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Happy Lemmings Day! a.k.a Black Friday
Should we besmirch this plucky rodent’s escutcheon by associating Lemmings as the embodiment of greed and feral-consumerism known to a good chunk of the western world as ‘Black Friday’? It isn’t really fair (hey, just like capitalism) to play on the misunderstood ‘suicidal tendencies’ of the much maligned lemming. For the record:
“Lemmings have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they commit mass suicide when they migrate, by jumping off cliffs. It is in fact not a mass suicide but the result of their migratory behavior. Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many may drown if the body of water is so wide as to stretch their physical capability to the limit. This fact, combined with the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings, gave rise to the misconception.[6]“
The answer, dear friends, is of course we should – appropriating and exploiting nature is a zesty analog for capitalism and the consumer culture that feeds the satanic mills that are grinding our planet into dust. (Not enough sleep and too much coffee during this particular writing stint.)
It’s hard to believe, but sometimes your dear host finds it necessary to perch upon a perfectly precarious high horse in order to dispense the needed wisdom to the unwashed massess, the hoi polloi, the basket of deplorables, et cetera. I remember making a post about Black Friday expressing my disgust with scenes that seem to happen around this time of year.
As noted in the video above – we’re still mired in this terrible consumerist extravaganza. The problem is that, I’m not disgusted, but rather saddened by the whole, often gory, spectacle. The lengths people will go to, to get stuff, that they think will bring them happiness in their life.
Their association of “happiness = stuff” is no mere coincidence, but rather the endgame of a society, while drunk on capitalism, that measures success, status, and happiness with the amount of material goods acquired. Of course, the needs are manufactured (followed by the goods to meet those ‘needs’) so that the prospect of new shiny baubles will be the next ‘true’ indicator of having ‘made it’ in life. The process of chasing after material goods in the vainglorious pursuit of happiness is a nasty positive feedback loop that reduces citizens in a democratic state to mere consumers always hungry for their next fix and thus justifying the exploitative system that feeds them their drug.
I can’t help thinking that if we had a guaranteed minimum income and housing for everyone people might start to stray from the consumption paradigm. People might start renewing connections with others and engaging in pursuits that they actually want to do instead of what they have to do in their struggle to avoid the depredations of abject poverty.
We’ve lost reverence for the security and connectedness a strong community provides – and it is only way back from the abyss that we continue to create for ourselves.
Make no mistake – capitalism in its current incarnation requires the exploitation of people and resources to make it work. Exploiting people and natural resources inevitably leads to war (see Iraq for instance) and this in this zeal for feeding our doom-systems we often forget that eventually
Start with lemmings and end with Lord of the Rings references, you’ll only see it here at DWR (for better or worse).
Imagine if you would a salt shaker on your dinner table. Now imagine another shaker on your table, only filled with bullshit. Most of organized religion is this shaker filled with shit that people add (voluntary or not) to the various dishes and activities in their lives. Our happy thought experiment plays on the funny human expectations surrounding how we perceive concepts like ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’; the takeaway for our purposes is that it only takes a little bit of shit to ruin your meal or experience; if you still happen to be following the larger meta-thought that I’m artlessly crafting.
We can boil our fruitful thought experiment down even further and generalize. Take any situation, add shit religion to it, and surprisingly(?) it becomes markedly worse. Take for instance the phenomena in American society known as “Black Friday”. The mythological notion that come the last Friday in November businesses are finally out of the red and into the black ink in their ledgers and to celebrate their profitability they are going to sell stuff at wildly discounted prices to demonstrate their thanks to the public for purchasing their stuff.
Orgies of consumerism are nothing new in the purposefully designed consumer society, but if we take the shit-shaker of christian religion and add it to the mix we get this:
“Onward, Christian soldiers: Research shows the majority of states where shoppers are most likely to experience violence while shopping on Black Friday are located in the Bible Belt.
According to research recently released by Estately management the top ten states where people are most likely to get into fights over discounted deals on Black Friday are 1) Arkansas, 2) Tennessee, 3) Alabama, 4) Louisiana, 5) Missouri, 6) West Virginia, 7) Oklahoma, 8) Indiana, 9) Kansas, and 10) South Carolina.”
So in the home of the great Moral Majority you’re more likely to get into a fight for that last plasma screen TV at your local retailer. Now we shouldn’t read too too much into this unscientific poll, but the results hint at the notion that endorsing religious thought (aka delusional shit) makes you a more aggressive, more selfish, let’s just say it; less Christ-like, than people who don’t partake in magical beliefs.
Apparently, the religious table shakers come pre-loaded with a generous portion of irony as well.
[Source:Progressive Secular Humanist]
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