October, 1997 

Dear ICE Subscriber:

We are another month closer to the year 2000 than we were last month. What have you done this month to: (1) confirm my warning; (2) prepare for a complete social breakdown; (3) prepare for a major depression; (4) prepare for a major recession; (5) store up food; (6) check out the NBC fall line-up? I suspect that #6 has occupied more of most subscribers' attention than 1-5. Combined.

Day by day, I add more links to new documents relating to y2k on ICE's Web site: http://www.remnant.org There is no other y2k Web site anything like it in terms of analysis and detailed documentation. I spend 20 to 30 hours a week on this project, free of charge. Why? Because I am trying to save a few lives. Also, I am assembling a record for posterity. I want future historians to have answers to the question: "Why didn't anyone see this coming, since it was all so obvious?" I offer two answers: (1) at least one person did see it coming, and he was a Christian Reconstructionist; (2) being obvious is not the same thing as being compelling emotionally. Decisions are made more on the basis of emotion and prejudice, including habit, than they are in terms of logic and evidence.

Van Til used to say that defending Christianity before unbelievers is like tossing facts in front of a man standing in front of a bottomless pit. He uses a fact-removing shovel to toss each fact over his shoulder into the bottomless pit. "Give me another fact if you want me to believe the gospel." You keep tossing out more facts, and his shovel keeps moving. You cannot give him a sufficient number of facts to convince him. So it is with my Web site. Nevertheless, I keep adding more evidence. For those of you who believe me about the threat y2k poses, the Web site offers confirmation that you're doing the right things. You're moving ahead. Also, it offers support for your arguments with your wife.

Your wife doesn't want to believe this story, I would imagine. Therefore, she doesn't believe it. Here is what she does believe: (1) you will continue to be able to support her; (2) the people to whom you have delegated life-supporting services will be able to defend her home. The Millennium Bug calls both assumptions into question. Everything she has built up over the years on the two assumptions is now at risk. How much risk? Total.

You don't want to tell her: "If we just sit here, I will not be able to support you in the year 2000 — and maybe not by late 1999 if the banks close." You are admitting a personal weakness. But there is a good reason for your weakness: "The government(s) will not predictably be able to defend us in 2000." That suggestion is unthinkable, yet true. Take away the banks' computers, and what level of government above the county or small town will predictably be able to keep operating? How will they collect taxes?

To what extent has modern society become dependent on computers? I think it is so close to total that Western humanist civilization is threatened by the absence of two digits. This suggestion is inherently implausible, even for those specialists who labor on repairing the error. They assume that they will continue to be paid for their efforts. When, in 1999, they at last perceive that they are at huge legal risk if they fail to complete their tasks without error — an impossible assignment — and meanwhile bank runs are shutting down businesses, they will wisely walk away from their uncompleted y2k repair projects. This is another reason why the problem cannot be fixed.

Why now? Why computers? I have a suggestion.

The Great God Number

Ever since the Renaissance, humanists have assured us that their suggested alternatives to Christian civilization are superior to the ideal of Christendom. In every area of life, they have insisted, relying on human reason or human experience is far superior to relying on the Bible. The Bible, they say, is a document written for earlier ages by a series of forgers. We dare not rely on it for anything more than personal mystical illumination.

In the late seventeenth century, humanists began offering a new view of society based on the ability of men to pursue knowledge scientifically. Through mathematics, we have been told, scientists can build a better society. A new science of society would lead to improvements in society, they told us. This world can be transformed for the better through social science. What Newton did for physics, social scientists would soon do for men's understanding of man and his institutions. (See Louis I. Bredvold, Brave New World of the Enlightenment [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961], chapter 2.)

Mathematics, not the Bible, must serve as the foundation of this new knowledge. Why? Because mathematics is morally and religiously neutral. Math is understood by all men — well, anyway, by the elite who are good at math — whatever their religious views are. Thus, through mathematics, men can find ways of gaining agreement among warring religious groups. A unifying faith in number can replace divisive confessions.

This faith in the power of number is a variant of older forms of occultism: Pythagoreanism, numerology, kabbala, etc. But instead of access to knowledge and power through mystical illumination or secret initiation into the mysteries, men can now achieve knowledge and power through a skill that can be taught openly. Despite this openness, faith in number is still essentially magical. The slogan of magic — "as above, so below" — is the operating presupposition of science. The invisible, immeasurable links between man and nature are said to be mathematical. Man thinks mathematically; nature then obeys.

Is science really magical? In its present form, yes. Modern science relies on a presupposition: God did not create the world and does not sustain the world. Also, God did not make man in His image. Man's knowledge of mathematics and his understanding of nature's mathematical coherence are not dependent on a Creator God. Yet scientists cannot explain why the mathematical logic of the human mind so closely matches the interrelationships of the world outside of man's mind. Somehow, it just does. (See the article by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Science," Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics [1960], pp. 1-12.) Why gravity exists — attraction at a distance through a vacuum — no one can explain. Newton believed in creation. He explained gravity in terms of God's providence. Modern science does not. Modern man has substituted occultism — reliance on invisible forces that he cannot explain — for the worship of God. Thus, when modern science declares the power of number, it declares the power of it knows not what.

Modern man believes deeply in the power of number. He entrusts his life and his civilization to number in every area of life: airplanes, medical diagnosis instruments, military technology, telecommunications systems, electrical power grids, and so forth. He has no faith in that which cannot be measured. If something can't be counted, modern scientific man officially does not believe in its authority. In secret, he does believe in many things that cannot be counted, but not in public. This is why P. A. Sorokin called our culture sensate culture. If something is beyond touch or number, it has no authority.

Scientific cause and effect is seen as numerical — not caused by number but expressible by number. This faith has filtered down from the realm of astronomy to the world of society. The daily change in the number known as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more space devoted to it in American newspapers than space devoted to the world of the church. Statistics has replaced liturgy as man's source of meaning.

Twentieth-century society has worshipped the great god number far more fervently than it has worshipped the God of the Bible. This society's faith was summed up by that master of applied statistics, Josef Stalin: "How many divisions does the Pope have?" (If he never said this, it nevertheless sounds as though he would have.)

Number supposedly offers wealth for all. Investors today are sleepwalking in a magical world, a world of supposedly assured profits, worry-free investing, and widely assumed safety, a world in which all you have to do to become a millionaire is buy and hold stock market mutual fund shares. Consider the words of an October 9, 1995, Wall Street Journal advertisement for a computer software product they're selling. The ad worked. The Journal has continued to run it, indicating that it makes money. The headline announced:

How To Retire As A Millionaire
You can do it — if you start early and "plan ahead."

When the supposedly sophisticated readers of the most widely read daily newspaper in America are seriously expected to send in money to buy a piece of software because they have been told that becoming a millionaire is easy, that by simply investing their money on a regular basis, they will actually become rich, we are in the final phase of a dream. They have never considered God's warning: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:17-18).

Sophisticated investors scorn the poor man who buys a lottery ticket. "It's a game for people who are bad at math." It is indeed, but it is a game that offers no more preposterous a hope than the dream of automatic wealth for all through mutual fund investing: "Buy, hold, and reinvest the dividends. At 10% per annum, you'll die rich." You will indeed, if you can find a way to generate 10% dividends after taxes. But in a world where 3% per annum economic growth is the norm, there is no way for everyone to earn 10% per annum after taxes, long term. Millions of investors have rejected math — the impossibility of 10% a year after taxes — in the name of math: automatic wealth for all. They have chosen to live in a fantasy world. They buy computer software that reaffirms their faith.

Another God That Fails

The death of the great god number is fast approaching. His covenant is about to be undermined by a massive breakdown in the ability of our wealth-producing computers to count. Men have imputed sovereignty to number. They have delegated to counting machines the operations of the social systems that keep them alive. They have entrusted their lives to a priesthood of programmers in cubicles who have written new code and revised old code on the assumption that 99 will somehow never roll over to 00.

The day of reckoning is also fast approaching. It cannot be delayed. For the first time in the history of man, we can predict a world-changing event exactly. We can date the breakdown. We can see what's coming. Why? Because this number is public: 2000. I have been called Nostradamus on one Internet forum for programmers. Peter de Jager, who wrote the original "Doomsday" essay in 1993, is called Nostrdamus. But Nostradamus was a mumbler. The world of numerology, from the Pythagorean circle to the Zohar, was a matter of initiation. Modern number worship has been public; therefore, its death will be public.

Men will not give up their faith in number easily. They find themselves unable to envision at least the outline of what is about to come upon them. They laugh or shrug it off or change the subject. But their indifference will not delay the day of reckoning by one second. It does, however, make it easier for those of us who see what's coming to get out of the way. When Dagon's statue falls, be out of its way.

Sincerely,