Is This All There Really Is?
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Is this all there really is? Life is full of fear and desire. For some, fear and desire are defined differently. For others it means the same. Why are we enslaved by a consumer society? I say its because we feel that it is all we have; or is it because its what we are taught to love since the day we are born. The allure of consumerism is appealing to us. We were always told that if we work hard and strive for the best then we could obtain anything our hearts desire; we could live the “American dream”, which is sometimes looked at as being the standard way of living. Uniformity when we are born is how I look at it. Striving for success, is the way to achieve the “American dream” But it seems that to become this dream, to have these things that matter so much, we have to sell our souls to the corporate world. But not everyone can be this. The dehumanizing effects of the corporate world can be what makes or breaks you. With the corporate world comes the realization that you arent who you were before. You are no longer an individualist, you are no longer authentic. You are who they say you are and you think how they have trained you to think. In Chuck Palahniuks Fight Club, all of these ideas and more are evident. I hope to establish the evidence of these ideas being present and explain my views of them. Why? Because I want to establish that there is more to life than living like the world wants you to live. Life is what you make it.
The narrator in Fight Club is a prime example of living and breathing the corporate world and the emotionally deadening appeal of “useless shit.” His desire is the Ikea catalog which holds all the funky, new consumer goodies which he believes is the gateway to a good life, but they never really satisfy. At one point in the movie this is all he is concerned with. When his condo is somehow blown to pieces the only thing that he can think about is his cute little sofa and his wardrobe that was becoming respectable. For him that was completeness. Now his completeness was suddenly gone. His satisfaction is gone, but with that satisfaction was fear. The fear of, “is that all there is?” Is there more to life than material thing and going to work everyday? For the narrator the things that make him feel complete, his desires, are slowly slipping away. His job is portrayed as his life and because of it he has issues like insomnia. He believes his life is ending one minute at a time and he spends it traveling to different cities for his company. Is that all there is? He deals with insomnia by joining support groups for people who are dealing with disturbing problems. This is his way of bonding with others, pretending to be ill to fit in and subside his own issues. Is this ok? He seems to think so and it is working so it must be. Then there is the issue of work. His ideas are built on how the company has trained him to think and he himself has become somewhat heartless; he is a slave to his job, which portrays loss of freedom. He is working to do what is good for the company not what is good for the consumer. The equation he gives is: A (number of vehicle in the field)*B (probable rate of failure)*C (average out of court settlement) =X; if this is less than the cost of recall they dont do one. Now this is purely money over lives, which has to do with what De Tocqueville says about being concerned with a whole instead of ourselves. The company should be concerned with peoples lives not how much money they would lose for recalling a car. Like I said before he is starting to think as the company does. He is losing the freedom of knowing what is right and what is wrong.
This brings me to one of the three malaises that Taylor defines in his book, Ethics of Authenticity. Because of the narrator not thinking for himself this displays a loss of freedom, which is basically not being who he is free to be; not having your own ideas and your own thoughts. Taylor defines this malaise as restriction of choice placed on us by the other two malaises, individualism and instrumental reasoning. Individualism and instrumental reason put constraint on our lives and our decisions as well. Basically, we are faced with choices by society that might not be right for us, as long as we are playing the game. This sometimes can mean putting aside our own values and the importance of others to grow for our own purposes, loss of freedom to do what we think is right. Taylor believes that it doesnt have to be this way; we can keep the good ideas of an individual lifestyle while avoiding the negatives of it. Being an individual also mean being authentic, a way of living that is uniquely yours. We can still be concerned with others as well as be authentic. Too much authenticity can be a bad thing. Pluralism; too much of a good thing can be bad. There are different ways to look at it. The narrator loses his freedom through his job and through his and his over whelming need to stay current. This tears him down and he doesnt really know who he is without these things that he has shaped his life around. He wonders if he wakes up in another city can he wake up as a different person.
This is where Tyler Durden comes into play. Tyler Durden is everything that the narrator is not. Tyler could do what the narrator couldnt. Tyler lives outside the box while the narrator is in it. Tyler is everything that the narrator wants to be and is in awe of his mentor, the happy go lucky Tyler Durden, attracted to Tylers manic energy because he has the ability to be free without care. The narrator created Tyler to be what he couldnt, an out of that came chaos. Tyler has his ideas about trying to obtain the “American dream” as well. Violence to Tyler is the solution of a generation beat-up by a mass media that offers its citizens a universe with two hells and no heaven, a world in which desire and fear are linked. He believes that it is a meaningless existence to strive for all your life; what we are told we can be. Tyler says in response to that, “everything that you want to be but you cant.” Meaning they tell you that you can be this and that, but the chances of it are very slim unless you give your life to it, unless you become a slave to it. He is most definitely a hyper individualist, which is what you get when you combine relativism and subjectivism. Relativism to me is major denial of independence and subjectivism to me is putting ones own feeling above anything else regardless of how it might change things. With this comes the robbing of a good deal of life. Tyler believes that everyone should have total equality and he believes that this should happen by any means necessary. Whether it is through civil ness or violence, but Tylers way is violence. He believes in being a “space monkey,” sacrificing your life for the greater good.