INDIVIDUALISM VS. COLLECTIVISM: the bad acid-like trip I experienced during the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show

Let’s face it: the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show, performed by “The Weeknd”, was creepy as all hell. There were dark angels with red eyes falling from the sky, pentagrams on the stage, guitarists wearing demonic masks with devil horns, dancers with gauzed face-masks that made them look like burn victims and creepy subliminal messages in the background that said, “touch,” “enough,” “voice,” “you” and “alone”. Never before has a Super Bowl halftime show been so in-your-face with satanic imagery. In fact, it was as in-your-face as ever. I mean, why are we not talking about this, at least maybe a little bit? The Super Bowl checked all the PC boxes, what with all its racial diversity and honoring of the frontline medical workers and what-have-you…but, HELLO, what about the elephant in the stadium?! The giant satanic ritual that was the halftime show! What’s THAT all about? We’re just going to let that slide because the Super Bowl checked all other politically-correct boxes?

Sorry, I’m already getting a little excited here.

And, also, with all of the above being said, I’d be very dishonest, not to mention fake with my outrage, if I didn’t admit that I found a lot of the show very cool-looking—all the complex lighting designs, the synchronous dancing choreography etc. I’m not really sure what that says about the state of my soul—when I’m genuinely impressed by a show that’s so dark—but maybe I ought to visit the local church and douse myself with holy water as soon as possible. Well, shit, maybe it makes sense, though: the devil has a way of mesmerizing and hypnotizing you with his powers. He uses all the bright lights and the spectacular art design and the catchy music (I literally haven’t been able to get friggin’ Weeknd’s song “Blinding Lights” out of my head for the past 48 hours) to seduce you…

But, alas, I’m already drifting off into a tangent here. Let’s get back on track.

So, ok, by the time I got to the finale of the halftime show, I began to almost trip out completely, almost like I had dropped some bad acid, only I didn’t. I saw all the dancers, dancing in unison, with masks over their mouths and gauze on their face. What came to me was not a vision of the future per se, but a vision of a possible future, a version of the future that “dark forces” would like to see. What do I mean by “dark forces”? Well, seeing that the halftime show was filled with satanic symbolism, I guess you might say the dark forces are opposite of the big guy in the sky. Let’s call him the big guy in the underworld, the king of h-e-double-hockey-sticks. But if we want to put this into more “physical world” terms, I guess what I saw in that finale was a vision of a communist society where everybody is masked, no longer has a voice and no longer has an individual identity. Instead of living with personal liberty, people are “dancing” in unison with one another. There is no longer any individual; there is just a face-less, voice-less collective of conformity.

Now, some may call me overly paranoid or borderline-insane (wouldn’t be the first time), but I do see this communist agenda potentially being imposed on us right at this very moment. Let me be clear that I’m by no means “anti-mask” and, for cry eye, I appreciate the power of the COVID virus, but it’s almost like everybody being mandated to wear a mask in public is symbolic of something larger. It’s like a dehumanizing shackle that takes away both our individual identity and our individual liberty and turns us into a collective. In other words, the mask mandate is symbolic of communism being forced upon us, albeit all done with the justification of protecting us from a virus, but that’s what it seems to be: an assault of communism.

So, it’s almost like there is a struggle taking place right now, between what America has always been about—individualism—and what “darker forces” want America to become: a dehumanized collective of robots dancing in unison with each other, which is the vision I experienced during the finale of the halftime show. Throw in big government telling us what we can and cannot do all the time, the ravenous “cancel culture” and the unprecedented amounts of mass censorship we’ve been witnessing these days and what we have is an epic struggle between human liberty vs. human slavery, basically.

Am I reading too far into all this? Possibly. But think about it: once we get the COVID virus under control, will we just go back to our old ways of liberty and individualism? Or has the real intention been to basically reprogram us into thinking individualism is selfish and collectivism is not just selfless but noble?

To put this another way, the COVID virus has essentially triggered a major identity crisis in America. What we’ve been grappling with is how far do we sacrifice our own personal liberty for the sake of the collective? Where is the line in the sand that we won’t cross? When do we say enough is enough? These are tough questions because the virus is, in fact, real and serious. But what if, after two or three years, we suddenly wake up and realize America is more or less dead? Personal liberty? Gone. Individual identity? Gone. Boom…we’re all of a sudden a collectivist culture, we’ve been fundamentally changed. How did this happen? Well, it happened quick and it happened while we were all in a frenzy about a virus!

Therefore, I guess what we need to do is be careful. We can’t let “dark forces” use COVID as an excuse to assault and basically rape us of our liberties. It’s a tough balancing act for sure…to what extent do we need to compromise liberty for the sake of the collective? COVID is real, we need to be responsible, but we also, at the same time, need to make sure we preserve our liberty in the process. This is easier said than done, but maybe once we realize that this liberty is, indeed, at stake, then we can maybe at least keep a close eye on it and not let it slip away from us forever.

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MATT BURNS is the author of THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON, which is a novella loosely based on chapter 12 in The Book of Revelation. He’s also the author of JOHNNY CRUISE, WEIRD MONSTER and a memoir called GARAGE MOVIE: MY ADVENTURES MAKING WEIRD FILMS. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.