The desire to end the world

TL;DR: Popularity of the movies about apocalypses tell us that the end of the world is a very attractive idea. There can be several psychological explanations for this unconscious desire. This increases x-risks.There are many movies about the end of the world. While most end well, they are in some sense similar to stories about serial killers: a suppressed desire is acted out in symbolic form.Myths about the end of the world exist in all regions of the world. Note that there is a difference between the desire to end the world and cognitive biases in estimating its risk.While the desire itself is mostly fulfilled via art and literature, it may affect the behavior of some people. Existential terrorists are possible (some sects), but more interesting are the unconscious changes in behavior that can lead a scientist to perform a dangerous experiment, such as gain-of-function research.There is also a desire to create self-evolving agents, possibly related to the instinct of procreation, which becomes especially dangerous when combined with the desire to end the world. Human interest in gain-of-function research and in recursively self-improving AI are manifestations of it. Recall ChaosGPT, which was one of the first looped agents and was created with the explicit goal of destroying the world.There are several sources of the desire to end the world:• Generalized but suppressed aggression (for example, I hated my kindergarten and dreamed that a nuclear war would start and destroy it) — a general dissatisfaction with the whole world, my place in it, and how things work.• Similarly, suicidal thoughts can generalize into the desire to end the world.• Sadism and the "pleasure of killing" can also generalize into world-destroying ideation.• The desire for world transformation — the dancing Shiva, the myth of the deluge, and so on, as well as socialist ideas about revolution.Desire to save the world and the feeling of self-importanceThe desire to save the world (the opposite of