Fight Club, Self-definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity

Provided for non-commercial research and education use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. This article appeared in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (2013, V. 69, 3-4) published by Aletheia – Associação Científica e Cultural. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. Authors requiring further information regarding Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.rpf.pt The copyright of this article belongs to the RPF, such that any posterior publication will require the written permission of the RPF's editor. For the use of any article or a part of it, the norms stipulated by the copyright law in vigour is applicable. REVISTA PORTUGUESA DE FILOSOFIA ALETHEIA - Associação Científica e Cultural Faculdade de Filosofia de Braga Praça da Faculdade, 1 4710-297 BRAGA Portugal www.rpf.pt rpf.aletheia@gmail.com Author's Personal Copy Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. WILLIAM IRWIN* Resumo Visto por uma lente existencial, o filme Fight Club impele-nos a criar um autêntico self. Porém, também nos adverte que a criação de um autêntico self é algo que só podemos fazer por nós mesmos. A definitiva ironia no filme Fight Club é que, num esforço por rejeitar a sociedade e cultivar a individualidade, as pessoas acabam por se conformar a um culto e aos seus ditames. A lição é que a autenticidade é frágil, facilmente esmagada e facilmente rendida. No final do filme, o protagonista, oferece-nos esperança, ainda que seja para nos tornarmos auto-conscientes e lutar contra as forças que nos procuram subjugar. Palavras-chave : autenticidade, consumismo, existencialismo, Fight Club, Nietzsche, vício Abstract Viewed through an existential lens, Fight Club urges us to create an authentic self, but it also cautions us that the creation of an authentic self is something we can only do for ourselves. The ultimate irony in Fight Club is that in an effort to reject society and cultivate individuality, people end up conforming to a cult and its dictates. The clear lesson is that authenticity is fragile, easily crushed and easily surrendered. By the end of the movie, the protagonist at least offers us hope, though, that we can become self-aware and fight back against the forces that seek to subjugate us. Keywords : addiction, authenticity, consumerism, existentialism, Fight Club, Nietzsche F ight Club depicts an existential crisis, its cause, a unique solution, and a misguided development. The story deals with broken promises, or at least implicit promises, from God, from fathers, indeed from anyone who tells us he or she has the answers we need. Viewed through an existential lens, Fight Club cautions us that the creation of an authentic self is something we can only do for ourselves. Beware the person who says he or she can do it for you. * King’s College. williamirwin@kings.edu Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 673-684 Author's Personal Copy 674 WILLIAM I RWIN Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. The dead God and the absent Father In The Gay Science Nietzsche’s madman declares to a crowd in the marketplace that God is dead. Frustrated by their lack of appreciation and comprehension, he throws down his lantern and concludes that his time has not yet come, that his message was not for these ears.1 The madman’s declaration is not a statement of God’s nonexistence, but rather God’s obsolescence. God is dead. He may or may not exist, but he is certainly irrelevant. He cannot solve our problems; we need a new solution. In his bestseller, Iron John: A Book About Men, the poet Robert Bly renewed interest in the Iron John fairytale in which the prince must steal the key from his mother to free Iron John. The prince needs the iron man, the wild man covered in rust-colored hair, to encourage him to take the bold action. Fight Club, though, does not feature a confrontation with a mother figure for freedom. Instead, fathers are blamed. It is his father who Tyler Durden says he would like to fight if given the chance. The following dialogue ensues: Jack : 2 I didn’t know my dad. Well, I knew him, till I was six. He went and married another woman, had more kids. Every six years or so he’d do it. Again – new city, new family. Tyler : He was setting up franchises. My father never went to college, so it was really important that I go. […] Tyler : After I graduated, I called him long distance and asked, “Now what?” He said, “Get a job.” When I turned twenty-five, I called him and asked “Now what?” He said, “I don’t know. Get married.” Jack : Same here. Tyler : A generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we really need. If their mothers, despite their best efforts, made them weak and domesticated, then a wife would likely just complete the job. Jack remarks “I can’t get married – I’m a thirty-year-old boy.” The drama is not just 1. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich – The Gay Science, trans. Walter KAUFMANN. New York: Vintage, 1974, pp. 181-182, section 125. 2. Though technically the character remains nameless, it has become conventional to call him Jack. Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity parental, though, it is cosmic. We are God’s forgotten children. God is depicted as an uncaring, absentee father, like Jack’s father who starts a new family franchise every six years in a new city. In that sense God is dead. Tyler makes it explicit in Freudian terms, saying, “Our fathers were our models for God. And, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God?” Like the pronouncement of Nietzsche’s madman, this realization is awful, ugly, and shocking, but it also contains the seeds of good news: we are free. Tyler says, “Listen to me. You have to consider the possibility that God doesn’t like you, he never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.” In more vulgar and blasphemous language, Tyler echoes his own sentiment, saying, “Fuck damnation. Fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted children, with no special place and no special attention, and so be it.” The title of Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, is sometimes translated less literally as The Joyful Wisdom. This translation reflects the hope that the madman offers, namely that the death of God is a great opportunity in which we can rejoice in the power of our own responsibility and creativity. The concern, though, is that we will not have that bold reaction, but will instead sink into nihilism, filling the void in dubious ways, much as Jack does with his catalogue purchases. Of course Jack’s catalogue purchases predate his realization of the death of God, but this is very much like the people in the town that the madman visits, who are living in the wake of the death of God though they do not realize it. Consumerism as the opium of the people When Marx called religion the opium of the people he was saying that it is not surprising that in the misery of a capitalist world people would turn to religion for comfort.3 It is no more surprising that they would find comfort in religion than that other people find comfort in a drug. Opium works; it takes away the pain, at least for a time. Likewise, religion works, telling people that the suffering of this world ultimately does not matter because there is a better world to come. In fact, those who suffer in this world will be rewarded in the world to come. A key existentialist insight is that meaning is not given from above, not from God, and not from a father. It is created. But if it is not selfcreated, then someone else will be all too glad to supply it. When we meet 3. MARX, Karl – Early Writings, trans. T.B. BOTTOMORE. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963, p. 43. Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 675 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. 676 WILLIAM I RWIN Jack he is not going to church services, though he is going to recovery meetings in church basements. He has not become addicted to the opium of the people, nor has he become addicted to actual opiates. He has instead become addicted to recovery meetings. This is his strange way of dealing with the emptiness resulting from the failure of his primary addiction, consumerism, to fill the void. Comically, Jack tells us in deadpan voiceover, “Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct.” and “I flipped through catalogs and wondered: What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” Jack is pathetic. He is not a man, and Tyler helps him to realize it in this exchange: Tyler : Do you know what a duvet is? Jack : It ’s a comforter ... Tyler : It ’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? Jack : ... Consumers? Tyler : Right. We are consumers. We’re the bi-products of a lifestyle obsession. Jack’s consumerism is so complete that it has him buying stuff that no man should care about. He is not buying sports cars and electronics and power tools, but instead duvets and sofas and dinettes. Tyler sums it up, saying, “The things you own, they end up owning you.” Like any addiction, consumerism demands more and more while it succeeds in filling the void less and less. Tyler diagnoses their condition in the following way: Tyler : Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. Tyler’s prescribed treatment for the affliction of meaninglessness and consumerism is straightforward: “Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.” Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 Author's Personal Copy Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. Freedom and hitting bottom Conventional wisdom has it that people must hit bottom before they are willing to take the actions necessary for recovery from addiction. The twelve steps go against natural inclinations; they require a sense of desperation, a sense that this is one’s last chance. There is hope, though, because it is only by hitting bottom, by completely burning out, that the phoenix can rise from the ashes. But what about people who don’t have a drug addiction or a fatal disease? What about people who have simply realized that the life they have been living is a meaningless lie? Where can they go? Quite fortuitously, Jack goes to a cancer survivors meeting at his doctor’s jesting suggestion, and he finds that he gets relief. Jack experiences catharsis vicariously, not through movies or plays as Aristotle would suggest, but through witnessing real human drama. Humorously, Jack tells us “I became addicted.” But Jack is, as he calls Marla, “a tourist”. Really, he needs a cure for what ails him personally, a meaningless life of consumerism and conformism. And so, with his alter ego, Tyler, Jack ups the ante by putting himself in the conflict, by experiencing conflict and struggle firsthand in the form of the fight. Jack encapsulates Tyler’s philosophy as aimed at developing “the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide”. Jack had glimpsed that kind of freedom at his first testicular cancer meeting, saying, “I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.” The appeal of this approach is reflected in Jack’s power animal, the penguin who says “slide” as he slips down the ice. In the midst of the rat race and the struggle to keep up with the Joneses, there is something highly attractive about this conception of freedom. The old song has it that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” (“Me and Bobby McGee”). Addicts and alcoholics find that they cannot do what it takes to get sober and stay sober until they have hit bottom – until they have virtually “nothin’ left to lose”. As Fight Club depicts it, we are trapped by our possessions – we don’t own them, they own us. We work to pay for them; we work jobs that we do not like, jobs in which we put up with crap, because things own us. There is some real attraction to dropping out and living off the grid, in saying “I will no longer be a slave to consumer desires.” But it is not an easy solution. As Tyler says, “Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat! It ’s not a seminar! You have to forget everything you know, everything you think you know – about life, about friendship, about you and me.” In the context of the movie, the last phrase, “about you and me” is crucial. It turns out that Tyler is Jack, and he/they had set the fire that Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 677 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. 678 WILLIAM I RWIN burned down the condominium. As Tyler says in a different context, “Selfimprovement is masturbation. Now self-destruction …” The implication, as confirmed by the text of the novel, is that self-destruction is “the answer”. The desired alternative to masturbation is actual sex, which is not its opposite. By contrast, self-improvement and self-destruction are nearly opposites. Masturbation is a substitute for sex, but self-improvement is not obviously a substitute for self-destruction. Maybe self-improvement is a denial of death, an attempt to put off death, to experience oneself as making something of life, of improving and extending life, whereas self-destruction brings one into close proximity with death. Paradoxically, a brush with death is, as Tyler describes it, “a near-life experience”. The self-destructive behaviors of addicts may bring them into close contact with death, and sometimes they actually die. This is part of what is attractive to Jack and Marla about the recovery meetings. Many of the people at the meetings are looking at death or have looked at death and are reacting to it. Though it is never stressed, there is a real possibility of death in fight club. The losing fighter can tap out and surrender, but there is no guarantee that he will do so before the damage is done. It is a “near-life experience” every time. Self-definition A number of great singers and musicians died at 27: Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Robert Johnson, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse among them. Most were drug addicts and/or alcoholics who attempted to ease their pain through their chosen forms of self-medication. Though he enjoys a beer and a cigarette, Jack does not appear to have the predisposition for substance abuse. He has survived the 27-trap, but at 30, the age when Jesus began his ministry, Jack is still a boy in most ways, without a clear sense of what it means to be a man. His father was largely absent from his life and the culture has defined a “man” in some weak, domesticated, metrosexual way that he adopted for a time but which he has now come to reject. His self-searching is precipitated by his insomnia, a sign that something is nagging at him deep-down and will not let him rest. Like Neo in The Matrix, he has a splinter in his mind driving him mad, a sense that something is not quite right about the world. There is no happiness or fulfillment to be found in just mindlessly following the prescribed path of college, career, marriage, kids… The recovery meetings relieve Jack’s insomnia for a time, but then Marla shows up. She ruins Jack’s self-deception at the meetings, and so he Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity experiences insomnia again. As he says, “Marla – the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie.” Thanks to Marla, Jack engages in an even more intricate self-deception, inventing Tyler Durden. Jack’s job is cold and calculating, assessing the risks involved with manufacturing flaws in his company’s cars. What is the risk, the percentage of cars that will have the problem? What is the cost of the average out of court settlement in case of a problem? What would be the cost of doing a recall on the car? He does not enjoy his work but it does seem to pay well, as it finances his condo and furniture and clothes, all of which he is inordinately fond of. People are conspicuously absent from Jack’s life – there is no mention of friends or relatives. He is always on the go, always flying from one city to the next for his company. We can imagine that he liked the lifestyle when he started his job. As a young man just out of college, he likely felt important being sent by his company to fly to different cities and stay in nice hotels. He has grown weary and jaded, though, remarking how everything is single-serving: single-serving butter, single-serving cream, plastic-wrapped little soaps and shampoo bottles. He calls the people he meets on his plane trips single-serving friends. When Tyler impresses him with his oddity and freshness, Jack remarks that he is the most interesting single-serving friend he has ever had. Getting no reaction, Jack begins to explain what he means. Tyler stops him, saying that he gets it, it’s very clever, and asks “how’s that working out for you?” The truth is that being clever is not working out so well for Jack. It may have provided a buffer and a sense of superiority at one point, but it does not seem to any longer. The irony and hyper-irony that let him feel superior to his job and possessions really are not doing the trick any longer. So he has now met Tyler, his alter ego, who will offer him an alternative. Getting up to leave Jack, Tyler remarks that “We are defined by the choices we make.” Tyler then seats himself in first class while Jack just watches. With nowhere to go after his condo burns down, Jack calls Tyler to meet for a drink. After three pitchers of beer, prompted by Tyler, Jack finally asks Tyler if he can stay with him for the night. Tyler assents but counters with a strange request. He wants Jack to hit him. Incredulous, Jack refuses at first, but Tyler explains “I don’t want to die without any scars. How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” This theme of knowing yourself and defining yourself through struggle and opposition echoes through the rest of the film. Later, in a rousing speech, Tyler tells the men of fight club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” Unfortunately, though, Jack Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 679 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. 680 WILLIAM I RWIN does not really come to know himself. He doesn’t even know that he is Tyler. And what begins as a quest for individual identity leads to the loss of individual identity in Project Mayhem. The reason for fighting is not personal animus. One’s opponent in fight club is never a man against whom one has a grudge or with whom one has a problem. It is just someone randomly assigned. There is no trash talking, no sense of the other as a rival or opponent, as in professional boxing. The value of the fight seems to come in the risk that each man is taking. He is exposing himself to bodily harm, pushing himself in a kind of limitexperience. It is better to win than to lose, but there is no shame in losing and no great glory in winning. There is, though, a bond and camaraderie among the men, and perhaps especially between two men who have just fought, but there is no special friendship. Jack explains that “fight club wasn’t about winning or losing. It wasn’t about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church”. Everyone wants to win, but losing seems to be just as valuable. Tyler purposely loses the fight to the bar owner, Lou, and just lets Lou pummel him. Then he gets in Lou’s face, dripping and spitting blood on Lou. Lou runs away scared and lets them continue using the basement of his bar to fight. Tyler gives the rest of fight club a homework assignment: go out and start a fight with a stranger and lose. This turns out to be comical, some of the funniest scenes in the movie. No one wants to fight – most men will do anything to avoid being drawn into a physical confrontation. Of course the mission would be self-defeating if the men started fights and then trounced their opponents – that would just reinforce their opponents’ aversion to fighting. By losing, though, presumably they give their opponents the thrill of the fight, perhaps getting them in touch with their primal selves. In civilization we are obliged to repress our violent impulses, much as we are obliged to repress our sexual impulses. We are thus walking time bombs of repression. The homework assignment of starting and losing a fight can help the targets feel the relief of giving in to their violent impulses. But is that really a good thing? Do we really want people to give in to their violent impulses? By way of comparison, consider that even though we might want people to be freer in expressing their sexuality, we do not want people to feel free to grope others. Fight club literally provides an arena for the expression of violent impulses. It is cathartic. While the men may be bruised and scarred physically, they feel better emotionally. Since the acts of violence occur between consenting adults, who could object? Likewise, we might applaud free acts of sexual expression between consenting adults, including Tyler and Marla. And we might say that the more of that Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity expression we have, the better. People in general will be happier and there will be a spillover effect that benefits society. Increasing sexual freedom leads to a flourishing of different forms of sexual expression. Likewise, we would hope and imagine that the increased freedom of self-definition in fight club would lead to a flourishing of different forms of personal expression. But, sadly, such is not the case, because Tyler turns megalomaniacal. His initial impulse seems noble and understandable, reject consumerism and consumer society. As he says, “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.” Tyler calls for a return to the primitive, both psychologically for the individual and culturally for the group – a call to resist the civilizing tendency of consumerism. Jack has rejected consumerism and the soulless job that he worked in order to fund his consumerist lifestyle, moving in with Tyler. Remarking on life in the house on Paper Street, Jack says, “By the end of the first month, I didn’t care about TV. I didn’t mind the warm, stale refrigerator.” And Tyler introduces him to a way of funding a life off the grid by stealing human fat from a liposuction clinic and making soap out of it, thus selling rich women their asses back to them. Likewise Marla pretty much lives outside respectable society, stealing clothes from a laundromat to sell to a thrift store. They all cultivate an aesthetic of voluntary simplicity, coming to appreciate the squalor of their dwellings and the shabbiness of their possessions. Tyler’s vision becomes extreme, though. He doesn’t just want voluntary simplicity, he wants enforced simplicity, indeed primitivism. As he tells Jack, In the world I see – you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway. Tyler goes wrong in forcing his vision on others, rather than letting others define themselves – no matter how misguided they may be. The first and second rules of fight club are that you do not talk about fight club. This calls to mind the policy of 12-step programs to spread through attraction, not promotion. 12-step programs do not advertise through TV or newspapers. Instead, they count on their members to be walking billboards for what their programs have to offer, such that people are attracted to them and Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 681 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. 682 WILLIAM I RWIN want the peace and serenity they have. In related fashion, we can imagine that, at first, the members of fight club do not go around preaching the gospel according to Tyler. Rather, people notice that there is something different about them, not just their bruises but their don’t-give-a-shit attitude, and they want to know more – want to know how they can get it. This changes, though, when Tyler becomes evangelical and fundamentalist, enforcing his vision and his self-definition on others. Power corrupts and people listen Tyler calls for men to self-define, but gradually he becomes a cult leader who strips them of their identity and self-definition. Tyler was the solution, but he becomes the problem. He thus illustrates the difficulty with authenticity. We each need to be authentic in our own way, not by mimicking someone else who is authentic. Men in the movie make a good first move in going to fight club and experiencing themselves in struggle and combat, and in coming to know themselves on a primal level. They also make a good move in rejecting consumerism and social standards and definition. But what they fail to do is discover their own replacement for what they have thrown out. In reaction to the death of God, Nietzsche’s madman asked “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”4 Destruction is only a first step; creative replacement must follow. Tyler has engaged in creative replacement, but he has not encouraged his followers to do the same. By contrast, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra encourages his followers to doubt, deny, and reject him. Indeed, he says, “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”5 In Tyler’s/Jack’s case, his students become so entranced and blindly obedient to him, that even when he wakes up to who he is and what he has been doing he cannot convince them that he has changed his mind. Of course, the temptation is there to take advantage of these men who follow. They are so grateful for his showing them a new life in fight club that they become ready to follow him further, though in a contrary way, into Project Mayhem. Fight club becomes a way of life rather than just an occasional escape. Taken to its extreme, it morphs into Project Mayhem. As so often happens, 4. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich – The Gay Science, ed. cit., p. 181, section 125. 5. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter KAUFMANN. New York: Penguin, 1966, p. 78. Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity the rejection of conformity becomes its own conformity, as the men become nameless “space monkeys”, skin-headed, unquestioning, drones. As The Who sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The balance between authenticity and inauthenticity is difficult to strike. As Jack says, “Sooner or later, we all became what Tyler wanted us to be.” Tyler goes from making rules for fight club and yet claiming no one is in charge, to making rules for Project Mayhem and very clearly putting himself in charge. Power corrupts. Whereas fight club has a “question everything” mentality, the first rule of Project Mayhem is “you do not ask questions”. Reliance upon God, or a higher power, is an integral part of 12-step recovery, but it is absent from fight club. Instead, the men of Project Mayhem come to rely on Tyler Durden, a deeply flawed human being. “In Tyler we trust”, as Jack says. They revere him, take his word as gospel, and follow his orders without question. Contrast this with the convenience store clerk who Tyler threatens at gunpoint and instructs to pursue his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Though messed up, this is the kind of inspiration one would hope for from Tyler, the encouragement that each person should discover his (or her?) unique talent and goal to develop and pursue. Instead, Tyler becomes megalomaniacal and makes each man the same. Whereas he had enough respect for the wimpy convenience store clerk to make him pursue his own dream, Tyler comes to have no real respect for the bold men who come to fight club and want more. He learns the store clerk’s name, Raymond K. Hessell, whereas men in Project Mayhem have no name (except in death when they all come to be called Robert Paulson). Tyler breaks down their ego and sense of self in the worst military fashion, telling them “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap.” Instead of offering them true liberation, he offers them opium, the opium of belonging to a group in which one does not have to think. He has swapped one cult for another. Conclusion The ultimate aim of Project Mayhem is to destroy the credit record so that people can start over. Tyler Durden envisions a post-apocalyptic primitive scenario in which we live among the ruins of the towers of high finance. But why that? Why not just continue to be the bad conscience of society by wearing a black eye and a bloody shirt to work? Tyler is fond of telling men “We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” Project Mayhem is destructive without being creative. Nietzsche, by Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013 683 Author's Personal Copy Provided for Personal License use. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. The copyright of this Article belongs to the RPF. 684 WILLIAM I RWIN contrast, recognizes that we must create something to put in the place of God and traditional morality. That new creation must be individual, not just another enforced conformity. So the ultimate irony in Fight Club is that in an effort to reject society and cultivate individuality, people end up conforming to a cult and its dictates. The clear lesson is that authenticity is fragile, easily crushed and easily surrendered. By the end of the movie, Jack at least offers us hope, though, that we can become self-aware and fight back against the forces that seek to subjugate us.6 6. For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article, I wish to thank Mark T. Conard, Ed Costas, Kyle Johnson, Megan Lloyd, and Joe Zeccardi. Vol. 69 Fasc. 3-4 2013