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May 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:38
231 Movie Review: Fight Club
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Good afternoon, everybody.
How are ya? Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 20 to 6, Wednesday, the 10th of May, 2006.
And I just wanted to mention about a little death that has been revealed in Toronto, or the motive for which has been revealed recently.
And it's worth having a little look at based on the fact that there are little, little deaths all over the world caused by the state.
Not obvious, not in your face, not like wars or genocide, but these are all the little deaths that occur that are caused by the state.
And there are lots and lots of little ways that the state can kill you.
But I want to point out one of them here.
And just so you sort of get an idea that crime is not really random, that violence is not always and rarely is random, and that it's sort of important to understand the causes of these kinds of murders or deaths.
Not that all evil can be laid at the hands of the state, but it's impossible to tell how much evil is in human nature while we have the state, because the state provokes and creates so much of this.
So... Let's have a look at the death of a little girl, an eight-year-old girl.
Her name was Zhang.
Her last name was Zhang. And she was killed in 2004 in Toronto, and they didn't know.
She was sort of abducted.
She vanished from her parents' home one night.
There was indications of a break-in, and then for quite some time, she was not found, and the parents thought, oh, she's alive, there'll be a ransom request, and so on.
And... What happened was eventually the girl's body was discovered and eventually they arrested a guy and finally it turned out that we figured out what the motive was, right?
So here you have someone who is breaking into someone's house, stealing their child, dragging them away.
He says that he accidentally choked her to death and his main purpose was to get some ransom money, but she fought and so he ended up killing her in a tragic kind of way.
Well, how did this all come about?
Was he just... Greedy?
Was he just a guy who wanted to buy a whole bunch of computer and video equipment and stereo equipment and iPods?
Just a shallow, greedy guy?
Well, no. As it turns out, this was not the case, as it rarely, if ever, is in the case of something like murder.
So the funny thing, of course, is that the way that this story's played out in Toronto is, oh, there's this random crime, oh, society's becoming so dangerous, there's no way to predict these things, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so let's look at what his motive was, which has finally sort of been revealed in the last day or two.
Well, he's from China, and he was a border at these people's house for a while as he went to school, and he was desperate to stay in the country.
Now, if you come to Canada, you want to sort of become a citizen, it can take you four to five years.
You can be deported at any time.
You're severely restricted.
It's really problematic.
You can never leave the country.
You're constantly under threat of deportation, and you can be severely harassed by the police, of course, because you don't have the sort of quasi-protection of whiteliness or citizenship.
So, all of these sorts of things combine to make a pretty stressful situation.
Now, he's from China, of course, so he doesn't want to go back to China fairly badly, I guess you can say, and so he ended up hatching this plan.
Now, the plan was to kidnap this little girl, Cecilia, her name was, to hold her hostage for ransom and to get $30,000 or $40,000 cash from the parents.
Now, why did he want $30,000 or $40,000?
Was he a drug addict?
Was he gambling?
Did he owe money to the mafia?
No, of course not. None of those things.
The reason that he wanted $30,000 or $40,000 is that's roughly $30,000.
The bribe that you need to give to a Canadian citizen so that she'll marry you, in which case you can become a Canadian citizen in six to nine months.
And so he needed this money desperately.
He wasn't able to get it, of course, because he wasn't able to get a job.
He wasn't allowed to work.
And so he had no choice, he felt, but to try something desperate.
And being an inexperienced criminal and so on, he botched it really badly.
But this is not random.
This is not something that just springs like an evil demon from a pure heart.
And this is not a darker aspect of human nature.
We look at something like this young man and we can see I think fairly clearly how it is that he developed as a human being.
Well of course when he was younger he was brought up in China and of course nobody's mentioned anything about his background because when you are in the media everything you try to do You try to do so that you can make sure that everyone understands how necessary the state is, right? So you don't want to start drawing any really logical conclusions about the role of the state in what led up to this poor girl's murder.
This guy, he's brought up in China, so he's subjected to brutal totalitarian dictatorship from day one, propagandized with hateful communist propaganda in school and so on, and then he makes it over to Canada, gets a taste of freedom, and becomes desperate.
To stay in Canada and obviously is facing a significant uphill battle to staying in Canada.
So what he desperately wants is to find a wife who will marry him, who's Canadian, so that he can become a Canadian citizen through that process.
And the going rate for this, as sort of a bribery situation, the going rate for this is between $30,000 and up to, sort of rarely, up to around $50,000.
Which sort of makes sense, right?
Because you've got to live with the person for a year, you've got to do a lot of research.
So, I mean, you don't actually live with the person for the year, but you've got to spend a lot of time researching each other so you can look plausibly married and so on.
So, this guy wanted the money so that he could bribe a woman to marry him and so that he could stay in Canada.
Which obviously means that he really, really didn't want to go back to China for whatever reason.
I don't know. I haven't read anything about it.
But this is just one of the little agonies.
I mean, it's only little in terms of the kind of genocide that's going on around the world with governments already, but it's one of the little agonies, the little genocides, the little murders that go on, which is all traceable directly back to state power.
And to evil laws like restrictions on immigration.
Whoever wants to live here, you know what?
They should just get to come and live here.
I don't own the country. The government doesn't own the country.
You don't own the country. Somebody can buy the house.
Somebody can get them to give them a job.
Somebody can come over and panhandle for all I care.
The idea that we who are in can now raise the portcullis and control who else comes in, it's all just the most evil nonsense, of course.
And a lot of it has to do with unions who want to keep immigrants out.
Unions don't want immigrants coming in because it's going to drive down the price of manual labor.
And so the unions pressured the state to raise the immigration barriers so that the unions can keep their wages high, the wages high of their members and so on.
And it's all the most complete nonsense.
I mean, I would not feel at all threatened by anyone coming in from any country for my position because it takes a long time to know the Canadian business culture, to develop your contacts.
I feel no threat. But if I'm some guy laying brick, where I basically can be taught to do it with hand gestures and then be productive, then I am going to feel that immigrants are going to threaten my livelihood.
So this is just part of the cycle of violence that goes on because we have a state.
Unions would never be able to block all entrance points to a country and never be able to set up something as convoluted and mad as an immigration system.
You need a state to do that.
And so once you have the state doing that, then you can offload the costs of keeping all of these competitive workers out, or at least driving them underground.
You can drive this cost and keep it on to the taxpayers.
So the taxpayers then sort of pay threefold, right?
They pay for the costs to keep an immigration system going.
They pay for the unions to lobby the government to increase the taxes on them.
And finally, all of the increased price of goods that occur because the unions are managing to keep people out or driving them into the black market, all of those things are more expensive because of this process as well.
So this is sort of a massive pillaging.
All predicated entirely and completely upon the existence and power of the state.
There's just no conceivable way that you would be able to get this done without the state.
And because there is a state, you can get it done.
And one of the tiny but somewhat significant casualties of this is little eight-year-old Cecilia Zhang, who is dragged from her bed and strangled accidentally or who knows what, right?
Because some guy wants to get past the horrible, violent restrictions on staying in Canada.
So that he doesn't get sent back to the even more horrible and violent state that he came from.
So if you want to sort of personalize things a little bit so you don't just think of abstract quarter of a billion people murdered in the 20th century by states, if you want to just make it a little bit more personal, just look up on the web a picture of Cecilia Zhang and you will see what the state can snuff out in its wisdom.
And that is something that It's just important to remember, all these big abstract numbers and so on, it's just very important to remember what gets snuffed out, what is the face of somebody who's killed by state policies.
And it's not obvious. This is not going to show up in the statistics.
But it's very real.
It's very real.
And it's a very powerful indictment to just look at a picture of one girl and say, but for state policies, this girl would now be alive.
And I mean the state policies in China and in Canada.
And of course, nobody's drawing these conclusions, right, at all, right?
So, I mean, it's just nonsense.
I mean, people are just saying, wow, what a random, crazy crime.
I mean, boy, this was just weird, wasn't it, you know?
Because they don't understand the desperation of being sent back into a gulag, of being sent back to China, where you're eyed with suspicion for having any kind of contact with the West, and you could well end up killed or in jail.
So that may lead you to do something desperate like this.
I mean, I don't know. I mean, we'll find out more.
And I'm certainly not saying that what he did was not evil.
It is evil, but it is directly causal to state policies.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that.
Now, the other thing which I'll talk about sort of briefly is the movie Fight Club, which I watched in 1999, right in the middle of my 18-month bout with significant insomnia, with zero to one to two hours of sleep a night for approximately 18 months, which was just a hellish situation for me.
This is during the time of great transition, which is why I fully understand the difficulties of Getting rid of your family if they're corrupt, of getting rid of corrupt friends and corrupt relationships, and that's why I have nothing but empathy for people who go through this or who choose to take this path.
It's fantastic, but that first step is a bit of a doozy, let's say.
So I was going through this terrible period of insomnia.
I just broke up with my girlfriend of seven years and moved out.
We were living together. And I was breaking up, getting out of my business, breaking up with my friends.
And it was just a terrible, terrible crawling out of the corruption of the modern world and finally drawing that line between ideals and practice and And action, that was a very, very difficult transition for me, a nightmarish transition, but full of strange beauty at the same time.
I had the most vivid dreams that I've ever had in my life, vivid and beautiful dreams.
And I had immense fits of inspiration and wrote an entire book about this process.
And I just found it the most wild time, and also a time full of a great deal of emotional violence.
I felt emotional violence within me, sort of great anger, great fear, great joy, great rage, great affection, just a very, very powerful series of emotions coursing through me for most of this period.
And so, of course, right in the middle of it, I go and see Fight Club, which, if you haven't seen it briefly, is the story of a guy...
Who is an insurance adjuster.
He can't sleep. He ends up going to these self-help groups for people with terminal illnesses where he finds great relief and then he's able to sleep.
He becomes addicted to them and then one day he meets this guy who's a soap salesman.
He's on a plane and he ends up starting a fight club with this guy, a series of fight clubs.
And I won't spoil the ending or anything, but it's a film that's well worth seeing if you haven't seen it.
Now, I'm just going to touch upon it briefly because there's a lot to the film.
But what I found compelling about it was it actually talked about some ideas.
It actually talked about some ideas.
Incredibly rare for a film of any kind.
I mean, it's all Hollywood films, but, you know, European films, Indian films that I've seen, no different.
I mean, exactly the same.
They don't talk about ideas at all.
But this film did, and I thought it was really, really well done.
And, I mean, it's pretty Freudian in a lot of ways, but the basic idea is that, for me, the basic idea is that What you need to do to grow is to embrace what is unthinkable, to embrace the opposite, to embrace contradiction, because it is through contradiction that you get truth, right?
So all the certainty that we have when we're young, and by that I would sort of mean up to 25 or 30, all the certainty that we have when we're young is inherited from people who've told us lies, in my opinion.
So our parents and our teachers and the culture and the media and so on, news and so on, all of them, movies, everything that we feel that we're certain about is simply falsehood.
Now, how do you let go of falsehood?
Well, the challenge of letting go of falsehood is it's not exactly an easy transition.
You don't just sort of take your little yacht of falsehood into the dock and step off it.
What you have to do is jump off a cliff, looking down and seeing rocks, and just believe that somehow they're going to turn into pillows or you're going to fly.
It is a really terrifying transition to let go of all certainty and to embrace what you perceive as the opposite.
And so that to me was very challenging for me, and this is sort of what the film's about.
So, we'll talk about some of the sort of opposites that I see in the film and the sort of embrace of the opposites.
Well, the first thing that allows him to sleep is when he goes to a testicular cancer support group and he meets Meatloaf, the singer.
And Meatloaf was a weightlifter who abused steroids and therefore got testicular cancer and now he has these big...
Man boobs, because I guess once his testicles were removed, he ended up with an excess or deficiency of testosterone or excess of estrogen or something like that.
So he's growing breasts, right?
So this is...
And there's this big sweaty hug.
It's kind of gross, but...
He actually finds a great deal of comfort in this.
So embracing contradiction.
You have this weightlifter, a very masculine guy, who's got this high-pitched voice and these man boobs and so on.
So he's a real contradiction between male and female.
You have men with no testicles.
Again, it's a kind of contradiction.
Now, of course, the fact that he finds comfort in a room full of men with no testicles is not that surprising, because he himself has been emasculated by feminine culture.
So, for instance, he's overly obsessed with finding bath towels that match his tiles or something like that, and he goes through his IKEA catalogue.
Condo and so on.
And he really has been castrated by consumer culture, right?
By the pursuit of material things for the sake of material things, not because they give him pleasure or passion or anything like that.
And so he exists in this airless, lonely, materialistic, empty world.
And he's trapped there.
He's trapped completely in this kind of situation.
And so he finds this guy on a plane who is clearly anarchistic and clearly is opposed to all of the prevailing order in a really kind of classically anarchistic kind of way and who is not at all impressed by any material things and is not impressed by cleverness and so on.
And so when they start talking The insurance guy, I can't remember, Tyler, his name is.
No, Tyler's the other guy. The insurance guy, I just say the name of the actor, Ed Norton.
He says, you know, well, it's like single-serving food they have on here, single-serving creamers and single-serving coffee.
And on planes, it's also like single-serving friends, because you just see them and you dispose, blah, blah, blah, right?
And so Brad Pitt's sort of Tyler Durden character says, hey, that's pretty clever.
How's that working out for you?
Being clever. And the guy's sort of startled, right?
Because this is something that nobody really asks you that much.
You don't get those kind of penetrating questions on a plane or even from close friends and family.
People don't say, how is your shtick working out for you?
How is being clever working out for you?
And he says, great. He's like, well, keep it up then.
So clearly, this is not someone who's ready for change yet.
And so this is a really fascinating process when they first meet.
It's well worth watching it a couple of times.
I think it's well written. Because this is a guy who's got these pithy little statements.
He's kind of clever. It's kind of detached.
He's obviously not a passionate and deeply committed man in any way, shape, or form.
So he's obsessed with You know, trivialities and inconsequentialities and little do-do-my-sheets-match-my-drapes kind of crap.
And it's gay, frankly.
And it's gay in the worst kind of gay, too, which is neither masculine nor effeminate, right?
He's just non-sexual.
He has no gender. He's neither male nor female.
And so he is sort of sexless himself with no drive, no passion, and then he embraces this meatloaf character who is not neither sex, but both sexes, right?
Because he's obviously a man, but he's got breasts and so on, and so it's embracing this contradiction.
It's embracing the opposite that is the source of a lot of growth in life.
And so this guy who is all about insurance and controlling risk and he sees dangerous things every day and he's trying to live safe in his little condo.
Well, his condo gets blown up.
So he has to go and stay at Tyler Durden.
Now he had this at the anarchist's place.
So he had this beautiful little Ikea condo, and now he's going to live in this absolute crap heap of a house.
And he's sort of hanging around in his bathrobe.
He's not working. There's one scene where they're sort of shooting golf into buildings across the road, and so on.
So he's living in this absolute crap heap, this guy who's all about insurance risk and controlling risks.
So he takes a completely opposite approach.
He no longer is embracing safety.
He is now embracing wild anarchistic danger.
And this takes the form of the Fight Club.
So after having drinks with Tyler one night, where Tyler is saying, you know, what do we care as guys?
Why do we even know what a duvet is?
Like, what does it really mean to us in a hunter-gatherer sense?
Nothing. And then he says, to hell with Martha Stewart.
She's polishing the brass knobs on the Titanic.
This whole system is going down.
And of course, he's quite right.
I mean, this is the insight that's in the movie, that the entire system that we have is on its last legs, and it is going down.
And so this idea that you're supposed to be focused on these pretty little minutiae of material goods is complete nonsense, right?
You should be focusing on the big picture, as we're trying to do through this conversation.
So... To hell with all of these little minutiae and little details.
Who cares? The really important thing is to get in touch with the deep stuff in life, right?
To get in touch with the real reality of life, to get in touch with what is deep and personal and powerful within yourself.
I would say that that's the argument for morality, but that's not, of course, these guys' approach.
So, of course, what happens is they end up fighting in the parking lot for a variety of reasons, and they end up starting this fight club, right?
So, this guy who's working in this nightmarish office world...
Of the cubicles and oppressive bosses and so on.
He becomes sort of a mean and brutal savage filled with sort of cuts and bruises and so on.
And again, this is the opposite, right?
Instead of being a safe guy who's worrying about his decorating tips or decorating problems, he's now throwing himself into brutal fistfights.
So it is very much about embracing the opposite.
And he's sleeping well, right?
He's sleeping well because he's no longer living this one-dimensional, tiny, false self kind of life.
He's actually embracing something that is deeper and more meaningful.
Now, of course, I don't care for the violence.
I really don't. I understand that it's a movie, and you want to see Brad Pitt's torso, but to me, this would be a much more powerful movie without the fistfights.
I just never found that stuff to be too powerful.
That's sort of the least meaningful part of it for me.
And they do talk quite a bit about the domination of the feminine and the rebellion of the body.
These are the things that I've talked about briefly in The God of Atheists as well.
But the rebellion of the body is important.
That the body rebels against being mistreated, not exercised, fed poorly, and so on.
And you sort of need to get in touch with that.
And one scene that I thought was just great, which is where Tyler Durden is scrubbing himself in his absolutely mangy bathtub, which again is pretty funny, right?
He's trying to clean himself in a completely scum-infested and rotting bathtub.
And he says something like, we're a generation of men raised by women.
Because his dad's sort of gone away or whatever, right?
So we're a generation of men raised by women.
And he's talking about dating this woman, played by Helena Bonham Carter.
I don't think that the solution for us is another woman.
And I think that's fairly important.
These guys, in order to appreciate and love women, I think you need to appreciate and love masculinity.
This is sort of my pop psychology moment of the day.
That to truly appreciate the feminine, you have to appreciate the masculine.
And one of the reasons why relationships are such a mess these days is that there is precious little respect given for the masculine.
Any time a man attempts to assert anything, he's just considered to be a bully and a patriarch and a mean guy or whatever.
And so we live in these perpetual matriarchies wherein men just don't have a say and women run everything.
And that's sort of been my experience in relationships up to the woman I met who gave respect for me.
And of course, I earned a good deal of respect for my own masculinity by working through these insomnia issues.
But I just think it's very important that we be confident and happy and joyful in our own masculinity.
And I'm not going to give you any clues on how to do that.
If you're curious, let me know and I'll do a podcast series on it.
But trust me, it doesn't involve any sort of tribal drumming or any of that sort of Iron John nonsense kind of stuff.
But there are definite ways that you can learn to love being a man, and through that, you will end up learning to love women, right?
Because we are compatible genders, in my view, but you can't have any more love for women or femininity than you do for masculinity.
My sort of approach is, I think, sort of borne out in this sort of film, where because this guy doesn't have any sort of emasculated semi-man, he ends up having to go to the complete opposite extreme of masculinity in order to try and find a balance, right? So from a guy who's obsessing over Martha Stewart colors, he turns into a guy who is getting the crap beaten out of him and beating the crap out of other people every night.
So he's embracing an opposite from...
Being completely emasculated, he goes to an exaggerated and hyper form of masculinity.
From being somebody who is obsessed with rules, he swings into someone who is completely against rules.
From somebody who's completely obsessed with his appearance and the order and neatness of his living space, he ends up living in this complete crap house Of a messy living space.
And from somebody who's very obsessed with his career, he turns into somebody who is able to get himself fired by pretending to beat himself up and this and that.
So there's lots of opposites that are embraced in this film.
And the opposite as well is also moving from a highly technological society to what Tyler Durden describes in a sort of brief speech, which is a completely at-technological or anti-technological society.
So the world that Tyler Durden thinks of, the world that he sees is...
People hunting bisons down the stone corridors of New York City and drying pelts on the abandoned expressway and so on.
So he has this vision of life that is very primitive, very savage, and is the complete opposite of this hyper-refined and emasculated life that the character leads at the very beginning.
And there is also not any appreciation for the feminine in this film at the beginning.
So the girl that this guy gets involved in, that Tyler Durden gets involved in, hates herself.
As much as he is non-masculine, she is non-feminine.
So she hates herself and at one point commits suicide and has these sort of shocking lines like, you know, I want to have your abortion.
I haven't been blipped like that since grade school, as I mentioned the other day.
So she sort of hates herself as much as he hates himself, and it is due to his lack of acceptance of his own masculinity and her own lack of acceptance and love of her own femininity and so on.
Now, this embracing the opposite is very important in terms of personal growth.
So, for instance, it's what is unthinkable for you that is your path to growth.
And I know this sounds all very zen and contradictory, but it's just that the false self is...
A unity of perspective that is entirely artificial, right?
You want a multiplicity of perspectives in order to gain wisdom in life.
And I'm not just talking about 2 plus 2 is 4, the state is evil, and so on.
But it's very important that you gain a multiplicity of perspectives.
And usually what that means is to embrace what is unthinkable to you, or what your entire personality is sort of designed to keep at bay.
So, for instance, there are two things, of course, that I have pursued for most of my adult life.
One is logic. And the other is morality.
So what was it that was my path to growth?
Well, I had to say to myself, am I logical?
Am I moral? And I actually found that the answer was in the negative.
And of course, that's part of the journey that I talk about in The God of Atheists, that after spending 20-odd years trying to be logical and moral, I found out that I was neither, which was unthinkable to me because I had all the theory.
I just wasn't putting it into practice, which is one of the reasons why my life was not going the way that I wanted it to and why I was wasting my time.
Because the other thing that is very prevalent in Fight Club, which is very important, is that your life is ending, right?
I mean, every day, you're one day closer to the end.
Life is short. If you get obsessed with minutiae and forget about the big picture, then you really are pissing your life away in the most inconsequential, banal, and futile kind of manner.
And so this living with the awareness of death is also, this is sort of the duality.
This is the opposite of consciousness, of organic consciousness, that Life is at its richest when we remember that we're going to die.
That is a very important aspect.
If you forget about death, this is book Denial of Death.
It may be important to read if you've never sort of dwelt on this topic before.
But to accept the fact that you're going to die is absolutely crucial if you want to make sure that you're going to live as richly and as powerfully as possible.
And I'm not saying that I do that every single day, but I certainly try to keep it in mind that there will come a time when, you know, they throw me in the ground and throw dirt in my face, and I will have no more chance to go back and to make up for lost time or to get back the hours that I may have wasted.
And wasted doesn't mean like sitting there watching TV. I mean, that's not wasting your life if that's what you genuinely feel like doing at the moment, but...
In doing things for the pleasure of other people, doing things for the effect of other people, doing things for what is considered to be socially acceptable, is a kind of living death.
It is a kind of stasis and a kind of self-destruction that is really not...
It's not helpful. It's not going to make you happy.
So this embrace of the opposite, I think, is quite important.
Now, the fact that this opposite, the embrace of the opposite in this movie results in sort of pretty widespread destruction, I think is useful as a metaphor for one's own illusions, but not really, you know, you blow up the credit card buildings to achieve freedom and things like that.
But it is important, the statement that is made, like, you are not your wallet, you are not one of the contents of your bank account, you are not your gap pants, you are not, you know, and this is all quite true, right?
We are not our material possessions.
They are an effect of us.
And what you own ends up owning you.
I don't quite think that's true.
I don't know if it's owned by my car or owned by my computer.
But it is important to remember, I think, that material possessions are just a means to an end.
They are A means to an end, and the end is happiness.
And happiness is based on the pursuit of virtue and truth and goodness and integrity and having courageous fights in life where the stakes are high enough and the audience is receptive enough to really fight for the best in other people to try and save their souls, if I may borrow a metaphor from our Christian friends.
That is a really deep and powerful part of life, and I think that's where we should be spending our time and our energies.
And so I think that if you sort of don't worry so much about the sort of fistfights and so on, but look for this embrace of the opposites in the movie, which results in cohesion at the end, which in a manner that I won't describe here if you haven't seen the film...
But it's well worth looking at that and seeing that sort of play out in a film that has quite violence and so on.
But the violence, I think, in this case, if you take it as a metaphor for the personality, which it is definitely shown to be near the end, then I think you can get something out of this film, because I thought it was quite powerfully done.
So, thank you so much for listening, and if you like the movie, feel free to donate to freedomainradio.com.
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