Durden Dogma

Fight Club is about breaking chains laid down by your oppressors. It is about every single one of us, our individual struggles, and our existence either enslaved to a pre-selected dominant ideology or in service of a greater cause – the destruction of an inherently flawed system of rich and poor.

Traditionally the American dream is a source of inspiration. It is the belief that economic success and social mobility can be achieved by perseverance and education, regardless of the class one is born into. The American dream promotes optimism and an entrepreneurial spirit. ‘If you believe, you can achieve’ and ‘you can be anything you want to be’ are the mottoes instilled in children by public educators and mass media. Adulthood brings the shocking realization that pursuit of this dream is fruitless – it is simply a means for the bourgeois to control the proletariat.

We are not special. You cannot be anything you want when you grow up – you are just one of billions on a warm ball of mud, flying through space around a giant fireball that is older than you can count. You are nothing and your actions don’t matter. You could die tomorrow or in the next ten seconds and nothing about the world will change. Tyler’s nihilistic dogma uproots the consumerist mindset we were all raised with and razes it to the ground. The cold truth that you are not your hair, your belongings, your money, or your beliefs invalidates your will to conform. The anger within each member of fight club grows as they distance themselves from the temporal things they once held dear. Fight club becomes a place where they can shed all of the affects of society and exist simply as men. A sense of community arises, and something Marx described as ‘class consciousness,’ or the proletarian looking beyond personal suffering and viewing themselves as one part of a whole. It is a paradigm shift from ‘me’ to ‘us.’ According to Marx, this is the quintessential step toward revolution.

Fight Club is right. It may be a grotesque caricature, but the truth is irrefutable. Tyler Durden isn’t a savior, his dogma isn’t a cure-all, but it sure as hell looks a lot better than where we are standing now.

“Let the ruling class tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have a world to win.” -Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto