Solzhenitsyn’s delightful The Gulag Archipelago. My point is, Russia never earned a reputation as home to the world’s Pollyanna. Seemingly, for Russians there is a bleak side and a bleaker side.
Consequently, when a job recruiting site in Russian recently conducted a survey and five percent of the respondents professed a belief that the so-called Maya-predicted doomsday will be in 2012, it wasn’t all that surprising. Of course, I think if the same survey was conducted in the U.S., Great Britain or all of Europe the five percent figure might hold true.
The website, Superjob.ru, issued this statement regarding their survey results: “The majority of Russians (16 percent) are optimistic and expect changes for the best. Our survey shows that there are half the number of pessimists, almost two times fewer at nine percent. The pessimists don’t expect anything good from 2012 and foresee a poorer quality of life and the rise of prices for goods and services.”
Five percent isn’t all that much, really. One in twenty. If we surveyed Americans I suspected we’d get five percent believing all sorts of nonsense such as Iraq attacked America on 9/11, Obama was born in Africa or Wall Street is full of honest and honorable financial folks.
Still, on the whole, I’d be willing to bet that more than five percent of the world population that is aware of the Maya doomsday scenario believes it’s true. I mean, David Hannum – not P.T. Barnum – said it: “There’s a sucker born every minutes.”
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