This week began with news of the apocalypse, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the World Cup is over. On Monday morning, Washington’s insiders woke up to a “Playbook” newsletter citing another newsletter—this one for clients of the investment firm Southwest Securities—titled “A Weekend of Chaos.” “There is too much going on, which is too widespread and too serious to be ignored for long by the markets,” the newsletter said. “We have the constant threat of terrorism at our doorsteps.” On the Wall Street Journal’s front page a story sounded a similar alarm: “Obama Contends With Arc of Instability Unseen Since '70s.”

The surprising thing about this article wasn’t that it took two reporters to write. It was that it cited, as proof of this once-in-a-generation apocalypse, alarmist-in-chief John McCain: "Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), in a CNN interview Sunday, said the world is ‘in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime.’"

That’s a shocking statement for a man born in 1936—a man whose lifetime spanned the entirety of World War II and who was, let’s recall, a prisoner of war in Vietnam. As for that headline, let’s also recall all the unstable things that have happened since the 1970s: the Iran-Iraq War, Israel’s long fight over its borders, Lebanon’s civil war, the collapse of the Soviet Union (with its massive nuclear arsenal), the violent dissolution of a country named Yugoslavia, the end of apartheid, the genocide in Rwanda, the rise of China, the fall of Japan, the reign of the Taliban, the unraveling of Yemen and Pakistan, 9/11, the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the drug wars in Mexico and Colombia, and the Arab Spring, just to name a few.

Through all of that, America has remained intact and mostly healthy. And as for the assumed global consequences of all those events—a democratic Russia or Iraq, dirty nuclear weapons landing in our shopping malls—well, not very many of them have come to pass. What’s more, we’ve forgotten that we ever thought they were likely to happen. And yet, we continue, generation in, generation out, to watch the sky, sure that it is falling, and certain that we know exactly which way it’s going to fall.

Perpetual anticipation of the apocalypse is something of an American specialty. The U.S. was founded as an answer to the corruption and chaos of Europe. The Puritans believed that their “city on a hill” was the new Jerusalem. The idea that a small group of people have a unique access to the horrible truth, says Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton, “goes right back to the Book of Revelation.” These millenarian strains came to the fore in the First Great Awakening, when people believed that Christ would return to earth: first stop, America.