If you are the financial managers of a doomsday cult what you have to do is keep the punters permanently in expectation of the end.
Failures of prophecy are par for the course in the snake oil world of selling Armageddon and paradise. All humans when in trouble can activate an escape from their troubles through possession of the emotion, manufactured in the brain which we call HOPE.
People who have cried “Wolf!” ten times already can no longer be trusted.......”Those who saw 1914 will also see the end of the system of things”.............How many lives were thoroughly wasted on this tripe? How does a doomsday cult survive after its inevitable and repeated prophetic failures?
The most obvious emotion after a cult date failure would be disappointment and then regret but if you are stocked up with religious hope and the living examples of others sharing your (delusional) hope; you are buoyed up for hope is the antithesis of regret. Hope gives us the will to go on. Only through faith in the unreliable fairy tale book of the Bible and human HOPE can JWs continue to believe in the Watchtower edicts after a disastrous and public confirmation of false prophecy. Even after 1914, 1915, 1925 and 1975 by mind manipulation through relentless propaganda machinery; it was possible to convince the gullible and uneducated, contrary to all evidence and reason that your belief system comes from God, as the experience of the WTBTS shows.
What you do is keep bleating on that God will not disappoint his loyal ones, then demand: keep drinking the spiritual cool aid from HQ, stay within the fold and don’t stray or you will become bird food at Armageddon.
Promises hope and threats.
Humans, especially the poor, the uneducated and the distressed need hope, we all need hope! But the Watchtower marshals the needy to serve its own interests. The Orwellian Watchtower Doomsday-Cult supplies hope..............not the reality, no! Never does it deliver on that, but it supplies, at arm’s length a religious hope of immortal life eventually in a Watchtower controlled paradise.(Could it really be paradise then?)
It will cost you your personal choices of friends and even marriage partner, it will determine your life style, limit your education and probably your chance of a good career. You will shimmy around with a bunch of like minded zombies and you will all be deluded together in an opaque bubble but still you will have and share a delusional HOPE.
It appears that hope, however irrational can be orchestrated by religious cults to the point where people will sacrifice their very lives for this never- to- be- realized hope.
Isn’t this what the Watchtower doomsday cult does?