My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html A must read review: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/01/fight-club-as-holy-writ/
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|---|---|
| I make allusions to Fight Club all the time. | |
| And it's not because I'm Jack's raging sense of megalomania. | |
| Quite the opposite. | |
| This does not belong to us. | |
| We are not special. | |
| The reason I love Fight Club so much, and I reference it so heavily, is because it is the movie of our era. | |
| It is the defining piece of fiction which describes the 21st century. | |
| If you want to understand the 20th century, you read All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a book I heavily, heavily recommend, and it should be free with Project Gutenberg right now. | |
| You want to understand World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the peacenicks, the fall of Europe? | |
| All of that is in All Quiet on the Western Front. | |
| It defined for generations. | |
| But let's not forget the era that we live in. | |
| We're not living in the era of trench warfare, of machines eating people. | |
| For us, Martha Stewart's polishing the brass poles on the Titanic, it's all going down. | |
| We're living at the end of history. | |
| It's debatable whether there are going to be historians in the future that assumes that we survive as a species. | |
| As things stand, we are looking at the end times. | |
| And maybe Tyler Durban's anarcho-primitivism is the best that we can do with the whole thing. | |
| But if we do survive, if society doesn't collapse, historians are going to look back on Fight Club as one of the defining films of our era. | |
| And it has such an interesting mix of nihilism and hatred of God. | |
| Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. | |
| What you're feeling is premature enlightenment. | |
| We are God's unwanted children, so be it. | |
| It is a very nihilism-heavy film, and yet it's also chock full of religious imagery. | |
| There's constant religious metaphor. | |
| There's the one scene where Tyler fights the bar owner and bleeds for his sins, shedding his blood to redeem mankind. | |
| It is an extremely nihilistic film. | |
| Except it's actually properly nihilistic. | |
| God is dead from thus spoke Zarathustra. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| I have a podcast coming up where me and my friend, we go into great philosophical detail. | |
| In fact, he even goes above my own head in some of the matter. | |
| But to simplify the question, what is God? | |
| The thing is, we know as a matter of fact that no system of mathematics can contain itself. | |
| That there are forms of knowledge that we know to be true, but we can't understand. | |
| And God is that ultimate final knowledge, that perfect truth, that perfect version of ourselves. | |
| So why does the nihilist reject God? | |
| So often we hear about nihilism and we see this empty-souled materialism connected to it. | |
| This pure hedonism. | |
| This depression and the sense of failure in modern life. | |
| That's what the term nihilistic means. | |
| But I challenge you to show me a philosophical nihilist that embodies any of those traits. | |
| Nietzsche himself, there's the tale of the horse. | |
| He saw this low brute of a man beating this horse, and the horse was taking his blows with great dignity, greater dignity than this man had. | |
| And Nietzsche had a psychotic break when he saw that and flung his arms around the horse because here he saw the lesser beating upon the greater. | |
| It's a funny thing, is that nihilists actually do believe in something and yet God is dead. | |
| This line from Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not an advocation of policy. | |
| It's a statement that we killed God, that the Christian God became such a loving namby-pamby god, and we rebel against any of the rules that he put upon us. | |
| We want to have equality in marriage and equality in sex and all these other absolute nonsense that winds up being the upper echelon of the Puritan church going for the soft harem and creating all these double standards, fake openness about sexuality that allows the lower males to be excluded. | |
| Saturday Night Live did a skit about sexual harassment, where what it boils down to is sexual harassment is when a guy hits on a girl and she's not interested in him. | |
| So to avoid the lawsuit, be attractive, be popular, be good-looking, etc. | |
| God is dead is a reflection of our society. | |
| It's that we killed God. | |
| We no longer had room for an actual masculine force of creation in the world. | |
| All of a sudden we needed the God of softness, of kindness, of crying. | |
| That's why we are the unwanted children. | |
| That we are not these weak, pathetic little creatures that God can love and coddle. | |
| That God hates us. | |
| The nihilist rejects God, not because he doesn't believe in him, but because we must. | |
| Because in such a sick and broken society, we need to start out as damned individuals without redemption. | |
| We live in these empty consumerist societies. | |
| This meaningless life with no spirit, no goal to live for. | |
| And that is our high goal, to be consumers, to be that vagina, never satisfied no matter how many times it has penetrated. | |
| The all-consuming whore. | |
| The Nihilist goes out into the world naked, without armor, and actually fights. | |
| And actually struggles. | |
| And sometimes they lose. | |
| We're all going to die one day, and the nihilist embraces that. | |
| The nihilist does something with their lives because somebody accepts the challenge, does not cry and pray and beg for divine salvation. | |
| He goes and finds salvation in the real world. | |
| It's not about giving up, and really is the best way to honor God possible with the degenerate churches we find nowadays. | |
| The nihilist recognizes that the existence of God is a bracing challenge, not a comforting lie. | |
| Tyler Durden saw the end of history. | |
| He saw society coming to its reset. | |
| And that's why he was trying so hard to pound on that reset button, to start history anew with tough sons of bitches. | |
| The lie on the hand, the three days of standing on the front porch being abused with no support. | |
| That's what it means to man up. | |
| That's what it means to finally accept this noble challenge to become something with ourselves, to fight against entropy rather than just giving in to the comfort and the seduction of the opiate drip which we are all offered in society. | |
| Fight Club is the movie of our times, of our generation, of the struggle that we are going to need to face. | |
| So remember space monkeys. |