{"id":936,"date":"2013-03-07T05:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/the-village\/"},"modified":"2013-03-07T05:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T05:01:00","slug":"the-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-village\/","title":{"rendered":"The Village"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a late afternoon in the fall of 2004, my wife looked at me and said, “I think it’s time for a movie night!”\u00a0 Nothing else needed to be said, I was off.\u00a0 Just a few minutes later I found myself checking out a new thriller at the local Blockbuster Video store.\u00a0 It’s name, “The Village” by M. Night Shyamalan. What I knew of this Shyamalan thriller is that the setting was a late 19th century village whose inhabitants lived in continual fear of unknown creatures living in the woods just beyond the village.\u00a0 Out of fear, no one was allowed to leave.\u00a0 It was bizarre to say the least.\u00a0 After many twists and turns, a couple of screams, my wife digging her nails into my arm, the final scene was now upon us.\u00a0 I thought I knew how it was going to end.\u00a0 All of a sudden I was shocked.\u00a0 What seemed to be reality for the past two hours, was myth.<\/p>\n

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This past week while reading The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter I was struck by the concept of “commodity fetishism”<\/strong> which originated with Karl Marx.\u00a0 Commodity fetishism can best be described as understanding the market as a system of natural laws rather than understanding it is a set of relationships held between individuals.\u00a0 In the end, social relationships had become objectified and many workers subsequently became alienated from their own activity.<\/p>\n

Victims of Illusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prices and Wages Vary Randomly…<\/strong> In late September 2005 hurricane Rita was moving quickly through the Gulf of Mexico and projected to hit the east coast of Texas. Only a few weeks had passed since Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans, it was obvious that many were nervous.\u00a0 In fear of oil refineries being hit and destroyed in Texas gas prices soared.\u00a0 Our local Shell station had been selling gas at around $1.10<\/strong> per gallon, all of a sudden raised their prices to $3.90<\/strong>.\u00a0 Crazy!!! At the end of the week, Rita changed course, never hit Texas and gas prices have never gone down since.\u00a0 Prices and wages don’t vary randomly.\u00a0 Supply and demand, wars and often networks of relationships vary these two elements.<\/p>\n

Loss of Job Equals Bad Luck…<\/strong> In a merger based economy where streamline is better and bottom dollar and shareholders is all that matters.\u00a0 The loss of a job is often not just bad luck but rather a series of decisions made by other individuals who by choice have chosen to commodify people for the purpose of monetary gain.\u00a0 In hopes of squeezing just a little more profit margin out of the companies budget, those employed become dehumanized.\u00a0 Commodification is not bad luck, but rather the loss of humanity in the image of God.<\/p>\n

Market variations outside of control…<\/strong> As the Dow Jones soars one day and then plummets the next many begin to feel as if there is no controlling market variations. The assumption is that the market acts like natural law, rather than a series of interdependent global relationships. At the core of these relationships come decisions which are often alienated from those in which the decisions have the greatest impact upon.\u00a0 Variations are not random.\u00a0 Commodification, greed and often culture interplay is at the core.<\/p>\n

When Believing these Illusions, “No one is to blame”.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Capitalism had created a nation of clock watchers<\/strong>.\u00a0 Marx argued that the working classes were unwilling to engage in revolutionary politics because they were completely caught up in the nexus of false ideas.\u00a0 Commodity fethishism and alienated labor providing the ideology of capitalism.\u00a0 All of this was wrapped up in a bow by traditional Christian religious doctrine, which promised workers paradise in the afterlife, on the condition that they behaved themselves here and now. Thus religion was the “opiate”<\/strong> that kept the imposed suffering from becoming unendurable.\u00a0 Heath and Potter<\/p>\n

As I jumped off the couch, screaming “no way”!\u00a0 I couldn’t believe that everything I had just watched for the past two hours was simply an illusion. What seemed to be a nineteenth century village being bewitched by these evil creatures was a\u00a0 1970’s experiment by Edward Walker a Professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania. The setting was a wild life preserve just outside of Philadelphia where Walker after the murder of his father had convinced a few other couples to join him in “the idea”<\/strong>. What came of this idea is that a group of people were going to move into the middle of this preserve, live as if it were the late nineteens hundreds, self sustain and never be hurt again.\u00a0 Once children came along and further generations, the illusion became reality.<\/p>\n

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Are you living the illusion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why do you serve in full time ministry? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Are you just punching the clock, or do you try to leave the village?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a late afternoon in the fall of 2004, my wife looked at me and said, “I think it’s time for a movie night!”\u00a0 Nothing else needed to be said, I was off.\u00a0 Just a few minutes later I found myself checking out a new thriller at the local Blockbuster Video store.\u00a0 It’s name, “The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,114,363],"class_list":["post-936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-heath","tag-potter","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}