A Culture of Vamparism

The original Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978, and critics at the time hailed it as, not only a wonderful horror movie, but also a great criticism of America's growing consumer culture. Today we often we refer to the American masses as zombies, living purposeless meaningless lives and doing nothing but consume.  I'd like to expand on that idea. I believe we live in an age of  the vampire.

Vampires, or creatures like vampires, are an almost universal item of lore throughout all human cultures throughout all our epochs.  The current, and most popular idea, of the vampire stems from the European tradition, specifically the Balkans, and that tradition expressed vampires as the most terrifying thing on the planet. Zombies are scary, if only because it entails massive societal breakdown, but they do not hold a candle to vampires. Zombies are not evil,  they are mindless and something cannot be evil if it is unaware of it's actions, and the latest iteration notwithstanding, cumbersomly slow, and only pose a threat in large numbers, and can be overcome rather easily. The real theme of zombie movies is what humans do to each other in an impossible situation. You never see zombies infiltrating a compound, city, or settlement that has it's act together and is ready. You see zombies where you see a broken dysfunctional society. That is the threat of zombies, nothing more, nothing less. However, Vampires are a different being entirely. They are the very embodiment of evil, they know what they do, they simply don't care.

It took the very things wonderful and sacred about the christian faith and turned it on its head. Whereas God, and Jesus, promised eternal life that can be freely accepted, vampires forced eternal life, and damnation on their victims, doomed to forever wander the earth a prisoner to their unholy desires. Where consuming the body and blood of Christ, in the Catholic tradition, was symbolic of becoming one with God and gaining spiritual strength, vamprisim reflects the opposite. A victim of a vampire becomes weaker, not stronger, and their blood is taken, not given. They could command werewolves, possessed super human strength, preyed on the young and innocent, and even worse, doomed the victim to eternal damnation. They robbed you of your day, your life, and your very salvation. To the peasants of the Balkans there was no more terrifying than a vampire.

It is something that the west has forgotten about vampires, and perhaps it is fitting that a morally corrupt society would turn pure evil into the sexual fantasies of middle aged women and teenage girls, they do not 'sparkle', they do not agonize, they do not care. They only live to feed their perverse and insatiable desires. And that is where we are now, feeding off each other. Aurini is right about narcissism and the Captain is right about shamming, they are all products of the vampiric culture we have today. 

Look at any part of our society, men and women's relations, civil rights, entitlements, corporate welfare, even popular culture, and you see the manifestations of a vampiric culture.  Harlots, sluts, and women with no scruples use 'nice' guys as emotional tampons, fuck men who would have been losers in any other age, rob them of their riches in divorce court, or even worse, force them to pay for bastard spawn.  In return you have the degenerate men of society using psychology and dark triad traits to seduce and use women, many of those women are the sluts and will garner no sympathy as they wail alone in their 40's, but there also many decent girls, whose only crime is being born in an age of advice contrary to the human condition, and with their naivete, have their hearts broken and ruined. Even the men's rights movement has become nothing more than a vampiric movement itself. Rather than seek to restore man's proper place, and the societal respect for manly virtue, they seek to sit at the table of the victim, even though they will forever be denied the place they seek.

We now have an entitlement system that consumes us. The producers are sucked dry, I am not a rich man, not even close, but my own federal tax burden is 27% of my gross income and that does not include the additional burden I pay in sales taxes in my home state, I can only imagine the sucking sound the job creators hear every day they wake from their slumber. We have the government, all too gladly, taking the place of fathers and enabling the creation of baby mommas. Their damaged progeny often become wards of the state, which costs us even more money. We have the old sucking future earnings from the young and the young mortgaging their futures so they can extend their adolescence and when the check comes due they cry foul.

Businesses, rather than focus their time creating products and wealth, now have to contend with a myriad of obscure regulations. Commerce is no longer about production, but about nuzzling up against the government teet like a new born cafe and sucking away with abandon.  We have multi-national corporations that use lobby groups to block out their competition and lower their tax burdens. We have non-profit organizations that do nothing but seek government handouts. We have entire industries that only exist because the government funnels money, which they do not have, to ensure their existence.

The analogies are endless. Find any aspect of society and you will most likely see, if you look hard enough, evidence of how our degenerate culture has turned it on it's face and perverted it. Every time I think about our current society I imagine something right out of Dante's Inferno. I see a tangle of bodies, intertwined with their fangs biting into the flesh of their neighbor. Frantically, they are forever sucking blood in efforts to try and counteract those who are sucking their very life blood from their flesh, as they suck blood drips out of their orifices, they gourge themselves on the blood of their neighbor, and all the while it is for naught. They continue to shrivel to nothing. Around that jumbled mass of intertwined bodies are screwtapian demons dancing and laughing as they scoop up the blood oozing from the body pile. What is most insidious, and terrible, is that we are all vampires now, we do not get a say in the matter. Society has now been organized that you must become a participant, short of retiring to the wilderness and becoming totally self sufficient, you have no choice.

It certainly seems hopeless but a day will come when no more blood can be extracted, when the last drop has been collected, and the buckets will run empty. On that day the laughing demons will wail and gnash their teeth. Some of them, their desire for blood so insatiable, will turn on their fellow demons and try to take their blood from them. It is on that day that we might be able to build anew and we relearn the wisdom of our forefathers. Until then we must steel ourselves for the vampiric culture that we now live in.