July 21, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:44
4148 The Truth About Fight Club. One Minute At A Time.
Movie Summary: "A depressed man (Edward Norton) suffering from insomnia meets a strange soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and soon finds himself living in his squalid house after his perfect apartment is destroyed. The two bored men form an underground club with strict rules and fight other men who are fed up with their mundane lives. Their perfect partnership frays when Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group crasher, attracts Tyler's attention."Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We are with Dr. Duke Pesta, a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
For more from Dr. Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org.
The link is below.
Dr. Pesta, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Glad to be with you, Steph. So the reason we're going to be talking about Fight Club, which I know breaks the rules, but the reason we're going to be talking about Fight Club is because we don't live in the same place.
Otherwise, we would have just stripped to our waist and beat each other senseless with nihilism.
But we are going to talk about Fight Club.
We're going to focus a little bit more on the movie, although we've both...
Read the book now you just read it in preparation for this.
Oh my goodness. Do you know I gave you homework?
That's so enjoyable to me in a little academic drone.
I did it. So yeah, this for me, this is unique.
I I remember hearing about Fight Club back at I was teaching at a small college outside of Philadelphia in the year 2000 and all my kids were buzzing about this movie.
So important was it that this little small university college actually About a thousand kids.
They started their own underground fight club.
So kids were coming to class with bruises on their faces.
And the girls even got into it.
They created a club that they called Foxy Boxing.
And the girls were pounding each other in the aftermath of this movie.
But I never did go back and read it until you assigned me the homework, and I'm glad I did.
So, what are your thoughts?
You know, I'll just throw my opening gambit on the table and we can do our usual game of chess here.
Well, some might call it checkers, but I'm going to pretend it's chess.
I think it really is the triumph of postmodern subjectivity, this movie, the argument that Everything is utterly subjective, starting with the schizophrenic narrator himself.
Everything is completely relative and relativistic.
A lot of people see the movie as empowering, and we'll focus more on it.
I think more people probably have seen the movie, so we'll more or less talk about that.
I think a lot of people see it as empowering.
I think there are aspects of the movie that are very empowering.
All the graduate students talk about the anti-commercialism, anti-capitalism, and that's certainly a factor, but I think there's something bigger going on here.
To me, it surprised me when I watched the movie and read the book, How quickly the movie falls to pieces.
The Fight Club is one thing, and then all of a sudden there's this immediate segue to Project Mayhem, which is nothing more than anarchy, right?
And you see how the men who were previously empowered, so to speak, from Fight Club, they become kind of drones again, don't they, in Project Mayhem?
They become obedient and submissive.
They refuse to think for themselves.
They simply follow the code of Tyler Durden.
And so to me, it's a movie that ultimately implodes upon, many have commented, I think justly, on how the movie has an ending problem.
The whole Project Mayhem scene seems to be a very different movie from the earlier, and I believe that's true as well.
And I mentioned this to you beforehand, and I know maybe you're not as familiar with it, but I know a lot of you in your audience will.
For me, in watching this movie, it just kept putting me in mind of another movie from exactly the same year.
I didn't realize, 1999, 2000, not only did it give us This movie, Fight Club, it also gave us The Boondock Saints, which is another movie about cultural anarchy and dissolution, but with a radically different way of seeing things.
The two vigilante protagonists, two young Irish boys, Irish Catholic boys, who start a vigilante campaign to kill all the evil men.
There are so many wonderful parallels between the two movies.
And if indeed Fight Club is sort of the epitome of postmodern subjectivity carried to its logical conclusion, Then I think that the Boondock Saints tries to reverse that subjectivity with a nod towards the objectivity of good versus evil.
And there are two movies I think that could be really well understood side by side.
Yeah. There is...
Okay, there's going to be spoilers, just so everyone knows, but the movie's almost turning 20, so if the movie can almost have its own drink, I think spoilers are acceptable.
From a personal standpoint, I was enmeshed in some fairly corrupt relationships when the movie came out.
I actually had been battling insomnia at this point for well north of six to eight months.
So for me, the movie starting off with this sort of crippling description of insomnia and like just looking at Ed Norton's eye bags just makes you like, you know, you're never awake, you're never asleep.
And the depiction of insomnia was astoundingly relevant and powerful and it's rarely depicted in, there was an Al Pacino movie called Insomnia, but it's rarely depicted and it's a big modern problem, particularly with smartphones and tablets these days.
And I found the movie just astoundingly powerful in its nihilistic wisdom.
In other words, when you're not taught anything, you can become skeptical of everything, but you stand for nothing.
And this seems to me very powerful.
This is the weird arc of our society in the 21st century.
We have this incredible technology that keeps getting better and more powerful and better and more powerful.
And yet, we are sliding back in time to prehistory, when it comes to philosophy, when it comes to ethics.
And there is a rampant anti-modernistic, and by modernistic, not the postmodern stuff, but there's anti-capitalism, anti-technology.
I mean, they're relentlessly primitive.
Not just, you mentioned the sort of anarchy.
Well, anarchy just means without rulers.
This is just wantom terrorism and destruction.
But there's a powerful scene where Brad Pitt's character is murmuring and talking about, you know, in the world of my vision, we are stalking elk around the ruins of the Rockefeller Center.
You look down from the top of a tall building and you see people pounding corn in the ruins of a superhighway.
There is this very powerful Rousseauian thirst for primitivism, for an abandonment of a technology system.
That came about as the result of wisdom.
Why do we have a modern world?
Because there were Christian philosophers, Enlightenment philosophers, who built universal property rights, who built subjugation of rulers under the law, who built various philosophical foundations to the explosion of wealth we have in the modern world.
And now we've lost all of that wisdom.
The philosophy that we have is incredibly primitive.
You know, the primitive tribes, they apologize to a rock when they have to move it out of the way to plow.
They think that ghosts live in trees.
They believe that their tribe is always the best.
There's no universality, no objectivity, no reason.
And so to me, we've got this incredible arc of technology founded on rationality and founded on universality that has been eaten away.
By the primitivism that has been infecting our culture since Rousseau onwards.
And this collision of the technology with the underlying nihilism to me is one of the centers of the film.
Yeah, I think that's well said.
I agree with you. And the part of the film that's interesting to me is that part of it.
And just because, maybe just to throw this out there for readers or for watchers who aren't really familiar since we're spoiler alerting, Tyler Durden is sort of the projection of the main, the narrator.
Edward Norton's character is a bit schizophrenic, right?
He loses himself in another entire character who he calls Tyler Durden.
And Tyler Durden, the Brad Pitt character, is sort of everything that the emasculated Edward Norton wants to be, kind of a projection of the hyper-masculine male.
And I think what you said is exactly right.
I think of the barbarians over the wall metaphor with the fall of Rome.
You think about the thousand years of Roman civilization with indoor plumbing, basically indoor plumbing that worked with aqueducts and with high-level engineering and sophisticated libraries.
And all of the technology that Rome had given the ancient world.
And then in the fifth century, the barbarians come crashing in and they occupy now what was once the shattered civilization of Rome.
And they're sitting there with their sticks banging on their drums and imposing, trying to make sense in their pagan way of the great edifice of Rome that had fallen.
And to me, that's a perfect metaphor for Fight Club.
I love the critique of capitalism.
I'm as militant a capitalist as you're going to find.
I think it does lead to, in the aggregate, greater wealth, greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater personal liberty.
But that doesn't mean it's beyond critique.
And I think that some of the smartest critique of capitalism, very little smart critique of capitalism comes from Karl Marx or any of his Legion followers.
I do think the kind of quasi-anarchists of the postmodern era come a little closer to it.
In arguing that there is a certain emasculization that goes along with it, there's a certain herd mentality that it's capable of breeding, a certain resigned level of materialist culture that you're willing to accept at the expense of higher order things.
And so I appreciate that aspect of the movie very much.
The problem is, once you, with great wit and sophistication, deconstruct civilization, because it's not just capitalism, I think, that the movie deconstructs, just like it's not just capitalism.
That postmodernism is deconstructing.
You said it yourself. Philosophy now is being taken back to the Stone Age, really.
This is tribal politics.
You think about Political correctness and social justice warriors, they're fighting with intellectual sticks and stones.
That's all they've got, right? You disagree with me, I'm going to hit you with the brick of racism.
You don't agree with me on gender, you're a transphobe.
Literally, we're fighting it out around campfires now, again, on supposedly the most highest intellectual levels of our academic culture, which have devolved into this kind of—I like the word anarchy here.
It is a kind of anarchy, but it's one that is carefully crafted and controlled.
And I love how the whole thing is also mediated by mental illness, too, right?
This inability to see one side or the other.
And remember, in 1999, if I'm not mistaken, we really didn't have cell phones yet.
We certainly didn't have internet on our cell phones.
You think about how much worse the problems that Fight Club identifies, you think about how much worse they are.
In the 20 years since the movie was made, turns out it was pretty prophetic, the movie, in terms of isolating what the problem was in modern society.
Yeah. The untutored aspect of the young, to me, is very powerful here.
And there's a scene, so he's called the narrator.
He doesn't actually have a name, sort of the Edward Norton character.
He blows up his own condo, which is sophisticated and technological and so on, and he basically ends up living in In a hovel, in a ratty old house.
It's one of these movies, there's not one burst of sunlight the entire movie.
It's all dark and cloudy and rotten.
And he's living without running water, with intermittent electricity.
He's very much going back to this kind of primitivism.
And there's a scene where he and Tyler Durden are sitting in this rotten wreckage of a house.
And they're talking about their lives, and you get this kind of opening up.
And this, to me, I remember this so vividly sitting in the theater, like popcorn frozen on its way to my mouth, just like jaw dropped.
And for me, when intelligence shows up in a movie, it's like this incredible oasis in what is usually just a CGI stimulation of your neurons.
Because I remember the movie Disclosure, there was some debate about male and female responsibility for the ills in society.
I'm like, oh, let's rewind that.
So when this stuff shows up, and there's this conversation between two of them, goes something like this.
He says, I can't...
The narrator says, like, I can't get married.
I'm a 30-year-old boy.
I've never grown up.
I have no responsibilities.
I have no purpose.
I have no goal.
I have no higher path, no higher meaning.
And... We now know that it's the same character, but Tyler Durden says, I never knew my father, right?
I never knew my father, which is different from saying I had no father, right?
Because I never knew my father means I don't have a conceptual understanding of him.
And then he says, you know, I graduate from high school.
I call him up and he says, what do you do?
I say, what do you do? And he says, I don't know.
I don't know. Go to college.
This is the sum total of wisdom that the boomers are handing down.
I don't know. Go to college.
And then it's like, graduation college, I don't know, get a job.
I don't know, get married.
And this incredible lack of handing down of any kind of wisdom from the elder generation, they really just left the young to invent everything all over again.
And there's an old, there's a German writer who many years ago said something like, my parents were neglectful, I raised myself, and like everyone who raised children, himself I did a pretty bad job of it and I think that's the younger generation who have inherited no particular wisdom from their elder generation now we can talk about why well the welfare state means that the parents don't pay for negative actions on part of the children and They don't have to be nice to their kids because they've got old-age pensions which in and health care and they don't have to so some of the family wisdom has been disrupted by status programs and then there is of course this post-modernism where the elders wisdom is always portrayed as benevolence sorry as malevolence as ignorance as bigotry and so on and this astounding emptiness of Wisdom.
That wisdom just kind of hit the post-war generation and stopped there and everyone since then has just been trying to invent things and go the entire course of human intellectual evolution starting from ground zero.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I see it at the universities all the time.
The boomer generation, the first generation after World War II, I think, and you're on my generation, Steph, probably did continue it.
It's this argument that we spend more time apologizing about our traditions, our culture, our faith, our values, our history, than we do explaining it.
If you think about how in basically 20, 30 years, we went from Teaching kids the basic truth of American history, right?
We taught kids that America was a great but flawed institution.
America was the best hope for liberty and freedom based on its system, and yet we were capable of bad things as well.
That went in a 30-40 year period from being that America is irredeemably racist, the Constitution is nothing but white supremacist, that the flag is a symbol of hate and intolerance.
And so we're not only handing our kids nothing, we're not just handing them nothing, we're handing them hatred And hostility of the kind you see, I think, really manifested in someone like Tyler Durden.
You know, the comic, there's a comic, a similarly postmodern comic scene in pop culture in the 1990s that matches the one you just said about this kind of like, we're just, I'm a 30, when the narrator says, I'm a 30-year-old boy, I'm not fit for anything.
It's that scene in Seinfeld, also a show about nothing, In which you have George and Jerry sitting at a coffee shop, and they're talking about, we're not men.
We're not men. There's nothing manly about us, right?
And they're lamenting in a very funny way what the narrator is relating in a kind of tragic and sad way.
And I got a couple quotes from the movie I set aside, and one I think that fits right in what you were saying.
About fathers. Absent fathers are huge in this movie, and they contribute to a running theme of castration and emasculation through the movie.
You think about the Meatloaf character, right?
The character played by Meatloaf who had testicular cancer.
Testicular cancer, by the way, is a running theme of that entire movie.
Men getting literally diseased in their genitalia so they don't function anymore.
Well, and toxic masculinity has rarely had a more compressed analogy.
Exactly. Well, and you've got meatloaf with these big man boobs now because of the hormones he's on.
Just a couple of quotes from this.
At one point, Tyler Durden, the projection, the hyper-masculine projection of the narrator says, fuck damnation, man, fuck redemption.
We are God's unwanted children.
So be it. Shut up.
Our fathers were our models for God.
Our fathers were our models for God.
If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
Listen to me. You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.
He never wanted you.
In all probability, he hates you.
This is not the worst thing that can happen.
We don't need him.
And then a little bit later in the movie, this quote that I think ties in with this gender problem in the movie, Tyler Durden also says, we are a generation of men raised by women.
I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.
Even that moment, I remember that gives me goosebumps even now, I'm telling you, man.
That moment in the theater where it's like, wait a minute.
Women are being even remotely tangentially criticized.
That's right. Because we are a generation of men raised by women.
And look at the fallout. The fallout is that like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, they've almost become caricatures of masculinity.
So one of them has become the beaten down eunuch consumer that post-capitalism kind of demands and requires.
He just sits there on the toilet obsessing about the IKEA furniture that he can buy So he has become a eunuch.
Whereas the other guy has become a hyper-masculine taker of women and fomenter of violence.
And neither of these, to me, are masculine.
Like, one is sort of very primitive and sort of pre-civilization masculine.
Ape-like, almost. Whereas the other is this neutered eunuch, you know, he for she.
Kind of castrato that doesn't really have any particular power, but we are a generation of men raised by women.
That is an astounding thing and could have sparked a wonderful conversation in society about what is the cost of fatherless boys.
I mean, the cost of fatherless girls, we can't imagine that the woman who will get to this...
Marnie Singer was her name?
Marla Singer, sorry, Marla Singer.
The woman will get... I mean, we can't imagine she had a good relationship with her father, to put it mildly.
But we are a generation of men raised by women.
And this monk-like, I mean, to me, they can say God is dead.
They can say, but they have become a set of violent monks, right?
They all live together.
There aren't women around.
They're all devoted to each other.
They become a set of anarchy monks, if you want to put it that way.
And to me, you can say, well, you know, we've just gotten rid of God, but then explain to me the crucifixion scene, right, where he puts the chemical burn on his hand in the spot where Jesus took the nail, and that brings him spiritual enlightenment and growth.
Yeah, exactly right.
And I think, you know, let's not forget that the very name Marla Singer is kind of an anagram for alarm rings, right?
Or alarms ring. She's the one female, the only female character in the movie.
And she is a mess herself.
And I think what they were trying to convey in that movie is that the fatherless boys, boys who are not taught how to be men, And that means the caricatures, right?
You've got the eunuch, as you said, the hype, the Conan, the barbarian figure.
Think about this. For how many decades in a modern American feminism have feminists been lobbying the claim that Western culture's got to go because women are treated as either Madonnas or whores, right?
That total simplification of history that the feminists always engage in to make their patriarchy point.
But this idea that women were either whores or they were blessed, untouchable saints and there was nothing in the way, nothing in the middle.
Modern feminism then also turned around, and with a couple generations of fatherless boys, you could not have had the so-called transgender revolution unless women were raising boys.
You could not have had it. You could not have had it unless you removed the male presence from the home.
This whole gender confusion argument now, I think, is predicated not on Gender suddenly becoming malleable when it never was before.
It's on not representing real masculinity to boys or little girls for that matter.
I think that we're so representing everything from the female side that boys are confused.
They see attention.
They see praise by becoming more feminine, by gravitating to the feminine or to emulating the people in their lives who happen to be mostly women now.
There's a big problem, I think, with all of this, too.
And the movie makes a great gender point about it.
The question I would go is, I think a lot of men react to this.
I think if you're only two choices and they're false choices, as you pointed out, if the only two choices are sit when you pee emasculation or the kind of hyper-masculinity that we have represented in Tyler Durden, Men are gonna choose the latter every time.
We want to be like Tyler.
We don't want to be more feminine.
Even think about what just happened with the Boy Scouts, for God's sake, Steph.
I mean, you have a situation now where the Boy Scouts are too threatening because they're the Boy Scouts.
So the Boy Scouts open themselves up to little girls.
Little girls are leaving the Girl Scouts in droves to join the Boy Scouts because, this is a funny thing, little boys clubs, little boys and little boys clubs, never throughout history felt a huge strong desire to join girls clubs.
Girls clubs, on the other hand, always were being told by modernists that unless you're part of the boys club, these girls clubs mean nothing.
So what happens? We open the boys clubs to girls.
Girls are leaving the Girl Scouts to join the Boy Scouts.
Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts are pissed off.
And the leadership of the Girl Scouts now are saying that we're going to do whatever it takes to get these little girls back with us where they belong, and we're still not going to take boys.
And so you have a weird situation now where the Boy Scouts really don't want the boys.
The Girl Scouts really don't want the boys.
Maybe, as I've said in a different format, maybe the boys need to leave the Boy Scouts and form their own organization and call it the Boy Scouts, if you could get away with doing that nowadays.
But you could see in that little postmodern drama playing out between the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts exactly what the problem is.
Any space that is a boy's space is a dangerous space.
It is a toxic space.
It is a threatening space.
It's a space that has to be deconstructed.
Meanwhile, girls are free to be girls unless they want to be boys, where they're more free to be boys than boys are.
And I do think it's not just a crisis for men, it's also a crisis for women.
And I think the Marla character, the only real woman in that entire movie, suggests what happens to women who have nothing to play off of masculine-wise.
The woman. See, everyone thinks that the movie is about masculinity, but it's not.
It's about masculinity and femininity.
Because there are, it looks like there are three main characters, but of course, as we find out at the end, there are two main characters, which is the narrator and Marla Singer.
Now, Marla Singer, the woman, is...
An absolutely toxic and abysmal mess.
You know, the chain smoker, she's hanging out at these support groups preying on the sympathies of other people.
She doesn't have a job.
She's a thief. She's undateable.
She'd be a horrifying mom.
She's wildly promiscuous.
I mean, the only thing we don't see is direct drug use.
And so... She is a completely horrifying human being and yet everyone says that the movie is simply about toxic masculinity and I submit to you, my friend Duke, that the movie is also about toxic femininity.
That this woman who is, you know, suicidal and just comes over for sex and wanders off who has no job.
I mean, it's never really explained how she has any kind of income at all.
They go to great pains to figure out, you know, okay, well, he basically threatens his boss and gets free paychecks and that's how they fund Project Mayhem and so on.
And Tyler Durden has all these jobs and he makes soap and he pees into clam chowder and all and has a job as a projectionist.
But Marla, I mean, I think once we see her stealing...
From a laundromat and selling some clothes.
It's not enough to live on. So the question is, what does she live on?
And my answer would be something like the welfare state.
She's got to get government services from some kind.
And so the idea that it's all about masculinity when it says this is the effect of being raised by women.
Women are all over the place.
They're omnipresent.
They're as present as God is pretending to be absent in the movie, but they are everywhere.
And the fact that he's considered to be feminized, the fact that men are threatened continually being turned into eunuchs, which is closer to femininity, and the fact that Marla Singer is there and is so ridiculously dysfunctional is, to me, saying that when women take over the family, both saying that when women take over the family, both the male and the female products of that are wretchedly self-destructive.
And that seems to get...
Maybe it's the charm of Helena Bonham Carter.
It's kind of odd because Fight Club is one of my favorite movies for the intellectual stimulation.
One of my other favorite movies is called The Room with a View, which is an old E.M. Forster novel and a Merchant Ivory production.
And a rather different Helena Bonham Carter shows up in that one.
So she's the thread in this China doll face and the big hair or whatever.
But she is monstrous and yet people only focus on the toxic masculinity when the movie says we're produced by women and these are the women who are around us.
Yeah, and you know, that's borne out in the movie as well because she only hangs around men and she's always constantly going to these self-help meetings.
That's where she meets Ed Norton's character, the narrator, and she goes to prostate cancer meetings.
She goes to meetings, self-help meetings that only men can be a part of.
So she's desperately trying to be part of that masculine world, right?
That she doesn't understand herself how to be female.
And there's that one horrifying scene in the movie where she actually thinks she has breast cancer.
And she says something to the effect of like, my tits gonna rot off.
And the paranoia that that raises that the only...
She's very androgynous too, by the way.
When you see her character in Fight Club, it's really quite androgynous.
I mean, she wears drab clothes.
She has kind of a tomboy haircut.
Her makeup is minimalist.
So, and she has a kind of a tomboyish face anyway.
So when she gets this, she thinks she has this breast tumor, it's the one thing that makes her even approach real femininity.
When in reality, she...
Then she needs a man. Yeah, she needs a man.
She goes running right to the Ed Norton character.
Now, the interesting question for me, which I really saw upon watching the film, I just sort of watched it again yesterday, is this focus on credit, I think, is generally unexplored.
Credit to me, you know, so at the end of the movie, the whole goal is that the big goal of Project Mayhem is called the big reset or going back to zero, which is to destroy everyone's credit history.
Now that is...
Kind of fascinating. And I actually think that's a stand-in.
Because the one thing that has always bothered me, which is absent in the movie, is that there is an entire government structure that overarchs what we call capitalism, right?
Massive amounts of taxation, fiat currency, debt, unfunded liabilities, huge promises made by sleazy democratic politicians to the open baby-mouth yapping of the endlessly voracious voters and so on.
And so there is this whole overarching...
People say it's a critique of capitalism.
It's like... I don't really think that that's fair because capitalism is now, to me, a relatively minor sibling in the family of the state and state power.
And to me, the fact that they wish to get rid of credit is really quite powerful and quite interesting because capitalism can function without credit.
But the modern government cannot function without credit.
So to me, in the same way they say, oh, God's not in here, there's no mention really of the state.
But to me, that's kind of everywhere and it permeates the whole movie.
And what they're getting rid of at the end would be something like the Federal Reserve or fiat currency or the disconnection of currency from gold, the gold standard and so on.
That to me would be the reset.
It wouldn't lead to primitivism.
It would lead to a new renaissance, to a new enlightenment, to a new golden age.
But the fact that they get rid of computers and credit, they're not getting rid of money.
They're not getting rid of trade.
They're not getting rid of property rights.
They're getting rid of debt and credit.
And that to me is very powerful.
It would have been much more powerful if it had been something like the Federal Reserve to be artistically depicted in that kind of way.
But there's probably some significant reasons why they either didn't or couldn't talk about it in that way.
But to me, credit undermines everything.
How can you be raised by a single mother if the government doesn't have a welfare state?
Well, the answer is you really can't.
How can you survive stealing from laundromats without welfare or other free things from the government?
Well, the answer is you can't.
And so, to me, everything that is dysfunctional in most of these human relationships comes because there's this big, all-powerful state massively redistributing resources, but it's never really talked about except tangentially.
Yeah, and there's also the sense, too, that relates to this in postmodern jargon of the panopticon, construction of the weird French philosopher Michel Foucault, this idea that there was the great eye in the sky that was constantly watching.
Back in the 1920s and 30s, that didn't exist, but it certainly exists now with all this technology capability.
Again, even in 1999, we were evolving towards this, this idea that somebody is watching.
And what I love about the movie, you said, God isn't mentioned much and the state isn't mentioned much.
But what do God and the state both have in common?
If God exists, then obviously he is watching and seeing everything we do.
If God exists, then there is.
A great eye in the sky that has a moral way of adjudicating or watching things.
And if the state is now surveilling us at this level too, well, then the state has its own political parameters by which we should behave.
And one of the things that's interesting about the movie to me is how everything goes underground.
I mean, everything is subversive.
They have the fight club in these places that you never would know, right?
In these abandoned old buildings or in these basements of warehouses.
There's that one great scene where the landlord doesn't realize that all these men have been beating each other senseless in the basement of one of his properties.
And he goes down into the basement with his bodyguard to confront Tyler Durden and these men for basically having sit-ins, for occupying this house, this building, and using it to fight.
And it starts with Tyler Durden letting the man beat him to a pulp, right?
Just keep throwing it in his face.
Come on, this is your building.
Let us stay. The landlord gets so mad he beats him up.
And by the end of it, the landlord gets beat to a pulp and he leaves the building letting them have it there.
And I think there is something I've mentioned...
Sorry, in the movie...
Sorry, I just wanted to correct...
In the movie, that's not the way...
I can't remember the book, but in the movie...
And to me, that's a very Christ-like thing.
You know, let me know if you think that's fair.
And sorry to interrupt, but that's an amazing scene because Tyler Durden is a very experienced physical fighter, right?
I mean, he's been fighting for months, if not years, by this point in the movie.
But he lets himself get beaten, even though he can fight back.
Now, I mean, Son of God, Crown of Thorns, Crucifixion, and so on.
The fact that you are one of the most powerful mortal, so to speak, or immortal in the universe, manifested on Earth, but you don't fight back.
That, to me, is so...
But what he does was he basically keeps begging to use the space while bleeding on the face of the man who's beaten him up.
And the man eventually just gets so freaked out, he says, fine, take it, and he leaves.
And it's almost like this weird Gandhi slash Jesus, not quite love your enemies, but don't fight back and show them the violence that they're inflicting upon you until some kind of conscience or horror kicks in and they leave you alone.
And that, I thought, was quite a powerful moment as well.
Yeah, and I think the point I was trying to drive at was, it's not just beating people up.
I don't think beating people up is the point of Fight Club.
I think taking a beating is the point of Fight Club.
It starts at the very beginning when Tyler Durden and the narrator have their first encounter in the parking lot, where Tyler Durden says, punch me in the face.
And Edward Norton's character says, the narrator, well, I've never been in a fight.
Well, that's not good, right?
And it's when Norton is provoked to punch the Tyler Durden character in the air that Tyler Durden has some kind of an almost orgasmic release, right?
Oh, man, no, it's good, it's good.
And so one of the great points, it seems to me, at Fight Club is that against these all-powerful forces that Are bigger than us, be they technological or state or material, sometimes the thing that you can do that most demonstrates your independence and your freedom is to be beaten.
And that goes to what you were just saying.
I think that's right. I think traditional Christian narratives, God is present in this movie all over the place, this tendency to the divine, right?
And rather than deny God's existence in that speech that I quoted, it's God is treated as an absent father.
God doesn't exist.
It's not that God doesn't exist.
It's that God, though he exists, is a derelict dad just like our dads were, many of us.
And that's a problem for them, too.
And so you've got the one hand.
It almost comes across as anarchic and atheist and materialistic.
And yet, really, it seems to me what the movie is scratching for is any kind of higher meaning.
It seems to demand it.
Right. There is something that struck me as well, and I just had a conversation about Streetcar Named Desire with a listener who called in.
Maybe we'll do that one day, too, because that's an amazing play.
But when you think of a married man having an affair with a woman...
The woman doesn't become a mother, right?
So the fulfillment of her material sexuality doesn't come to fruition, I guess, both literally and figuratively.
So when a man is having an affair with a woman, let's say he keeps this woman in some apartment across town and so on, well, she's got to be pretty, she's got to exercise, she's got to continually work her feminine attractiveness in order to have the man come over and want to have an affair with her.
But she never goes from sex object to mother, right?
And never graduates really beyond a very early and fairly primitive stage of female sexuality, which is to attract a man to the point where he'll commit with her, where they'll raise children and so on.
And the one thing that struck me was, so she becomes almost like a caricature of femininity.
She becomes a phase of female sexuality.
Attractiveness that just goes on way too long because it's not achieving its object, which is a legal commitment from a man to raise children, to have family, and so on.
Now, it struck me that these men, and also the woman who's the mistress, she kind of doesn't have a point.
Her point is to just wait around for the guy, and she doesn't really have a higher purpose other than to Be this kind of extended caricature of teenage female sexuality or youthful female sexuality and it kind of struck me the men too.
The men have no purpose.
The question is why don't the men have a purpose?
Why don't they have a higher goal?
Well, it's not because they're poor or broke because some of them have decent jobs.
It's not because they don't have opportunity or education and it's not just because They weren't raised by men.
That's a bit of a simplistic explanation.
Because if you look at the First World War, think of the number of young men who weren't raised by men because their fathers were killed in the First World War, or the Second World War, or you name it.
Going back throughout history, there were tons of boys not raised by men throughout our warlike history.
The question is, what is really going on?
To me, and put forward a little bit of a hypothesis and see if it makes any sense.
I think that the women are married to the state.
And the men are their concubines.
The men are their harem.
The men are their little piece on the side, their side dish, their crumpets, their man candy, their himbos, whatever you want to call them.
And I think that like the woman waiting for the married man to come to her apartment, who's bored and frustrated and is unable to move beyond merely being sexually attractive to the point where she becomes a mother, I think that the men have no purpose.
Why? Because the women don't need them.
And why don't the women need them?
Because the purpose of a man is the two-piece, to protect and to provide.
And if the women are not facing any danger, then there's nothing for the man to protect.
And if the women can get all their resources from the state, there's nothing for the man to to provide and I think this is why they end up in a deep post-Pluto orbit lost in space trying to find some way that their lives have purpose now maybe their purpose is just to survive a beating or their purpose is to go and put a gun to someone's head until he goes back to veterinarian school or their purpose is to destroy buildings now they have a purpose but it's because the purpose for which men exist which is to protect to procreate and to provide for has been taken over by the state and so it seems to me almost like they become caricatures of men and unable to move to fatherhood because they're just not needed.
Yeah, I think this goes all the way.
There's a strain in this in Western culture going all the way back to the Greeks.
Think of Aristophanes' Lizistratus, right?
Lizistrata, a play about a group of women who can't stand the fact that their men are away at war, doing both providing and protecting, right?
They can't stand it, and so they decide that they're not going to have sex with any of their men until the men stop it and come back home, which ultimately is going to Turn the screw the same way you just said, okay, the men are home, but they're not providing and they're not fighting, so what are they doing then?
And so you think about the death of men's clubs and lodges and play the Boy Scouts now.
Think of the death of- It's really the murder more than the death, but I know what you mean.
Yes, the brutal assassination of all of those male spaces where men at least could go to be men and to be around men and to have men to talk to and men friends and men models.
That's gone now. Our kids are now being taught to be ashamed of masculine men.
They're taught to be ashamed of the deeds of manhood down through the ages.
They're taught to believe that the Klan, the idea of hierarchy and meritocracy, the idea that they're Is something special about being packs of men who do man things?
This is now considered bad.
The consequences of this are really pretty remarkable and far-reaching.
To me, it goes back to the subjective.
We have done such a profound job subjectivizing everything.
We're now working our way through science.
We've lost the humanities.
We've lost philosophy. Religion now has been more or less neutered.
What we're doing now is we're taking science as really The last, pardon the erection pun, the last standing vestige of masculine, objective, empirical, hands-on kind of masculinity.
The feminists have kind of a point.
The feminists now are attacking science and logic and the scientific method as white supremacy and And as phallocentrism and exclusionary, they're right only in the sense that the history of science, as it's been practiced down through the ages, has been primarily a male enterprise.
I mean, you could argue all you want that some of this was women not being educated or not being accessed schools.
That's true. And yet there is something objectively masculine.
I would argue that the objective, the concept of the objective, has more comfortable home among the masculine than it does the feminine.
By definition, I think the feminine Tends to be more comfortable with the subjective.
I mean, the emotion versus the reason.
These old longstanding stereotypes, there are obviously lots of exceptions to them.
And yet, here we are as we watch civilization crash in this movie on film and what we've seen in the last 20, 30 years.
And I still think you go back to it.
If you are attacking masculinity, by definition, you are to some degree attacking objectivity and the history of objectivity and the history of empiricism.
And when you think about now how, as I just mentioned, on university campuses anyway, you have now scientists arguing that the scientific method is nothing more than a home for white privilege, that the focus on correctness, right answers, being able to get the right answers in math.
This is not something to be celebrated anymore.
This is a way of discriminating against people who don't get the right answers.
There's an article in the news today about a group of feminists actually making that argument.
This is the sociological argument of a feminist.
The reason more women don't go into STEM careers, she said, is because STEM careers don't recognize how hard they try.
STEM careers only recognize the right answer, the final outcome.
That's why it's sexist, and that's why women don't go into it.
If we change that, if we give women as much credit for trying, even if they get the right answer, as we give men for getting the right answer, then we'll fix it.
You can see what I'm trying to suggest here in a long-winded way about the death of objectivity.
Masculinity is one big point into that deconstruction.
Well, you know, that's a big topic.
And certainly, why did the postmodernism erupt over the last couple of decades?
Because science and universal experience destroyed any virtue or value of communism.
So it's like, well, communism has now been proven to be wrong, not just theoretically through the Austrian economists, but empirically through every time it's been tried.
So clearly if reason and evidence are against you but you don't want to give up your cult, what do you do?
Well, you get rid of reason and evidence.
And so the feminists have to attack science because science is...
Pretty good at explaining why women don't do so well in the sciences.
First of all, women tend to gravitate towards people-centric disciplines.
And the more free a country is, the more women gravitate towards those.
So it's not a function of patriarchy or lack of freedoms.
When women are free, they'll go into psychology and social work and teaching and all, you know, people and often child-centric occupations for evolutionary reasons we can all perfectly understand and aren't particularly controversial to any sane human being.
So science, sociology or surveys and choices, it explains why fewer women go into STEM. It is, of course, to me funny that a lot of the women who are criticizing a lack of women in STEM did not themselves take STEM fields, which, you know, that seems kind of obvious.
There aren't enough women in STEM, so I'm going to take women's studies to complain about how there aren't enough women in STEM. Well, you could have fixed that with one person, but instead you choose to complain instead.
The other thing, of course, that science does to explain this is that...
A lot of science, progress in science, the real cutting edge in science, you go up against a lot of opposition, a lot of opposition.
I mean, people forget, you know, now we take Einsteinian physics relatively for granted, but back in the day, man, people just found this the most horrifying thing.
All the people who were invested in the prior theory called the ether and so on, there were like hundreds of scientists signing petitions to say that he was wrong, and Einstein quite rightly said, just prove me wrong.
Why do you need to sign everything, right?
And so... The fact that to push forward science requires a lot of aggression.
And I can assume a fair amount of testosterone.
Women tend to like to get along.
They're high in, you know, which are good, great virtues for homemaking, for community building, for raising children, and so on.
Agreeableness, women score very high on.
And if you want to fight tooth and nail to get a new scientific theory accepted, you are going to face a lot of opposition.
You've got to overcome it. And women may not be quite as well equipped on average to do that.
But most importantly, IQ tests are very, very clear.
That when it comes to the very highest levels of IQ, there are little to no women.
Women cluster a little bit more around the middle.
And at the very highest ends of IQ, it's like 12 to 1 men and 14 to 1 men.
And at the very highest level, there are no women to speak of.
And so to have those kinds of achievements...
You need to have that level of IQ and, you know, don't get mad at me.
Don't get mad at the data. You can get mad at mother nature or evolution if you want.
But now the feminists, since science is beginning to show more and more differences in the female brain, psychologists are showing difference in female test scores, and the IQ tests are showing very clearly the paucity of women at the very highest levels of IQ. Well, now science is opposing feminism and now science has to go because, Lord forbid, you actually adjust your ideology to fit the facts.
Yeah, and going along with the question of IQ, I've always been blown away by it because, you know, you make the following suggestion, people get mad at you.
But we equate, generally speaking, we equate brain size with intelligence, right?
The smaller the least intellectual the animal, the smaller the brain.
And we know for a fact that men's brains, on average, are slightly bigger than women's.
And to argue then that that's- Even correcting for body size, just so everyone- Exactly, exactly.
But it's not just the IQ stuff, which I think makes sense at the highest levels, but it's also the lonerism, right?
You said that women tend to work collectively.
They tend to congregate around other people.
Think about all the great scientific discoveries of the last 2,000 years.
How many of them can we attribute to groups of people working together?
They're almost all of them, exactly, primarily men, loners, rejecting family, rejecting society.
Even our crazed scientists, the Dr.
Frankensteins of the world, the Dr.
Jekylls of the world, are men who are so obsessed and so alone that their sanity, and you see this in Fight Club, that the sanity begins to leach over into something much more destructive.
But historically speaking, there's that radical lonerism, that radical independence, That we see men more acclimated, more comfortable with than we see women being able to follow.
And you're right, what's happening now then is that the feminists are not reacting against science.
They're reacting against the fact that men are better at science.
And so the other thing that never gets pointed out is that women tend to dominate every other area of study.
All the humanities, all the social sciences are completely dominated at the graduate and the undergraduate level by females.
Females make up the vast majority of psychology students, a vast majority of, again, sociology, English, history teaching, all of that stuff.
It's only that one area, the hard sciences, where you see more men.
It's the last enclave.
And so they're coming after it.
Explain to me, Steph. Maybe you can.
I've never been able to figure it out.
Universities I taught have offered courses in feminist Biology.
How is that not the oxymoron to end all oxymorons?
The idea that women see biology different than men do, and that when you looked at from a female eyes, biology completely transforms itself into something else.
But we're taking that stuff real seriously now on college campuses.
Well, it's also a way of choking off the reproduction of an entire culture.
Because another reason why men tend to excel in these fields is men don't have children.
And so the only way to gain equality for women is for women generally to stop having children.
It's like, yay, we've achieved equality and we're done.
It's all over because nobody's having any kids.
So it is a way of choking off certainly the intelligent people from having children, this obsession with the equality of outcome.
So you can have women having equal pay to men, which they do, right?
Women have actually slightly higher pay for men, a woman in the same occupation with the same amount of education, who's been in the workforce for the same amount of time and who hasn't had children.
She earns slightly more than men.
So, the focus on equality is just another way of saying don't have kids, which I think is a pretty hostile idea to bring to a particular culture.
So, let's talk about something that I found confusing in the movie, or self-contradictory.
Now, of course, the movie would say, like Walt Whitman, I contradict myself.
Very well, I contradict myself.
But I'm going to point it out anyway, because it bothers me.
So, Tyler Durden says, self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction, on the other hand.
So, Self-improvement is not good.
Self-destruction is good, which I suppose is part of this primitivism, right?
But at the same time, they go to a convenience store and they drag this guy out, Raymond J. Kessel.
I don't know if that means anything.
I just jotted down the name.
And they take him out back at the convenience store and they point a gun at him until he promises to go back to being a veterinarian, like to studying to be a veterinarian.
Okay, it's like, dudes, can you pick one?
Self-improvement is terrible.
We must devolve. We must end up hunting elk in the broken shadows of the Rockefeller Center.
But I'm going to shoot you if you don't aim high and achieve a complex intellectual task like becoming a veterinarian.
And that, to me, is where the real nihilism sets in.
Because they're willing to save some of them.
Some of them get a gun pointed at them until they become veterinarians.
Other ones end up shot in the back of a head and a terrorist and end up living in this Brutal quasi-monkish house of horrors.
And so it's almost like this is an underclass.
And you do see people popping into the movie who aren't insane.
But they don't stay. Of course they don't stay.
Because it's an underworld. It's kind of like a Dantean level of hell for me.
Like there's at one point the narrator is saying to this woman on a plane.
He's explaining how his job works.
And how the car companies won't issue a recall if it's cheaper to just have people die and so on.
And the woman is like...
Kind of shocked and kind of appalled.
And like, which company do you work for?
He's like, a major one.
So this woman comes in and she's got some kind of conscience.
But then she's in there for like 10 seconds and then she's gone.
And so there is this underworld of a particular kind of person.
And Tyler Durden slash narrator, he says this, you know, we drive your ambulances.
We drive your cabs.
We, you know, we clean your sewage.
We provide your water.
Like we're this underclass of worker drones.
Don't fuck with us, he says.
But there are some people who get out.
There are some people who get elevated beyond this, but they don't.
And so the idea that this is somehow about masculinity as a whole is to me a very interesting question.
Or is it about a particular kind of person who has fallen prey to the temptation of self-absorption?
Because that's what bothers me the most.
Name me one charitable action that occurs in this movie.
Name me one Unselfish action.
Name me one kind thing.
It amazes me that people who end up having sex and living in filth and basically living worse than animals because animals don't have the capacity to be human.
So for a human to live like an animal is to live far worse than an animal.
But there's no generosity.
There's no charity. There's no kindness.
There's no help. There is just this rage and this resentment.
It sort of strikes me as the Nietzschean resentment group that they just hate everyone who's successful.
And he says this very openly, like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.
I just wanted to destroy something beautiful when he beats up the blonde guy.
And Tyler Durden says, where did you go, psycho boy?
And he's like, I just wanted to destroy.
I wanted to breathe smoke.
I wanted to destroy something beautiful.
Well, that is postmodernism.
Inheritance. I think that's it.
Go back to my initial point.
I think this movie shows you the consequences of only allowing the subjective, right?
Because the only one who actually gets ennobled, the only one who gets empowered, the only one who has any title in the organization fight club, the dictator, so to speak, the fascist, The dictator of Fight Club is Tyler Durden slash the narrator, right?
That the only one who has any mark of distinction that the others don't have, they're all the same person, right?
They're all the big bourgeoisie.
All Fight Club is the same person, except for Tyler, who becomes the mad genius who runs it.
And I took a series of one or two line quotes from the movie.
In the order that they came, and I think that if I just separate the rest of that out and just listen to these quotes side by side, back to back, you'll get a sense of what I'm trying to say here about the collapse, the final collapse of subjectivity.
Starts a bit with the phrase, the things you own end up owning you.
Fair enough, we get it.
Materialism, it's a great point.
Then a little bit later in the movie, I found freedom.
Losing hope was freedom.
Losing all hope was freedom.
Next, a little bit later in the movie.
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
A little bit later in the movie.
And then something happened. I let go.
Lost in oblivion.
Dark and silent and complete.
I found freedom.
Losing all hope.
was freedom and a little bit further.
Listen up maggots.
You're not special. You are not beautiful or unique snowflakes.
You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
And then one more. You're not your job.
You're not how much money you have in the bank.
You're not your car, 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.
We are all part of The same compost heap.
And so the nobility of not being materialistic, the nobility of rejecting your downtown office prison house, the idea of rejecting your IKEA-based furniture identifier, right?
Ultimately, when you pull it all apart, what do you got left?
You're just a walking dunghill.
You're just walking death.
You used the phrase before, it's always stuck with me, walking bags of meat, right?
Devoid of any meaning, any higher abilities, any nobility, hope itself.
If the last thing to go, Before anybody collapses in on themselves is hope, right?
And think about all the therapeutic language of Fight Club, all of the self-help groups, all of the you're empowered, hug, hug, hug stuff.
Well, they're predicated on hope, right?
There can be no wellness.
There can be no climbing up out of your hole.
There can be no reaching out to other people.
There can be no faith in civilization.
There can be no faith in love if there's not an underlying hope.
And what really gets drowned out in these quotes by the time you get to the end of the movie is all hope in anything.
Right. And the time when the insomnia is solved, Duke, to me is very powerful and I think ties into this.
So this man can't sleep.
And he can't sleep because he's not awake.
I mean, I know this personally.
I was sleepwalking through my life.
I was gathering values like an elk collects burrs by wandering through the bush, but I wasn't acting on them.
And eventually my unconscious revolted, saying, why are you feeding us all these standards if you're not willing to act upon them?
And it was when I began to act on them that my life actually began to improve.
So I get this, the challenge of insomnia because you're kind of sleepwalking through your life.
But then, how does he end up sleeping?
And I think there's a real powerful sequence here.
He's, I mean, the sentences I have to say in this show, but I'll say them anyway, right?
He snuggles up to meatloaf's man boobs, right?
And he cries. So that's an infant state.
He is crying on breasts, on large pendulous.
I mean, the fact that they're hairy, classic rock meat boobs is, you know, let's just put that aside for the moment so I can continue with the thought.
So he curls up on a set of boobs.
He cries.
And then what does he say?
He says, babies don't sleep this well.
And this, to me, talking about IKEA and materialism and capitalism and mass, something very bad happened to this narrator, and I assume to the writer as well, very early on.
A lack of bonding.
Maybe they're thrown in daycare.
Maybe the mom had postpartum depression.
Maybe there was some... That emptiness, that emasculation, that non-existence, people who don't have that bond, particularly with primary caregiver with mom, they grow up codependent, they grow up needy, they grow up schizoid, they grow up unintegrated.
And they grow up very selfish.
Because he says, when you give up hope, you're free.
When you give up everything, when you give up your resources, when you don't have any money, you're not free to be charitable.
You're not free to help other people.
To help other people means that you gather resources so that you can help other people.
I mean, if I didn't have any money, I couldn't have an internet.
I couldn't have a webcam. I couldn't, like, do these shows.
So, it's this fundamental selfishness that is running rampant through this.
And it's all blamed on IKEA and capitalism and it's nonsense.
What happened was, very early, there was a lack of bond.
And, of course, when he says we're a generation of men raised by women, what he means is not just the moms, but the daycare workers and so on.
I mean, I worked in a daycare for years as a teenager and the kids were dumped there and the moms were off at work or off doing something else.
And it's been really shown that a baby, a toddler, an infant who's put in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experiences exactly the same symptoms as maternal abandonment, as a baby who's physically abandoned by the mother.
And to me, this empowerment, this go to work, this, you know, your baby's dropped out of you like that horrible scene in Monty Python's movie where she's like, oh, can you get there?
And the baby just drops out while she's doing the dishes.
The fact that we don't invest in the babies, that we're not there with them, the eye contact, the breast contact, the breastfeeding.
I was doing a radio show some years ago, Duke, and this woman called in, was very, very proud that she went back to work a couple of weeks after her baby was born, and she was using some robot vacuum device to pump milk in a corporate toilet.
And I was like, do you think you've maybe drifted a little bit from kind of what...
Nature intended and what we're all for?
Putting kids in school.
I know you've got this homeschooling thing, which is how did we learn when we were evolving as a species?
We learned by hanging around with our parents and figuring out what they did and being taught on the fly, farming or hunting or whatever it was going to be.
And so to me that he's got this insomnia, he cries on a breast and then sleeps like a baby, to me indicates something foundational that is wrong.
With our society.
And I'm really fascinated by the intersection between sort of abstract philosophical concepts and really, really early baby and childhood experiences.
Because it seems very hard to reason with people who've never had a bond with another human being.
Because submitting to reason means submitting to trusting someone.
To trusting someone that they're not manipulating you.
That they're not going to try and mess with you.
That they're not trying to inculcate you into something horrible.
And how can you trust another human being who's trying to make a reasonable argument with you?
If you couldn't even trust your own mother as a baby and I think that this because it's so wide and so deep to me the wider and deeper the worldview the earlier it must have had its genesis.
I'm sorry that that was so long and rambling but I hope it makes some kind of sense.
No, I like it a lot. And I especially like that point that you make about the meatloaf character, right?
He's got these big fecund man boobs, but he's sterile from the waist down, right?
So he's become emasculated as a man, but he actually offers the narrator more genuine comfort than his sexual relationship with Marla can, right?
And so with Marla, it's just rutting, right?
At one point, well, some of the vulgarities are just hysterical when you hear them.
What does Tyler Durden call it at one point?
This is just sport fucking, right?
It's like sport hunting.
It's just sport fucking. There's no meaning.
There's no meaning of the sex whatsoever.
It's completely devoid of affection, of love.
And you think about the crisis that Marla has with her possibly diseased breast, the woman's breast.
The alienated woman's breast is a sort of disease.
So he takes comfort in the bosom of the man boobs of meatloaf.
And some of the things we're saying are you take them out and play them on their own.
People wouldn't believe them. But when you watch the movie, it makes crystal clear sense.
You go back all the way to technology.
We're talking about how technology is attacked in this movie.
Based on everything you said, the technology of birth control.
It was really a turning point in Western culture because it allowed culture for thousands of years before that, the primary thing you did in culture was bring forth children.
The entire society revolved around protecting kids, feeding kids, educating kids, finding ways to bring kids into the world, the ritual sacraments of marriage, courtship and marriage.
Sorry, a man could not be forced to pay for another man's offspring, which is foundational to evolution, to society, to the need for stability in the family.
Now, the welfare state is fundamentally forcing men to pay for other men's offspring, which breaks the whole covenant.
That's right. If you're a sperm donor, you pay money, you get paid to give sperm.
There are judges that are now finding that you're on the hook.
If the two lesbians who give birth to your sperm baby donor, donor baby, they want you to pay, you're going to have to pay money for their choices.
So even that's beginning to become part of the law.
But you think about the technology of birth control, which basically for the first time said that children were less of a reason for societal organization and more a problem to be solved.
Are we surprised that over time that became, babies aren't just problems to be solved, but they're tumors.
As one young woman in my interim class, I just got done A teaching told me, right?
Babies are parasites.
They are nothing until they leave my vaginal canal, she said to me.
And so, all right, but...
Babies are parasites, but welfare recipients are just empowered.
Well, they're entitled, right?
And you think about also logically how the technology of birth control, by definition, had to give rise to the technology of abortion.
Because if you promise men and women that they should be able to have all the sex they want without any consequences, meaning children, then the minute you find a form of birth control that's not 100% effective and a baby does appear, well, then you've got to kill it, right?
The technology has to evolve.
You already promised them sex without consequences.
And so I think that's part of it too.
I mean, you think about for both men and for women, men, the thing about women, it seems to me down through history is that they were responsible in many ways for civilizing the Tyler Durden aspect of manhood, right?
Women were the ones that made sure that there was a healthy masculinity, there were limits to it, right?
In some ways, the idea that a woman is supposed to be a place where a little boy can cry.
There's this kind of socialization that goes on there, different from the socialization that he would get from the father.
But when all that went away and mothers became either the deniers of their baby's birth or the surrogate mothers and fathers in the household for the baby, that all got pushed really radically out of whack.
And we've been able to find nothing, and certainly not the welfare state, has been able to compensate for those two things.
And to some degree, the rap music talk, you think about rap music?
Angry rap music, right?
It was Tyler Durden before there was a Tyler Durden, right?
The rise of rap music in the late 1980s, early 90s, pervades exactly the same kind of culture we're talking about in that movie, right?
Kind of anarchic and yet Oddly seeking a kind of higher association, money driven, but not in terms of money.
Money is sort of expressing a kind of manhood, not necessarily in terms of just what it could buy.
Seeking identity in places that they couldn't find it elsewhere.
We think about how the black family was even much more decimated In the 1960s and 70s than the other racial families.
It's a logical kind of outcropping, right, isn't it?
Of what we did to families, what we did to men and women, all under the aegis of progressivism.
All of this is under the aegis of progressive gerrymandering of culture.
Well, and of course, progressivism is regressive, and this is openly stated with the primitivism.
It also struck me Of course, the movie was made before 9-11.
Watching the buildings go down is quite powerful in that sense as well.
But it struck me as kind of contemporary as well, because I think men who have no purpose, men who can't get married, men who don't have children end up turning to violence.
I couldn't help but think of the hordes of sort of young, fighting-age migrant men that are being imported into Europe, who aren't going to have much purpose, who probably aren't going to be able to get married, not going to be able to have kids.
And marriage and children lowers testosterone.
It civilizes men.
And there is a feral element to this movie where it's like, I have to have some purpose.
I have to have some purpose.
And we need that. We need that to get through the slings and arrows of outrageous mortality.
We need a higher purpose that keeps us grounded and focused and allows us to overstep the things that life inevitably and people are going to throw in our way.
And that, I think, is...
The splitting, the false self, all of these things are, you know, when they say self-improvement is masturbation and so on, I kind of get what they're saying in so far as self-improvement for what?
You know, having an identity for what?
Going to school for what?
Because, you know, I mean, the narrator did go to school and he got a job that's fairly professional, kind of gross, of course, but that just goes in with the whole aesthetic of the movie.
But no higher purpose.
And the movie's flailing around for some kind of higher purpose.
The Fight Club is not enough, which is why it has to escalate to Project Mayhem, because the problem is not personal, the problem is societal.
And so the destruction of credit, the destruction of debt, which again I view as sort of the destruction of fiat currency, which renders men to be useless and pointless, but it is a higher purpose that ends the false self, the manipulative self, the selfish self.
However wrong it may be to blow up these buildings, it is something more than just, can I survive getting beaten up?
It is a larger purpose.
And this idea that there is a larger purpose that allows us to overcome our selfishness and pettiness.
And selfishness and pettiness is perfectly fine when you're a child.
It's kind of where we all start from.
But this elongated childhood that just goes on and on and on these days for decades...
I think does produce a real sense of frustration, and the easiest higher purpose is violence.
I mean, tragically, that is the easiest.
All of the other higher purposes, you know, Christianity or philosophy or devotion to the poor or helping the sick, well, they're all difficult and complicated, but violence is just something that is an illusory higher purpose that really makes people feel like they're achieving something when they're not.
I think that's right. I think that you want to talk about why it's young, primarily Caucasian boys in this culture who are shooting up schools?
That's why, right? I mean, what young white boys are now experiencing, you could argue, is what different minority groups through the history of America, the Italians, the Irish, when they came over blacks.
But right now you have this young boys, particularly white boys, being told in kindergarten, first, second, third grade, that they're responsible for the world's problems, that all that's wrong with the world and gender and relationships is because of white men.
And so these kids grow up.
They've been completely disenfranchised.
They already live in a culture that there is no higher ideal of anything.
They're being told that they should stop being boys and be more like girls.
There's no place they should be allowed to associate with other boys.
And we wonder why they lose it.
And like you said, they default completely to violence.
I think that's one of the lessons of Fight Club.
You can strip all kinds of civilized What you can't strip from them in the final analysis is the primal nature of maleness, which is to hunt or to protect or to lash out.
What we're really doing as a feminist society, as a progressive society, is not reshaping men in the role of women.
We are stripping away thousands of years of ornamental civilization Men being worked to channel their aggression, their testosterone, their need to pursue, their quest for dominance in socially acceptable ways like science, right? To conquer the mystery of the atom or seek that aggressive cure for cancer.
You've stripped all that away now and told men that they're not welcome and that their historical contributions to this were in themselves racist and sexist.
All you leave them is the violent impulse, right?
It's like the dog reverting back to the wolf at some point.
You beat a dog enough, you starve a dog enough, you ignore a dog enough, sooner or later that dog, you're gonna get the wolf, right?
And that's what's happening here.
And the more the wolf appears, the more the feminists double down, right?
And if I may, I mentioned the movie, The Boondock Saints.
Just a quick little segue here.
Similar situation. Two young boys, Irish boys, immigrants in America, who didn't know their father.
Their father has been incarcerated.
They never knew who he was. Same kind of chaotic, violent world.
They become vigilantes.
They start killing killers.
They band together and they start seeking out the worst elements of society and murdering them.
At the end of the movie, they're finally re-associated with their father.
Their father comes back and meets them.
And they form a kind of Trinity, the three of them, who proceed to go out and continue to kill murderers.
There's this one great scene at the end where at a Mafia Don's trial, right, where the Mafia Don looks like he's going to get off again, where the three of them burst into the courtroom and they're going to execute that Don because they know that the laws of justice have been bought.
And here's the little speech they give at the end of that movie before they put this criminal to death.
They say to all the audience in the crowd in the courtroom, they say, now you will receive us.
We do not ask for your poor or your hungry.
We do not want your tired or your sick.
It is your corrupt, we claim.
It is your evil that will be sought by us.
With every breath we shall hunt them down.
Each day we will spill their blood till it rains down from the skies.
Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal.
These are principles which every man of faith can embrace.
These are not polite suggestions.
These are codes of behavior.
And those of you that ignore them will pay the dearest cost.
There are varying degrees of evil.
We urge you lesser forms of filth, not to push the bounds and cross over into true corruption, into our domain.
For if you do, one day you will look behind you and you will see we three.
And on that day you will reap it.
And we shall send you to whatever God you wish.
And again, the violence is there, that same tendency, but these kids, these abandoned kids, immigrants in a country that they thought was gonna be a salvation, that they see the corruption of all the institutions, they do something very similar.
But rather than fighting each other and pounding each other into nothingness and creating A masturbatory...
And maybe you can comment on this.
People have long commented on the almost eroticism of Fight Club, almost the homo-eroticism of what goes on in Fight Club.
All the women gone. Why is it that you have to fight without shirts on?
There's all sorts of people who have talked about that aspect of it.
These boys in the Boondock Saints, what they do is they turn back To what you said, those larger structures of civilization, for them, partially it's the Roman Catholicism, right?
The opening scene of the movie has the two boys sitting in church, and the priest is giving a sermon.
While he's giving his sermon, the two boys get up, walk right up to the top of the altar, and everybody's just watching them.
They go kiss the feet of Jesus on the crucifix behind them, and then they walk out of the church.
And the whole time, the priest is delivering a sermon about the That case in New York City in the 1960s where a girl was being murdered and everybody ignored it.
And as they're walking out the front door, the priest is intoning, now we must all fear evil men, but there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference.
Of good men. And I think, to me, it puts a wonderful spin.
Same kind of a world, but these guys in the Boondocks 8 ultimately object for a form of masculine objectivity where you can't really find it in the schizophrenic mad world, postmodern world of Fight Club.
Yeah, I mean, this homoerotic stuff, I find, is a pretty dull and bland analysis.
You know, it's like the, you know, if two men get along, it's a bromance, you know, and it's like, oh, two women get along.
It's like there's another great line from Seinfeld where Elaine is talking about having some friends over, and he's like, oh, so you're having some girlfriends over, so you're going to strip down to your bra and panties and have a tickle fight?
And she's like, you really think that's what women do when we're alone together?
He's like, yes, yes, I do.
You know, it's like, no, I mean, not all women who are feminists want to have sex with each other and not all men who get along.
It's not a homoerotic thing.
I mean, it's partly just an aesthetic.
Plus, you know, I mean, if I had Brad Pitt's body, you couldn't nail a shirt to my body.
I could be walking around in minus 20 degree weather with those kind of abs.
I mean, I'm sorry. It's just the way it would roll.
But no, I think that the homoerotic stuff, I think, is I think the reason why there's this male club is that in the modern world, men don't really trust women a lot.
Or a lot of men don't trust women a lot.
And the general argument goes something like this.
Which is women have married the state and have the natural, we have natural deference for women in the West because we don't have arranged marriages and therefore women have to choose you and therefore men have to, you know, like those birds, the male birds who bring these elaborate, they build these elaborate nests so that the female birds will allow them to mate and the Male frogs that fight with each other so that the female frog will mate with them and so on.
The men's behavior is largely a shadow cast by the demands of the feminine.
And that's perfectly fine and I think it's a great thing to have.
But when women have the power of deference and combine the power of male deference with their own hypergamy united with the power of the state, you get a gynocracy.
You get a female dictatorship or a chicktatorship, as I've called it in the past.
So the fact that women do have so much power in the modern world because they have deference from male politicians and they give deference from academia and the women are a wonderful effect.
It's been really studied in psychology to the point where this penumbra of virtue surrounds women as a whole and the fact that female teachers regularly mark down boys pretty savagely is not considered bigotry.
If it was white teachers marking down black students, it would be everybody would go nuts and so on.
And so I think Whenever I have a challenging call on a listener conversation with somebody who's having difficulty in a marriage, the comments are pretty endless below.
Like the MGTOW comments and the comments of like, well, you know, you can get married and at any time she can snap her fingers, have you thrown in jail and take half your stuff.
And that's pretty alarming.
And so I think it's kind of interesting that he's He actually falls asleep on a male breast.
He has Marla Singer's breasts.
I mean somewhat breastlets to fall asleep on but he doesn't because he can't trust women.
I think he can trust a male and that's why he can fall asleep on a man's breast but not a woman.
And so I think that this lack of trust that is kind of everywhere in the movie.
Lack of trust of male authority figures.
Well my father told me to do this but he didn't really know what he was talking about.
That, to me, is part of the seductiveness.
One of the reasons why the movie resonates with me so much, and maybe it's just this satanic temptation, Duke, but man, it's kind of tempting sometimes, isn't it, to just fall out of the complexity of your complicated life?
You know, I don't know about you, my man.
Sometimes I'm like, I don't know, I'm working through my fourth day of taxes or something like that.
I'm like, man, I just want to hit an animal with a brick right now.
You know, like I just...
It's tempting. It's tempting this let go and you won't have any possessions and you can live in a rotted house and you can do anything you want.
And like the people who ghost, the people who just kind of go way off the grid and don't participate in society, there's a real temptation to that primitivism because this modern life is so bureaucratic and it's so paper heavy and it's so can't do this and can't do that.
And there also aren't any clean damn fights these days.
If people disagree with you, what do they do?
I don't know.
Or let's just have a duel.
I mean, I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, but it did solve some problems and it kept a lot of people fairly civilized.
So now everything's so slow.
You got a problem with someone.
Well, I guess you can call a lawyer.
And what was it? Somebody was saying on the Internet the other day that if you want to run a libel suit against a major media company in America, it's going to cost you $1.5 million to bring it to trial, which means basically they have the license to print slander and there's nothing.
That you can do about it.
And so all of our conflicts have been so buried under bureaucracy.
And I'm not saying that we should wake up and just take clubs to each other.
I'm not talking about that at all.
But there's got to be somewhere in between Fight Club and, you know, that Dickensian, The Laws...
Well, I know it's from Hamlet, The Law's Delay.
I mean, it was... Shakespeare found it so frustrating to work with the law, he put it in Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, The Law's Delay.
And there's a whole bit at the beginning of a Dickens novel about how ridiculously complicated some inheritance is and how long it goes.
We have this weird, sticky, gooey, nothing web where we just can't have open and clean conflicts with each other that don't last years and cost millions of dollars.
I'd rather a duel. I don't want this drip, drip, poison stuff or this, like, I don't know.
It's just kind of weird. So I can understand and I feel tempted on occasion by this, let all this civilization go.
Let's devolve because at least we'll get some stuff done.
Well, absolutely. Absolutely, and you know, that used to be called, Steph, a midlife crisis, right?
You went to school, you got your college degree, you went from high school, you worked your job, you had some kids, you've been married 20 years, the kids are leaving the house, you're 45, 48 years old, you buy a Corvette and have an affair with your secretary.
That used to be called a midlife crisis.
Now, what should scare the hell out of us as Americans, as Western people, is it's happening to the 11 and 12 year olds.
It's happening to 14 year olds now.
And they don't have the intellectual maturity or the emotional distance to separate that from actually doing something really crazy.
And one of the reasons I think this is happening is what we've been talking about here.
It's one of the things that I think Fight Club demonstrates so very well, is that when you do this, when you pen up people, when you divorce people from what, for thousands and thousands of years, people needed to become what they were meant to be, when you argue that masculinity by definition has to be We contain this way.
Can't be surprised when it blows up and it starts blowing up at younger and younger ages.
And you talked about this before, too, with the beginning of your comment there.
I agree with you. I think the homoeroticism is completely projected out of the movie.
It's a way of further emasculating men, right?
Oh, and men can't get together without being called gay.
I mean, that's just a way of making sure that men don't have friends, companions, and supporters.
Any man who's more comfortable in the presence of himself or other men must, by definition, be gay.
And it's white professor, oftentimes white male professor feminists who are making this argument, right?
And don't forget how quickly they'll throw the slur at you.
If you question any aspect of homosexuality, that's because you're closet gay.
This is what they do.
But there are differences.
I've taught at seven different universities, at six of the seven different universities I've taught at, at six of them, I had colleagues, In my own department of English who were heterosexual women who chose to have sexual relationships with other women Not because they were lesbian, but for feminist purposes, right?
Political statement. Exactly.
I don't know about you, I've never met a man, however politically liberal, who only sleeps with men to make a political statement.
It's remarkable. There's a grave difference there, I think, in the way women and men operate, and I think the objective and the subjective.
I think women can be much more subjective.
I'm not gay, I'm not a lesbian, but I'll sleep with other women to make a political point.
That's the height of subjectivism.
I don't think men are capable of those levels of subjectivity.
And the danger is when you make the subjective everything, right, and you use the subjective to do away with masculinity, the explosions are going to get worse.
This is how world wars get started, isn't it?
You could make an argument that how many of our largest world wars were the complexes of this kind.
Think about what drove Hitler.
Think about what drove Stalin.
I mean, you think about how this kind of This imbalance that occurs, this need for men who feel that there are no other outlets or no other avenues to pursue kind of reckless violence.
We see it at the individual level, and I think we've seen it down through the ages collectively, too, with people who, certain kinds of people who end up ruling states.
Right. Let's talk about the very end of the movie, because that's, to me, kind of mind-blowing.
So at the end of the movie, A movie that everyone says is about capitalism and masculinity, and it's all about these big social issues.
At the end of the movie, he says to, I don't know, his F-buddy or whatever you want to call her, this woman Marla, he says something like, you've met me at a very complicated time in my life.
Now that is to me really fascinating.
The projection of...
An alter ego out into the world to the point where he's psychotic, visually hallucinating, doesn't even know.
And it's brilliant the way that if you ever watch the movie again, you'll see just how well they layer all this stuff in.
But... When the credit is destroyed, when they go back to zero, when the social issues, to me, are dealt with, which again is this sort of fiat currency and debt and so on, which sounds very abstract, but resource allocation is foundational to human civilization.
It's foundational to the family.
Take so long to raise and the fact that their liabilities means someone has to provide which means a bond has to occur like evolution and our entire culture and civilization is founded upon the fact that children are massively consuming resources.
It is only fiat currency that can turn children from resources that from from liabilities to assets right in other words paying women.
to have children in other words a woman can make more money by having children that fundamentally reverses the entire course of human evolution of pair bonding of marriage of the family so just turning children from liabilities into assets it's like hitting rewind on evolution because evolution had to deal with the fact that we have this fourth trimester of babies that are useless for the first year or two of their life and so to me when when this external thing has happened And he ends up shooting himself in a way that has never made much sense to me.
But, you know, okay, let's just go with that.
You know, he internalizes the alter ego that's out there.
And then what's interesting is for the first time, he basically says, they're my problems.
These are my problems. These aren't the world's problems.
The problem isn't with Ikea.
The problem isn't Tyler Durden.
The problem is I can't take a fight properly.
The problem isn't Marla. The problem isn't women as a whole or my absent father.
It's my problem. So when he internalizes and reabsorbs this projected alter ego, he recognizes that he himself is complicated.
And that the issues that he needs to deal with are his own issues.
And that to me is a very powerful thing.
And I've made this case to...
I had a caller who used to be Antifa.
He was a radical left-wing person.
And... My general thesis, very briefly, is that women now rely upon the state for their resources.
A lot of women rely upon the state for their resources.
And they fear the end of the welfare state.
They fear the re-emergence of free markets or freedom or property rights and so on.
And so then anyone who's not on the far left is a threat to the continual flow of resources.
And so what they do is they gin up their Sons who have grown up without fathers usually they gin up their sons to go and fight anyone who might interfere with the flow of resources to mummy's voracious pink floyd style more and we talked about this and he sort of agreed with the general thesis in other words If you are actually going out and beating up right-wing people to make sure that nobody interferes with the fro of resources to your mom, that's a personal issue.
You may confuse it for some big old political issue, but basically you're just out there as a shock troop for mommy's stuff, right?
And so this moment at the end where he's not talking and raging about the fact that life is so complicated and needs to be simpler and we need to go hunt elk and all of that, he's saying...
My life is complicated.
I'm complicated. I have problems.
And that, to me, is a very, very powerful thing.
And I say this not because there aren't social problems we need to deal with, but the only way we can deal with them effectively is to make sure it's not our own personal problems that are masquerading as an obsession with social problems.
I mean, how on earth would a 17-year-old care so much about the welfare state?
I mean, it's not. It's his mom who cares about the welfare state, and she's priming him up to go and make sure that the resources keep flowing.
You look at yourself and you have dealt with your own issues.
Then you can approach social issues from a much more objective standpoint.
So you're not a marionette for somebody else's needs or preferences or requirements, but you're actually able to look at things relatively objectively and come up with rational solutions.
And I think that bit at the end where he internalizes his own rage, his own frustration, he actually says this repeatedly.
There's this little... I remember he used to read this in Reader's Digest.
You know, I am... I am Jack's frustrated rage and so on.
It's like he's actually externalizing even his own emotions rather than being integrated within his own psyche.
And this projection onto Tyler Durden, this projection onto other aspects of his body, his emotions, his personality, and so on, when that all gets pounded, the projections all get pounded back into his own psyche, then he can look at his own complexity and say, I am complex, I have problems, I need to work on my own consistency and my own rationality, and then hopefully I'll bring more to the table than blowing up buildings and stores.
You know, I think that's right.
I think that movie, that moment at the end of the movie where he kills himself, ironically, is the only objective moment in the entire movie.
And I think it's very chilling because notice what he does.
When he kills himself, he shoots himself basically through the mouth.
Not through the brain, where he's imagined all this stuff, where all of his subjectivity has originated, whatever disorder he has.
He shoots himself through language.
Where he talks, right? In other words, he's talked himself into this.
And I believe this profoundly.
You absolutely have to have objectivity to be able to recognize subjectivity.
If there is no objective place where you can view the subjective, that's mental illness.
That right there is disease.
That's insanity. Oh, which is why there's the old saying that if you think you're crazy, you're probably not.
That's exactly right. And to me, this is the single gravest problem Western culture faces.
It's not North Korea. It's not global warming.
The single biggest problem we face is this.
We in the West have decided that there are no objective places to stand and view anything.
And because of that, what do we do?
We are prioritizing.
We are giving into subjectivity and we're thinking we can remake reality.
Through purely subjective gestures, right?
That somehow if we force science to stop being science in the name of making it more diverse, that diversity will be better and science will be better.
It won't. And you could apply this to gender, right?
Ignoring the fact that there are biological male and female, get rid of that obvious objective fact, and manufacture 76 different genders.
We think we're being kinder to people and more tolerant.
We are not. And so to me, and yes, both of us being philosophers or people who pride ourselves on trying to be philosophers, it's the death of philosophy, isn't it?
If there is no objective place, and now again, simply recognizing an objective place from which to view subjectivity is not the same as arguing, right?
That there is only objectivity.
To make sense of the subjective nature of life in this world as a Christian, I would say it's a fallen world.
I can't be completely objective as a Christian about this changing world, but I have a higher objective post from which my Christianity allows me a solid foundation from which to view subjectivity and allow myself to navigate it through choices.
But in a world that increasingly has lost faith in its country, faith in its God, faith in its educational institutions, faith in the power of truth generally, we have no place to stand.
And so insanity looks a lot like madness to people who are also insane.
We need that objective space to make sense of the subjective and we don't have it anymore.
Yeah, this diversity thing, boy, one of the biggest bait and switches in human history.
Because I thought diversity meant, okay, we can all look at the same picture and like you and I looking at the same movie coming up with interesting arguments and perspectives and enriched thereby.
I thought that's what diversity meant.
Turns out, funny story, diversity meant diversity of sanity.
It meant diversity of rationality, which is not, there's rational and there's irrational, there's sane and there's insane.
And saying, well, we have to be inclusive of insanity and anti-rationality, that's not diversity, that's destruction.
You know, I don't want, if I take my car in to get fixed, I don't want the diversity to be, hey, half of our employees will fix your car, the other half of our employees will set fire to your car, because we value diversity.
It's like, no, I don't mind lots of different people figuring out how to fix my car, But can we have fixing my car as the one thing that's not a diverse objective?
Because that's kind of what I'm bringing you the car for.
It's the same thing with civilization.
I didn't think that Western civilization, the diversity was going to mean, hey, we're going to bring a whole bunch of people and we're going to train them to really hate Western civilization.
And we're going to teach them to hate white males and it's going to teach you to hate Christianity relentlessly and incomprehensibly.
And it's like... That's not really what was on the label when it came to diversity, but it seems to be what's actually happening.
It's one thing to say that there are male and female objectively, but we can interestingly look at how abstracted it can become, right?
Some men are less masculine, but always without getting rid of the fundamental concepts.
I'll never forget, I was 18 years old, I was at the New York Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with a friend of mine, also about my age, we were college kids.
And we had just left the Renaissance galleries, right?
How hard the great masters worked to recreate objective truth.
How they were about line and how they were about the vanishing line and how they were creating depth in painting through physics and all that stuff.
And then we entered one of the modern galleries.
And after looking at a Michelangelo here and a Raphael and a Titian there, we entered this room where there was this big canvas, purely white.
Big, huge canvas of just white space and one red dot in the middle.
And I will never forget the argument I had with him.
I called it crap. He got mad at me because I was not being subjective.
Art is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Art has no value, no rules.
It's purely subjective.
And I kept arguing with him about this and I, it was my, maybe my first real encounter with this kind of pervasive This perverse liberal type of thinking, right?
For him, that the value of a painting was less than its diversity, right?
This is a different kind of art.
It's not better or worse than what you just saw.
And I kept pointing out to him, when we were in the Renaissance gallery, do you see the use of brushstroke?
Do you see the use of perspective?
All that stuff. Those guys used to be anatomists.
They used to open up cadavers to figure out how the ligaments and the muscles work so they could better portray them under the skin as opposed to, oh, look, I made a dot.
And if everything is subjective, why is there a gallery?
Because the gallery says this art is better than the art that's not in here.
This art is more important than the art that's not in here.
Why can't I just take a piece of newsprint, stick it on a frame and go get $3 million?
Oh, that would be crazy. The very fact that there's an art gallery is saying that art is not subjective, that there's ways of figuring out which art is more important and better than others.
There was a feminist artist in the 1990s who actually sued that museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She was demanding that 50% of the space in the museum be dedicated to female artists.
That was literal. And of course a judge, that was 25 years ago, a judge threw it out.
I'm not so sure a circuit judge in New York would throw that out anymore.
It doesn't matter what's on the walls as long as it's represented equally, right?
I guess if it's a hole, not a dot, maybe that changes the whole equation.
All right. Well, thanks very much, Dr.
Pesta. Always a great pleasure to chat.
I will certainly recommend that people watch Fight Club.
It is a masterclass.
I wanted to mention, too, the acting is staggeringly good.
Brad Pitt has never been better, and I guess we haven't seen that much of Ed Norton lately.
He was a fine actor, but the acting is fantastic.
So I would certainly recommend the movie.
I also wanted to recommend FPEUSA.org.
This is the live online school that Dr.
Pest is the academic director of.
It offers individual classes, complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school, and check it out.
FPEUSA.org. A great pleasure, my friend.
Thank you so much, as always, for your time today.
