Man Punched in Face Pulls Gun On Line-Cutting Shopper...
Shots fired outside WALMART...
Shoppers smash through door at URBAN OUTFITTERS...
Customers run over in parking lot...
Woman busted after throwing merchandise...
Thousands storm VICTORIA'S SECRET...
VIDEO: Insane battle over phones...
Mayhem at Nebraska mall where 9 murdered in 2007...
Shoplifter tries to mace security guards...
Men Steal Boy's Shopping Bag Outside BED, BATH & BEYOND...
Heckler calls them zombies...
Ah, the pitter-patter of shoppers' feet. This is why the West is doomed.
Hypnotized by media, drugged to the teeth and having lost the last vestiges of social graces, the masses have become mindless consume-a-holics. They are incapable of reason and unable to haul themselves back from the precipice. Rather, like lemmings, they stomp on each other to be the first to leap off the cliff.
Our holy days, often referred to as holidays, are little more than crowbars prying money from our wallets, and we dutifully traipse along obliging the Masters of Commerce.
Black Friday, indeed.
There was a time when Man was seen as a creature of duality, both human and divine cohabiting in the same physical form. That concept became bastardized and secularized as being Man and Beast, reason and lust. Now, it seems, we have lost any concept of a higher self and spend our lives indulging our physical/bestial selves.
There is no longer the idea that we corporeal beings have been separated from the eternal by birth and must discipline our minds and bodies to reattain that higher state of consciousness. Rather, we are nothing but a morass of carnal lusts fighting over which one will be satiated today.
And we follow like hungry puppies. We justify the Masters' decision to throw away their Divine Selves by allowing them to dispose of ours. Misery loves company, and from the looks of things, we are obliging subjects.
We can view Black Friday and the spiritual depravity it places on display as being the ultimate expression of Calvinism. The central concept of Calvinism is predestination: that one is born saved or not, and nothing one does in life will affect that.
Thus, under the central tenets of Calvinism, we are free to indulge our basest desires and live with total abandon, since we are going to heaven or hell based on events that occured before our birth. We cannot obtain salvation through prayer, sacrifice and discipline.
Calvinism was considered heretical in 16th century Europe and its adherents fled to the New World in order to practice their 'faith'. Calvinism had a strong influence, along with a number of other heretical branches of Christianity, in the formation of the United States. Its vestiges can be seen everywhere today.
Later, Calvinism merged with New Thought movements to create the Prosperity Gospel, which results in the idea that we are predestined for heaven or hell and the one way we can tell whether we are among the saved is by the wealth we accumulate in our time on Earth.
Wrap this concept in the Catholic concept of the corporate body, where a group of humans gathered for a single purpose is superior to the individual, and you have the perfect storm of greed culminating in Black Friday.
Black Friday is aptly named since black is the absence of light and Friday is the last day of the week before Saturn-day. I leave it to the reader to investigate the Saturn cults, but suffice it to say that the orgy of lust we witnessed this last week was a perfect expression of Saturnalia.
Our society has devolved to this: we are not bound to good works and self-improvement because none of it will achieve salvation, which was determined before our birth. As a sign of god's love and favor, we amass wealth, thus gross consumption and the latest gee-gaws are an outward sign of our holiness. And finally, all of this is served by mega-corporations which are the physical embodiment of god on Earth through the focusing of groups of humans on single-minded causes. Therefore, by implication, the rulers of the corporations are god's vicars on Earth.
And so we claw and scratch and climb our way over our fellow humans to get that iPod or Galaxy or BlackBerry. We disembowel those who compete with us for god's favor, in the form of trinkets. We worship corporations and the foul beasts who sit atop them as the manifestation of god on Earth. And the Masters of Commerce laugh at us as we enrich them with our own greed, as surely this is a sign of their righteousness.
We are no longer spiritual creatures in physical form, but physical creatures with no need for redemption, discipline and moderation in order to remerge our bodies with our eternal selves.
The icing on this cake of greed is apocalyptism, which neutralizes anyone who may have a mind to change things. The idea that at some point, this mess will all come to a violent end and ultimately justify those who stood in opposition causes the few who see through the charade to stand down and leave everything to the Second Coming/Twelvth Imam/Meshiach. Thus, the parade of carnal delights proceeds unabated and unchallenged.
One thing I do agree with...it all will come to a violent end. Every society that has devolved to this point, for whatever reason and reasoning, has ultimately vanished into history. No society can survive when its adherents are nothing more than grasping animals seeking self-fulfillment in mindless consumption.
There is a natural limit of resources, but there is also a saturation point at which not another product can be sold. At some point all wealth will become so concentrated that a new system must be formed that redistributes everything equally once more.
This is an unavoidable cycle that we humans have been doomed to repeat throughout our history. There have been brief periods in which everyone seems to sober up a bit, usually following bloody and painful revolutions, but slowly we return to the pattern of destruction that has been our bane.
The only constant through all of this has been religion. This leads one to conclude that the seeds of our destruction are embedded in the very fabric of our faiths, especially those which depend on bloody sacrifice - or at least the ritualization of it.
Religion is the root of our divisiveness, both from each other and from our true nature. Until we realize this fact and finally rid ourselves of this insidious control mechanism, we will never be free. And being free doesn't mean having choices between brands and features, it means freedom from the desire for material wealth.
It will not be the end of the world, nor the end of humanity, only the end of our paradigm. And that end will not be pretty because it will involve the destruction of our entire weltanschauung, our world view. Everything we do and how we react are founded on a single paradigm. Its destruction means that most of humanity would be utterly lost and unable to recover.
Black Friday should be our wake up call. Thinking people must take heed. It is past time to take action by changing our educational systems, by rethinking what we want and why we want it. We can no longer afford to be complacent or depend on some outside force to set things right.
We have made our nest and it is up to us to clean it up or suffer the consequences.
