• theneverfox@pawb.social
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    8 months ago

    My take with fight club is he went all the way down the rabbit hole. Modern capitalism beat him down to the point he had a psychotic break

    The other guys literally saw him punching himself in a parking lot, and they were so numb and hungry for something different that their first thought was “maybe getting punched would make me feel something”. It wasn’t a bunch of psychos, it was average people so numb and beat down they took the first opportunity to rebel against the norm.

    One of them died. They didn’t just do a terrorism, they destroyed the loans of hundreds of thousands of people, and killed no one. It was presented as an effective and morally justifiable act. If you could blow up an empty office building and lift a quarter million people out of crushing poverty, it’s property destruction vs lives.

    I don’t think he came to terms with himself or worked on himself, he saw that he went from a fight club to a cult to the leader of freedom fighters in no time.

    He doesn’t come to terms with himself, he’s terrified because he’s not in control of himself and he just did something he would’ve found not only unthinkable, but logistically impossible before his psychotic break

    He tries to kill himself rather than see where he’ll go, how long before he’ll blow up a building full of people.

    Then he survives. He went down the rabbit hole, and came back changed. His life didn’t get better, he didn’t just work on himself. He came back where he started after glimpsing the other side, and he brought his adventure back with him to the life he was so desperate to leave.

    It’s the heroes journey - he wasn’t just mentally ill in wonderland, he was hyper competent. People were willing to die for him, and to kill for him. He was able to blow up a building, and no people, and get away with it. He accomplished a heroic feat in magnitude if nothing else.

    But it terrified the shit out of him, he had enough adventure. So he found himself happy to return home, and he picked up where he left off.

    Willingness to go to therapy wasn’t the journey, that’s what an office worker does when they have a psychotic break. The journey was to be a hero fighting back against the orphan crushing machine, and he did it. He struck a meaningful blow, he destroyed the Ring. And then he went home, having had his adventure and appreciating the peace of mediocrity