Join the new world

(If you’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book, that will be enough for following along with this disorganized spiel of a book review. Though the book gives deeper insight into the motivations of the characters, the movie covers all the main plot points.)

(I don’t necessarily condone the solutions that this book comes to, nor necessarily agree with all aspects of the identified problem as applied to a modern world, I merely present these things as they are shown in the book.)



”Fight Club is a decent work of fiction, well-crafted with emotional emphasis in the right places, adrenaline bursts in the right places, a psychological plot twist, and an ominous ending. When compared with the massive cultural impact of authors such as JRR Tolkein, GRR Martin, or JK Rowling, however, this book can start to be viewed as more of a flop than it originally was during its time. It’s great as far as fiction paperbacks go, and the film adaptation was abnormally loyal to the plot, but it becomes very forgettable when you line it up next to larger cultural icons.”

That’s what I imagine someone might write 30 years from now if, for some reason, they decide to read and review Fight Club. What they’d be missing, though, is something that’s harder to notice for people who weren’t born in America and whose formative years didn't fall somewhere between 1991 (the end of the cold war) and 2012 (when the Social Justice movement really started picking up steam). It’s the expression of a generation, wrapped up and framed into a work of fiction that itself is capable of standing on its own entertainment value without said expression propping it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eoVLfPszeQ


The Problem

”In the most general terms, ​Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.”

I can’t take credit for coining the term “Neo-Gothic Literature”, I first heard it from the mouth of a friend describing Night in the Woods to me. As you may guess from the name, Neo-Gothic is modern stories that have Gothic elements to them. The Gothic literature era came at a time when its authors were looking back on perceived giants: Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, kings and imperial conquerors, even the medieval monarchs and nobles who built the stone castles they could see around them, now falling out of use. Just as one of those Gothic writers can look back and feel inadequate compared to the mountains their ancestors moved, so can the Neo-Gothic writers look back on the metaphorical dragons that their ancestors slew.

The 90s were a time when WW2 had a firmer place within living memory. Young people could look back on their grandparents and admire people who overcame hardship, people who seemed to have known their place in an intense ethical and moral struggle. There was the Civil Rights movement, figures like Rosa Parks, MLK, and Malcolm X overcame hardships and seemed to know their place in an intense ethical and moral struggle. The draft dodgers of the 70s seemed to know their place. And all throughout those decades, the threat of nuclear war with a geopolitical rival fueled the feeling that people in our nation had something to stand for, and something to stand against. Everyday patriotic Americans seemed to know their place in an intense ethical and moral struggle.

But then, 1991 began a new cultural era in the US. The Berlin wall fell. The Iron Curtain was drawn back. The biggest threat to our way of life symbolically crumbled to the ground with the slabs of East German concrete. A new day was dawning. Pax Americana.



Young people in the 90s saw a time when the American heroes of the past had already climbed the tallest mountains and overcome the largest obstacles. Testaments to the greatness of those who came before could be seen in statues, in history books, on film, even in the skyscrapers and factory buildings constructed by 1910s steel workers. Everywhere the eye could see, there were things that had been created by people of the past who had something meaningful to strive for. Into this shell of safety and peace were born the metaphorical grandchildren of John Adams who had the ability to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain, but lost the knowledge of where to find fulfillment and purpose.



”’I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived,’ he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver’s window, ‘and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.’”

I wouldn’t be doing the description of this era justice, either, if I didn’t mention the gilding of this cage. ‘Consumerism’ is the word most familiar to the time. I’ll use a few direct book quotes to describe it.

”You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you”

”Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal people of wherever”

Retail therapy taking the place of deeper meaning and fulfillment. That is the setting of the US in 1996, the year Fight Club was published.

That’s not to say this feeling, this problem, this state of being was all-consuming; there were certainly hardworking people who had purpose and fulfillment, but it was widespread enough that such a group as the fictional organization described in this book couldn’t have asked for a better backdrop to their inception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezoOnI95BpE




This book speaks to something else that’s more applicable to the generation in question than to any other I know of: the realization that, after a whole childhood of being told about your own potential, one day you wake up disillusioned, living a life that doesn’t line up with where you thought you’d be. I say something else, but it really goes hand-in-hand with the concept of being John Adams’ metaphorical grandchildren, to the point where I would argue it’s just a symptom of the same cause.

"In one corner of the kitchen, a space monkey squats on the cracked linoleum and studies himself in a hand mirror. 'I am the all singing, all dancing crap of this world,' the space monkey tells the mirror. 'I am the toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation.'"

As this generation grows older, the implications of this only deepen. The ripples of the disappointment an entire generation feels when they wake up and realize their names won’t be remembered for centuries to come, that the world doesn’t care about their experiences by default, that their goals are much harder to achieve than they ever would’ve imagined, those ripples can easily be seen every time you turn on the news.

Humans evolved to overcome challenges. They evolved to struggle, and to conquer whatever they struggled against. There have been so few places and times in all of human history that have been free from significant struggle that everyone forgot to take into account the psychology of being without struggle.

The Solution

” Tyler said, ‘I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.’ I didn’t want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself. About self destruction. At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. I looked around and said, okay.”

Breaking everything in order to make something better out of ourselves. Let’s explore that concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd0cT7Dnpt8


This is just me talking out my rear end, but I can see two directions this concept can take us: minimalism (as opposed to materialism), and the embrace of pain in order to make the body stronger (physical exercise).

For minimalism, I got to practice it in a common way and to a modest extent this week by cleaning out my closet and parting with a bunch of old clothes, as well as reorganizing the whole thing. Is my wardrobe better as a result, both in the amount of space I have and in the selection of clothes I can readily grab and put on in the morning? On both notes, yes. I have fewer useless clothing items taking up space. I have a better system for clean laundry. I got to reacquaint myself with some good clothes that were hidden in the back and I hadn’t happened to see in a long time. But more than that, I feel good about myself for having done it.

There’s a controvercial psychologist with a large youtube following who frequently tells people to clean their rooms. Putting his politics aside and looking at that statement: is he wrong when he says that cleaning the room has the psychological effect of making it feel like your space in a way that it didn’t before? I don’t think that’s a bad way to look at it. Put in those terms, one could even look at it as a ritual of renewing your claim to ownership of that space, one might even be reminded of renewing marriage vows. As you grow as a person, you’re helping the space to grow with you, rather than waking up one day and realizing it’s a space for your younger self rather than who you are now.

But even cleaning your room is world’s different from purist minimalism.



”My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive."

Early on in the plot, the main character gets his condo destroyed while he’s away on a business trip. All he has left are the contents of his suitcase. To compact the issue, while coming back from said trip, his electric razor was turned on in his bag, causing the luggage to get held up by security. Our protagonist was left with exactly nothing except the clothes on his back. Later on in the plot, when project mayhem starts up, the participants are required to keep a list of items so short that all of it can fit under an army surplus mattress. And that’s a big point in the book’s philosophy, too: freeing yourself from your possessions.

This is further to the extreme end of the spectrum than I’ve ever gone, being someone who always carries a phone charger when I go out, just in case. It’s easy to imagine, though, how living a life free from clutter can be freeing.

As for physical exercise and fitness, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that working out is good for the mind, not just the body. Exercise can cure depression, but if you’re someone who spends their time practicing a sport or other physical activity, I didn’t need to tell you that. It becomes self-evident once you put a certain amount of effort into it, and it’s something I wouldn’t trust any scientist to try and quantify. Competition, as well, is a powerful motivator that can give your brain something to spend time thinking about, strategizing about. It gives you a goal to direct your thoughts and activities towards. Even if not competition with someone else, competition with yourself. Self-improvement for the sake of self-improvement.

”After you’ve been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex. Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails.

I do practice kickboxing IRL, so I can understand this angle better than the first. There have been times when I come home from the gym and make it a point to go jogging that week because I want better endurance. There have been times where I practice a certain move or combo in the shower. And yes, there have literally been times when practice or sparring became my reason for cutting my nails.

”Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything.“

Yes, I do trust myself to handle a lot more than I did before I picked up my sport. I feel more confident in life, confident in my ability to handle unexpected situations. I know my body and my physical capabilities a lot better; I know exactly what I’m capable of. Though I haven’t broken a tooth or a bone yet, I do know exactly what the author is trying to relate here.



In this work of fiction, the fictional organization known as “Project Mayhem” turns “breaking everything to make something better out of ourselves” into more than just the individual cure to the problem of hopelessness and lack of fulfillment. They apply it to all of society.

”Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.’Imagine,’ Tyler said, ‘stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty carpool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight lane wide and August hot for a thousand miles.’ This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right away destruction of civilization.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkW-K5RQdzo


Not much elaboration I can do for that, it’s pretty much like he said. The goal is to upend society. Complete reset. Bring humanity back to the stone age and rebuild, hopefully in a way that afford people the dignity they don’t currently have in the post-industrial world.

The climax of the story, as well as the opening which gives the reader a glimpse at the climax before circling back to the chronological beginning, has the protagonist’s body (spoiler alert, he and Tyler Durdan are split personalities sharing a body) standing on the roof of the tallest building in the world with a gun in his own mouth, waiting for the explosives at the base of the building to bring the whole thing tumbling down. Throughout the book, this moment is built up to by comparisons between Tyler’s life and that of Jesus.

”Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait. Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels? Four minutes. I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you a legend. I’ve been here from the beginning. I remember everything.”

”Tyler says I’m nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don’t fall all the way, I can’t be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn’t just a weekend retreat. I should run from self improvement, and I should be running toward disaster.”

Throughout the book, Tyler brings our protagonist closer and closer to rock bottom. He does it by blowing up his condo, delaying his luggage on the flight by leaving the razor on, killing his boss, giving him a chemical burn on his hand, destroying everything about the life that he had before, the life where he was trapped by his possessions, the life where he had no future, no excitement, no struggle, no meaning. He does it in pursuit of perfection. One grand moment of perfection, at the top of the tallest building in the world, standing there as the building collapses, and society with it.

Perfection. For only a moment. But, (according to the book at least):

”One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. You wake up, and that’s enough.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y001O8Azj1U


Tyler Durdan was the protagonist’s split personality. He was a figment of his own imagination. He was a projection, a manifestation of everything he wanted to be, a personification of all that he was missing, and in a way, he freed himself from his own gilded cage.



One last thing I want to touch on before I go: I can think of one more tragic antihero whose goals sounded strikingly similar to Tyler Durdan. Someone who killed people in pursuit of a greater world that he wanted to bring about. Someone who worked towards societal collapse for what he saw as the greater good. Someone who was metaphorically martyred for his beliefs. Only this one wasn’t a fictional character or a figment of someone else’s imagination. Coincidentally, the year of the book's publication was also the year of this man's arrest.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions with this comparison.

https://odysee.com/@countdankula:d/absolute-mad-lads-ted-kaczynski:7


Stay classy

o>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEXHeTcxQy4