"In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."
This speech from Tyler Durden in Fight Club is an increasingly relevant example of life imitating art. Or rather, if we examine it more closely, art imitating life.
Fight Club is a commentary on a series of social phenomena, phenomena which have two things in common: they're aggressively nihilistic enough to embrace the kind of apocalyptic vision Durden describes, and they're backed by the forces of governmental psychological warfare. Whether these strains are defined by adventurist violence, ahistorical narratives about the nature of class conflict, or genocidal "solutions" to the ecological crisis, they all exist to divert radicals away from dialectical and historical materialism. They merely react to our conditions, instead of properly studying them and finding coherent solutions. Naturally, they're the perfect ideological factions for the state's forces of counterrevolutionary intrigue to exploit, or to directly cultivate.
Cultural manipulation towards apathy & nihilism in the face of capitalist evils
Durden's rallying cry for the destruction of civilization is the essence of the character's satirical nature. In Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Durden represents the logical conclusion of ultraviolent and theoretically underdeveloped counterculture movements. This is apparent in how the novel describes the goal of Project Mayhem, the cult that Durden forms which seeks to realize societal collapse through a series of terrorist attacks: "It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover."
Project Mayhem is closer to Pol Pot than to an effective revolutionary like Lenin. And the fact that Pol Pot was propped up by the U.S. empire reflects the strange connections that Project Mayhem has had with Washington-adjacent intelligence entities, which I'll describe shortly. Practically, what this caricature of ultra-leftist radical movements entails is a humanitarian crisis of incomprehensible proportions. The collapse of all industry, markets, food distribution systems, and electrical grids would kill off hundreds of millions of people, especially in the current era where our capitalist crises have produced a pandemic and a climatic destabilization. Yet this kind of manufactured collapse is what's being sold by the ruling class as the solution to these problems.
The "Great Reset" that's being marketed by historically neoliberal institutions like the World Economic Forum has the goal of fortifying capitalism by shrinking the zone within which civilization exists. This is apparent from the concept's embrace of the pandemic's Big Tech takeover, where tech oligarchs have further consolidated wealth as ever more of the population has fallen into destitution. The Biden administration has furthered this corporate coup, explicitly under the "Great Reset" banner.
The end outcome of this is an unprecedented societal unraveling. The system simply isn't sustainable, especially in its new form of being more top-heavy and monopoly-ridden than ever. Given the assessments from scientists about how civilization will collapse within the next few decades if our current climate path continues, it seems increasingly plausible that the end goal of capitalism is something like what Durden describes. A scenario where society has utterly fallen apart, and where the few who've survived the calamity must eke out meager lives while the rich live in bunkers far away from the chaotic urban centers.
How do you sell a population on something like this? By romanticizing it. By fetishizing the ideas of destruction, mayhem, and deprivation. Which is where cultural psychological operations come in.
With how frequently the government makes changes to Hollywood films with the goal of influencing culture, it's possible that Fight Club's movie version is an example of this manipulation. The film's producer was an asset for the Mossad, which gave an opening for this towering cultural facet to be influenced by the U.S.-adjacent network of spy agencies.
This was a film destined by its historical circumstances to become a cult classic, and perhaps something more. It came in the midst of a great era of cultural nihilism, where Generation X had embraced an attitude towards capitalism which was both cynical and eager to cling to capitalism's individualistic mentality. The Soviet Union had just fallen, creating the sense that communism with its collectivist goals was not worth pursuing. It felt like capitalism, despite all of its absurdities, was here to stay no matter what, making the youth's only recourse to embrace libertarian punk culture and irony. Fight Club spoke to this emptiness about the state of the world, and provided a (sarcastically intended) answer to it: hypermasculine violence with the goal of tearing everything down. That the film's protagonist became disillusioned with this by the end made little difference as to whether many became disillusioned with it as well; Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden had made the case for it with an eloquence and charisma that inspired crowds of directionless young men.
Whether or not the Mossad factored into the film's changing the ending of the novel so that Project Mayhem wins, the outcome was a piece of satire that ironically undermined its own attempt at ridiculing anarcho-primitivist ultraviolence, and that therefore reinforced this nihilistic narrative. An infamous example of this is how the film inspired many teenagers to start fight clubs of their own, and to in some cases inflict violence on par with the shocking brutality depicted in the film.
Because Tyler and Project Mayhem succeeded in this version-a narrative aspect that's been taken out in the film's recent Chinese cut, to overblown controversy-our culture had in a small way been further primed for something like the "Great Reset." For a transition into drastically lowered living standards that's supposed to be about liberation and environmentalism, but that in practice amounts to eco-fascism.
To realize this catastrophe, we don't need to become theoretically deficient adventurists like the members of Project Mayhem. (Though as I'll get to, the government spooks have cultivated examples of this.) We only need to embrace the idea that capitalism can't be defeated, become apathetic, and passively let the ruling class destroy civilization. This idea is mainly communicated to us through all the manifestations of capitalist realism, the idea that capitalism is an immovable fixture. With this mindset, depictions of radicalism can easily be interpreted as warnings against the very idea of trying to resist capitalism, or as calls for pointless martyrdom. If you were to become inspired by something like Fight Club without studying the theory behind history's actual anti-capitalist revolutions, you could easily internalize this doctrine of inaction, of behaving with ironic detachment from the evils of late-stage capitalism and watching the world burn.
Worse yet, you could come to see random violence and action for action's sake as viable routes towards revolution; this eagerness for militancy, without the theoretical knowledge required for building an actual vanguard party, is where ultra-leftist positions like the glorification of gangs as revolutionary vehicles come from. The same applies to the radical groups which reject dialects in favor of individualistic ideologues, like anarchism. The assumption being that simply the presence of physical strength and organization is sufficient, regardless of the bourgeois class character of the organized crime entities, the dangers of action without sufficient theory, and other realities. All of these are things that an intelligence asset would certainly love you to believe in.
I'm aware that this view of the film version of Fight Club being a deliberate attempt to create controlled opposition, which I didn't come up with, is a conspiracy theory. But there are far more sinister conspiracies in this vein that have been proven, and that confirm the idea of the ruling class seeking to divert radical sentiments towards nihilism, apathy, and fascism.
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