Good Morning and Merry Christmas Everyone and Happy Holidays in whatever way you all celebrate them!

Friends, yesterday we were discussing class mimicry. People have always thought of themselves as successful, largely to the extent that they could mimic the socioeconomic class just above themselves.

It seems to me that we see this in the burial customs of the ancient Egyptians. Concrete hopes and striving for literal immortality was a critical component of Egyptian civilization. Great care was taken to mummify the body and preserve the internal organs, so that after death the spirit could recognize and return to the body, reanimating it for use in the afterlife. The idea was that one could pick up where he left off with his life in the terrestial plane.

The tombs of the kings were, of course, the most elaborate as they were trying to reflect directly as possible, the glory of their gods. Private individuals did this depending upon their financial means. The kings strove for the gods, and other people strove to emulate those above them on the class scale.

All of them wanted to be as king-like as possible. The kings were trying to be as god-like as possible. Therefore the overarching purpose of Egyptian burial customs, on the total societal level is to be as god-like as possible. As we said last time, Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Man is the desire to become God."

This desire to become God is visible in the simple reality of the world market in black market goods (apparel, shoes, and the like) and in the more legitimate department store "knock off" brands of the high fashion seen on the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan. The idea, to the extent that one's credit limit allows, is to acquire various acoutrements, gadgets, to "talk a good game," in the way you describe your lifestyle to coworkers, casual acquaintances, and strangers, in order to: make yourself seem richer than you are; to make your life seem more interesting and fuller than it really is; and so on and so forth.

Part of this present economic crisis is associated with lax availability of easy credit. But to my way of thinking this is a convenient scapegoat for an ingrained human tendency - not irreversible, I hope, but deeply entrenched. By the way, I almost forgot to mention: what is the meaning of those social courses we used to hear so much about in the late eighties and nineties, that purported to instruct single young women in the art of attracting and "landing" a rich husband.

The idea is that she should present herself as more prosperous than she is, so as not to make the rich man uncomfortable. It is a part of anecdotal wisdom that the best way to get a job, or get a loan, or some other desired resources, is to paradoxically seem not to need these things.

But who are the modern pharaohs we follow or try to mimic today, this crisis in the political economy notwithstanding? Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, etc. It is they and people like them, to whom the idiomatic expression, "He has more money than God," is applied.

It is the representation of God as an economic competitor and rival. But we needn't go that far for our purposes.

Therefore, all of us, as we pursue consumerism, acquisition, and consumption, we are mimicking our modern financial and economic pharaohs, who are trying to mimic God; and so we are all trying to get more money than God. And in this way, again, at least in the financial and economic sphere, we realize the validity of Sartre's statement that "Man is the desire to become God."

If all of this is true, then what are we to make of the interdenominational "prosperity gospel" movement in American Christianity? I would refer you to an excellent book on this by Sarah Posner called "God's Profits."

But is the prosperity gospel really a distortion of Christianity? It certainly is not a distortion of human nature. By human nature I do not mean an eternal characteristic of the species, but rather a tendency in the human species that is nevertheless deeply ingrained, and has been for centuries, which is embodied in the idea that "Man is the desire to become God," in the ways we have been discussing.

To be continued

wingedcentaur