Industrial Society and Its Fight Club

Why ‘Fight Club’ Was Uncle Ted’s Favorite Movie

By guest author Trashcan Jack.

Months back, a debate raged over the proper interpretation of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, which shifted for a brief period into discussion of the book and movie Fight Club. The main contention of the Fight Club debate was that Tyler Durden was wrong and was proven wrong by the actions he took in driving disaffected young men to revolt against the phony corporate world they inhabited; that his anti-consumerist acts of rebellion and corporate espionage were wrong and that he did nothing but lead men to destruction.

Yes, Tyler Durden was wrong, but only in the same way that Theodore Kaczynski was wrong: purely in his methods and degree, not in what he was actually preaching. The fact is that both were preaching nearly the same thing. They said that Modern Man was cut off from the historical ways of life that nearly all of his ancestors experienced; that we had become a people who were deracinated, longhoused, and turned by marketing into pretty-boy pussies — consumers with fridges full of condiments and no actual food.

Fight Club’s nameless Narrator subconsciously knows his way of life isn’t normal: sitting in a box all day whenever he’s not on the road investigating car crashes and making “single-serving friends,” ordering shit off the television in hopes that it will quell the animal spirits within him, and desperately searching for the perfect duvet cover. In spite of the ghastly nature of his work at the car company — “a major one,” he tells one of these single-serving friends — and attending support group meetings for cancer patients, the Narrator is so disconnected from his own emotions and cut off from natural life that he summons up Tyler Durden as something between a cry for help and a reclamation of his lost masculinity.

Durden is the antithesis of the longhoused Narrator, everything the office drone is not. He’s confident and cool and doesn’t give a shit about social conventions or the rules. If that was all he was, however, you’d just have some kind of punk-rock jagoff that we’ve seen a million times over. A “non-conformist” who ends up basically just being a Hot Topic shopper with a few good lines.

Durden is not that.

Instead, he wants to turn the clocks back on society. To break disaffected men free from their programming as the “middle children of history.” The men Durden attracts to his fight clubs are men who would have had homes, families, and meaningful lives in any other era of history. Instead, they’re single and live marginal lives doing unfulfilling work for minimal wages.

In one speech, Tyler calls out to the future of the Internet democratization of celebrity, telling his assembled club that they’ve all been raised by mass media to believe that they would be movie stars and rock gods. The implication being that all of this advertising is really in service to the idea that one day we’ll be able to obtain the heights of celebrity through a few simple purchases at the mall.

Fight Club is the realization that, as Uncle Ted said, “[t]he Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”

Kaczynski argued in his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future that Man has been cut off from the power process, the process by which our ancestors learned how to live meaningful lives within the natural world, exercising power over their environments.

Fight Club gives us men with no such power. They’re faceless entities in a corporatized machine that sees them as nothing more than warm bodies to throw at capitalism. Numbers on a spreadsheet. Through fight clubs and later Project Mayhem, they find a way to exert control and feel empowered. They learn to live life to its physical limits and to have power over their environment. Fight Club then isn’t really about fighting or violence, but about the power process.

As Durden puts it, “Without pain and sacrifice, we would have nothing.”

The power process as described by Uncle Ted isn’t just about “having power.” It consists of having goals, expending effort to achieve them, and finally conquering them. Uncle Ted said that humans have a need to exercise the power process meaningfully, lest they devolve into surrogate activities, activities in which they can exercise a version of the power process which is ultimately trivial. The men of Fight Club — indeed many of us at this very moment — live lives full of surrogate activities instead of engaging in the power process.

Tyler Durden sees a future in which men hunt deer around the abandoned superhighways and skyscrapers of the fallen Industrial Society, while Kaczynski saw environmental degradation of the natural world as Mankind’s biggest threat.

Durden ultimately turns towards nihilism, and Uncle Ted found creative uses for the U.S. Postal Service. Their points still ring true, however. Mankind, unmoored from nature and meaningful struggle towards attainment of goals, will turn towards consumerism, psychology, and a panoply of surrogate activities to make up for the lack of true power they are able to exercise in their lives.

It’s uncertain whether Uncle Ted, stuck in ADX Florence, was ever actually able to view Fight Club, but one imagines that he would’ve watched it, at least parts, with a wry smile. It’s possible that he would’ve seen something of a kindred spirit in Tyler Durden. A dark reflection. While not a nihilist, Uncle Ted might have seen something of his writings having broken through to the mainstream.