Fighting Back with Fight Club

Humans, like other great apes, find ranking low within a hierarchy stressful. According to neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky, the stress of low status can affect both mental and physical health. Much of the time that stress remains individual. Even when a specific population is afflicted, people can remain depressed and quiescent. And even when pockets of rage erupt among individuals or even groups, the (low-) status-quo often quickly re-establishes itself. But sometimes the oppressed band together to rise up forcefully against the enemy. Think about the French Revolution. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a fantasy about just such an uprising.

Fight Club suggests that much of our population participates in a service economy that caters to the wealthy; we live in an oligarchy. But it isn’t the very poor who rebel in Fight Club. The rage depicted here does not arise from the outright abuses such as those that directly impoverish and disempower people—the kinds of abuses that sparked the French Revolution—but rather against the insidious mechanisms of late capitalism that render people complicit in their own oppression without spiritual or ethical compensations. We might find the servants’ loyalty in Downton Abbey absurd, many would say the same of feudal ideals of loyalty, and many are skeptical of the belief in a better world to come: Marx and Engels said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” But whether we accept or reject this statement, a reigning belief, the feeling that a higher purpose guides one’s work or one’s life can confer a sense of dignity and meaning.

Many people in the early twenty-first century U. S. who make a living wage work in low-level and mid-level jobs so that they can buy a tiny portion of the good life, and they lack any such sense of a higher purpose. People work to buy stuff, a lifestyle that the anonymous narrator’s best friend Tyler Durden finds pointless, degrading, and worth destroying. Capitalism with its meniality and purposelessness robs men of their dignity, and in doing so—according to the logic of Fight Club—it takes their masculinity as well. It is not accidental that the novel focuses on the rage of waiters, men who wait on other men in a traditionally feminine and subservient role. And so Tyler starts the organization Fight Club.

Fight Club begins with a single fight between the narrator and Tyler, and soon blossoms into a plethora of clubs in which successive fights (fifty a night) take place while other members of the club watch. The clubs meet in basements where a single light bulb hangs over the fight area, a space that openly rejects the accouterments of civilized comfort and so symbolically rejects the trappings of contemporary society.

Source: Wikimedia/Aaron Pruzaniec

And I use the word trappings advisedly because, in the world of Fight Club, frills and ornaments are what trap you. The narrator says, “You buy furniture. . . . 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.” A member of a fight club later expresses similar thoughts: “Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. “

Fight Club protests not only the indignity but the immorality of a culture that serves Mammon. In one episode, the narrator’s boss finds a copy of the rules for fight clubs on the office photocopier. He confronts the narrator, accusing him of wrongfully using the company’s time and resources; the narrator obviously participates in a fight club as the seen in the evidence of beatings—his face is quite a mess at this point and dried blood adorns his clothing. The narrator answers the charge with a thinly veiled death-threat, aimed at his boss, detailing what the sort of crazy person who would write these rules is capable of doing: “Maybe, I say, this totally diseased f*ck would use an Eagle Apache carbine [to kill his boss] because an Apache takes a thirty-shot mag and only weighs nine pounds.”

In the back of narrator’s mind, as he threatens his boss, is the damage the company does by not recalling defective products because the cost will be too high: “What I don’t have to say is I know about the leather interiors that cause birth defects, about the counterfeit brake linings that looked good enough to pass the purchasing agent, but fails after two thousand miles.” The narrator is infuriated that the company he works for cares more for money than lives.

Source: Wikimedia/ Karl-Ludwig Poggemann

One goal of Fight Club is to give back to men (and it is a male organization) the masculine dignity that has been taken from them through the meniality of working in a feminized and vacuous service economy. The narrator says that after a fight, “Nothing was solved . . . but nothing mattered.” But fight clubs aren’t just a means of distraction through physical pain. They give men something to be proud of, as we see from the zeal with which this cult is embraced and the respect they have for both the narrator and Tyler. Through fighting, men get back the sense of camaraderie missing from alienated modern life, in which people live and work in small self-contained spaces: “A lot of best friends meet for the first time at fight clubs.” Fight clubs can soon be found all over the country.

The goals of Fight Club soon expand from restoring dignity to individuals to destroying the society that has robbed them of the pride they used to take in their work and in their lives. Project Mayhem emerges from Fight Club, an organization of domestic terrorists who blow up buildings belonging to the corporate world. The narrator says of his decision to join forces with Tyler and relinquish his comfortable way of life, “Maybe we have to break everything to make something better of ourselves.” Project Mayhem applies this maxim to all of civilization.

Spirituality Essential Reads

Addressing Religion and Spirituality in Therapy

The Psychology of Rumi's Poetry

Project Mayhem supports its activities by making soap out of human fat, much of it taken from the medical waste generated by wealthy people who have had liposuction, another sign of the corruption of the times: some people have their fat removed while others don’t have enough to eat. As one member of Project Mayhem says, spouting “pure Tyler Durden,” “The richest creamiest fat in the world, the fat of the land . . . . That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing.” The linkage between spiritual bankruptcy caused by capitalism and an anti-capitalist agenda that ultimately destroys civilization is made explicit by this disciple: “ We don’t have a great war in our generation or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.” And this follower also cites some solutions: “Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world. . . . .Imagine hunting elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.”

Hunting elk would mean that our species had returned to an earlier hunting-gathering phase of human existence, a way of life in which hierarchies still exist, as they do within all societies of great apes, and in which life is more stressful for those low in the hierarchy than it is for higher-ups. But there would nothing like the gap between “the one percent” and the rest of us. And we would live in a social hierarchy, not a socioeconomic hierarchy like ours, in which the “economic” is the determinant variable that asks us to measure everything in terms of what we own rather than who we are.

Source: Wikimedia/ Herman Gottscho

That the narrator turns out to be suffering from mental illness suggests that we inhabit a world in which it isn’t surprising if we are driven out of our right minds. Fight Club protests a lifestyle in which the violent actions of a “diseased f*ck” is an expression of rage against a society that has lost its heart and its soul.