 Aaron Powell Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus And I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell You're joining us today is William Irwin. He's professor of philosophy at King's College in Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. And he's creator of the philosophy and pop culture series of books including Seinfeld and Philosophy and The Simpsons and Philosophy, both of which he edited. And back in August 2016, we had him on Free Thoughts to talk about his book, The Free Market Existentialist, Capitalism Without Consumerism. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. William Irwin Well, thanks for having me back, guys. Pleasure to be with you. So today, we're going to break the first and second rules of Fight Club because we're going to talk about Fight Club. I'll start with is Fight Club, and I guess we should sometimes that the movie and the novel are a little bit different in how they approach these things. Trevor Burrus We should also have a thing at the beginning. If you have not seen or read Fight Club at the beginning of this episode, like there will be spoilers that you probably don't want so you should probably go read and watch it and then come back and listen. William Irwin Yes, even more. So is Fight Club anti-consumerism or is it anti-consumerism? Trevor Burrus Well, there you go, right? And as you know, there are some differences between the novel and the film. And I think one that's pertinent to the question you ask is that the movie I think is more anti-consumerism than the book is. And it's sort of ironic in that the movie itself of course is a consumer product and lots of big companies including not Coca-Cola, but Pepsi, Krispy Kreme, Starbucks seem to have paid big money to have product placements in what at least seems to be an anti-consumerist movie. William Irwin But it's also pretty extreme and to the point of mass destruction at least in the movie and also in the book, which could be seen as sending up the kind of mis, I guess the aims of the kind of, at the time it came out we had, the WTO was about to happen. Some of the kind of anonymous were going to break stuff, the Adbusters magazine, stuff like this had come out. But it could be seen as parodying exactly what they do for just how extreme this is and how silly it gets. Yeah, I mean that is a good point. It's certainly in the end when Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem, it's totally gone off the rails. It moves from a kind of issue of self-discovery with these guys, how well can you really know yourself if you haven't been in a fight and discovering your individuality and breaking free to then the first rule of Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions about Project Mayhem. And so these people are acting basically like drones following the leadership of Tyler Durden and breaking up, blowing up buildings and all the kind of mindless violence and mindless anti-consumerism that you mentioned. And it's a good point in a reference maybe for listeners that the movie goes back to 1999. So you set it nicely in its historical context just before. That was one of the interesting differences I think between the movie and book is that the big plan is to blow up the credit card companies and wipe out consumer debt. But the book it's just to blow up a big building and I think knock it over on top of a museum. So the movie seems to take that notion and run with it even more. Much more I think, yeah. I mean that really is the way that it's framed in the movie. And so I think it takes on a sort of victim mentality, whereas the characters start off trying to discover themselves and break free from the way in which they've been conformist and sort of become a Ikea boy and this nesting instinct and kind of metrosexual concern with clothing and appearance and all that to then blaming it. Well, why am I this way? Instead of saying I'm responsible for the way that I've become because I've bought into media portrayals or just conformed to the way in which people are living around me. Instead of saying that the finger gets pointed at the corporations Gucci and Calvin Klein who are selling them a lifestyle or Ikea or Starbucks or whatever else. And really all those corporations have done have made available certain products that you're free to choose to indulge in or not. If this was to be considered an existentialist book, is that change from self-discovery, the idea of having a fight club just so you can experience what it's like to be hit and feel different emotions in danger, how that could be beneficial to you, changing from self-discovery to we're going to change the whole world order and we're going to blame, as you said, ourselves on those other people, the corporations and whatnot. Does that make it not existentialist when it makes that shift, when it goes from self-responsibility to let's go blow stuff up because they did this to us? I would certainly say so but what part of the irony involved in answering that question is that fight club starts off as very much an existentialist tale in the sense of the early Jean-Paul Sartre who has this great emphasis on personal freedom, individual freedom and with that individual responsibility to the the end part of fight club, mirroring the later Jean-Paul Sartre who embraces Marxism and does not disavow his existentialism and it's been a constant puzzle ever since how those two could possibly fit together and my book Free Market Existentialist argues that they really can't. Once you start blaming other people rather than taking individual responsibility, the existentialist impulse is pretty well gone. I mean and we can see this if we imagine alternatively the way the characters in fight club might have acted. It might not have been as good of a story. It's a great story. I don't critique it as art but it would have been more existentially satisfying if they took responsibility for themselves and simply spread that message of personal responsibility rather than trying to liberate everybody from their debt that they I mean when you think of the debt that they want to free everybody from it's debt that's been incurred by freely making choices to charge crap on their credit cards. That's not very existentialist freeing people from responsibility that they themselves should be held accountable for. I wonder about the the starting point for it because it seems like there so we can we can say like their reaction to consumerism and their reaction to where the world had put them and the way of the world treated them ultimately goes off the rails but I wonder if it's on the rails to begin with in a sense that like what's so bad about the situation that are unnamed narrator finds himself in or that these other men find themselves in that warrants rejecting everything. I mean he seems he has a job okay but you know you need a job even in the you know when he's talking about hunting under the you know in the the jungles outside the Rockefeller center that still is a job you still need to work he seems to have a decent life he's got I mean he's got insomnia and as someone who has suffered from insomnia before it's it's terrible it really sucks but that's not really you know that it's not a product of late capitalism or something that he can't go to sleep and so are they are they kind of misdiagnosing their situation to begin with and therefore rejecting modern society and consumerism not just in a bad way ultimately but for bad reasons? Well I think certainly that they go overboard in their rejection of it and moderation is called for more than complete rejection right it's as if somebody had one bad meal and decided never to eat again where to eat you know only to the extent that they're wasting away right as you suggest in the question there's lots of good that is on offer in the capitalist society in which the the protagonist finds himself living but he's sort of living in a well-apolstered hell where he has no actual meaning in his life and the choices that he's made have not been well considered ones they've just been I mean this is a guy who who has first world problems right that he has no meaning in his very very comfortable and pampered and some might say privileged life because he really hasn't chosen well and we see this in the the dialogue between Jack and Tyler Durden where they're talking about their similarities before the big reveal has come that they're really the same person right that their father is an absentee father that the father said it was important that they go to college then it was important that they get a job and now they're saying well maybe it's important that you get married but none of these are really self-chosen ideals and this is the kind of thing that as a college professor I see all too often in my students who are choosing a major they're out of college that their parents told them to come to in the first place choosing a major that their parents have chosen for them that will lead them into a career that they probably won't really enjoy very much to buy a lot of crap that they really won't enjoy very much after the initial high of having it is gone so I mean in a way it's it's hard to feel sorry for these guys but it's also really not an extreme or unheard of situation that the you know the protagonist finds himself in let me see if I can revise the kind of thought I'm so I guess the question is what's wrong with Ikea in the sense that so they he's got he's got these comforts and maybe he's choosing them for the wrong reasons but one of the one of the themes seems to be that there's there's something almost anti existentialist or anti authentic about comfort about wealth about the being pampered that in order to be truly who you are to be truly authentic you need to I mean that the paper street soap company where they live is is an absolute dump and and the movie just you know kicks that up a few notches and just it's it's almost a dangerous place to live in terms of the electrical and the falling ceilings and the the water damage everywhere that they you have to suffer through standing on the porch for three days that having creature comforts of any kind in a sense is is inauthentic which seems I mean at least a point they would have to be argued for like is that like why why do we need to reject creature comforts in order to be really who we are or self defining right right no I think that that your question your point there is right on and it illustrates how they they go too far I mean we all know and maybe have been this kind of person like the the smoker who becomes an anti smoking zealot right and is knocking cigarettes out of people's hands and you know wrinkles his nose at the smell of tobacco that kind of thing it goes too far in that direction and I don't think from a purely existentialist standpoint there's anything wrong with Ikea or with taking comforts in certain pleasures or even certain consumer goods so long as they're chosen authentically so if we think about the way that they they dress at paper street where it's just kind of Tyler Durden Brad Pitt hanging out in that right ready bathrobe and clothes like that it's really stripped down but but then also if you think about the initial encounter between Tyler Durden and Jack if we can call him that the the protagonist played by Ed Norton on the plane think about the contrast in the clothes that they're wearing there we have Ed Norton wearing his business attire which he's cultivated a taste for but then we have the Tyler Durden character wearing a red leather jacket and a collar flung open shirt and this this seems to be more authentically what what his taste would be if he didn't have to conform to the expectations of the business world and the red leather jacket and whatever else Tyler Durden is wearing might even be more more expensive than whatever the business attire was but it seems more authentically chosen and and I think that's that's an important corrective and a middle ground that the the movie doesn't realize and and if we're to play it out philosophically that's a place we'd like to see it end up right so that you swing back and forth in a kind of Hegelian dialectic of extremes where we have extreme capital not extreme capitalism but extreme consumerism and then extreme anti-consumerism and we find this middle ground where our consumer choices are authentic choices of course that might make for a boring story and movie but philosophically it's probably a healthier middle ground. It seems that authenticity is well that it's particularly an issue in modern life and I and this movie kind of stands I think as a one of the texts that talks about authenticity especially the way we perceive it now we talk about whether or not someone we keeping it real whether or not someone is a is a poser or not so we had this huge question when I think it was Avril Lavigne I apologize anyone who knows more about this than I do because I don't know much but there was a thing there was a video in the early 2000s where she was skateboarding and then there was a huge like her fuffle because they're like she's not really a skateboarder she's she's she's not authentically a skateboarder so she's somehow it's almost like cultural appropriation that they're not being authentic and it seems like so that we might talk about more recently than maybe we used to when we were too poor maybe to sit around and wonder whether or not we were being authentic as a race it is that part of the the question the way we talk about authenticity now which is that we do it from a position of affluence so oftentimes what we think of as authenticity is stripping away some of those affluent traits but maybe when we were relatively poor as a people tilling the fields and things like that the view of authenticity could have been flipped around that what you really needed was a life of leisure where you could contemplate the greater questions of existence and that it's always it's not really a thing called authenticity there's just different viewpoints of kind of what you don't have right now yeah no that that's a great question and it certainly is a kind of a rich person's luxury to worry about authenticity and it's one of those terms that I think has been taken up more and more in in our discourse and dialogue and maybe misused maybe not I mean it drives me buggy as someone who considers himself an existentialist to hear talk about the existential threat all the time whatever that may be right of North Korea or whatever it may be where the real existential threat from the existentialist is that you may be living in a godless meaningless universe that's the real thing not whether or not your existence will continue but but in terms of authenticity I mean that that's that's a nice example about Avril Lavigne skateboarding and the sort of talk about cultural appropriation as to whether or not certain foods or fashions can be borrowed in a way that really is genuine and thinking back on the the recent presidential election there was lots of talk about authenticity and the problem with Hillary Clinton is not being authentic or not even that she was not authentic but that she was not perceived as authentic and likewise talk about Trump and part of what a lot of people did like about him as they at least thought he was authentic spoke his mind that sort of thing this is where I just want to interject with a yeah like it seems if you use Trump and you use our narrator and Tyler Durden as your examples of authenticity then is like a call it mental illness or mental health issues bound up in being authentic I'm so crazy that I don't even know I'm saying kind of thing yeah well I don't necessarily offer them as icons of authenticity I'm simply saying that people perceived Trump as being authentic I wouldn't offer him as an example and sure part of the problem with authenticity is it really is about trying to be the real thing right but there's no such thing as the real thing and as soon as you try to be the real thing you're definitely not the real thing Dave Chappelle used to have a great skit on on his comedy show about keeping it real I don't know if you guys are familiar with that I think I remember that one yeah I think he titled it when keeping it real goes wrong you know and it was it was about Chappelle acting out you know the demands of what it means to be an African-American and and how you act and how you respond to white people and and when you're consciously trying to do that rather than doing it spontaneously or organically all you're doing is putting on a show right and the the skits would just go off the rails where he'd end up acting the tough guy in a place where he wasn't the tough guy or telling off his boss or whatever and and this is this is obviously what can go wrong comically and maybe it's what goes wrong I mean there are all kinds of psychological diagnoses we can put upon Tyler Durden but perhaps going way too far in the pursuit of being your authentic self ends up making you not your authentic self well that that make you got me thinking about the constructing of image and maybe what Fight Club the movie in the book is one of the things it could be seen as saying is we spend a lot of time knowing about what other people are doing more than a comparative time if you lived in a in a school in a small town in Indiana 1830s your images of what a real farmer was or what a real housewife was or you know any of these sort of things of expectations that are put on I mean there are definitely social expectations but you're not pulling in tons of things from around the world and definitely not in a social media feed that are conveying to you that real men do X and real women do Y or real people who do this do X or Y and not to say that they're always telling us what we should be because that's a pretty common narrative they're always telling you you have to be this way but you just didn't even know and so maybe the part of the statement here is that the world that is telling you what is authentic is itself not a very good representation of authenticity so that he's wrong that going away from consumerism that's what we've been told I mean I hear that all the time being anti-consumer is seems to be pretty authentic seems to be like the the cool thing to do so actually he just misconstrued the entire thing and he took an image that he thought was authentic and it wasn't actually authentic to begin with yeah no I think that's right there were fewer options and possibilities right living in 1800s in a farm town in in Indiana so you didn't you didn't even think about it I mean you might have had a sense of of what it means to be a real man right the kind of image of masculinity that your father or whoever else portrayed it may be what it meant to be a real Christian or whatever it may be but there weren't a whole authenticity wasn't itself on sale right and being consciously anti-consumerist is as inauthentic as being consciously well I mean people are very self-congratulatory about these things right so I mean whenever I see a Prius on the road and it's it's littered with bumper stickers I think man the car itself is a bumper sticker you don't need bumper stickers on that right I get it you're an environment an environmentalist right and likewise when somebody is ostentatious in their anti-consumerism they have lost any semblance of what authenticity would be in relation to anti-consumerism so it's a very difficult balance and maybe it's one that's impossible to fully achieve for any real period of time being anti-consumerist and authentic about one's anti-consumerism has consumerism or I guess the the form of market economy that that enables consumerism been instead kind of a boon to authenticity in the sense that there's there's the line in Fight Club about you know our stuff like your stuff owns you and that that's there's something wrong with that and it gets this kind of line of causation where your stuff and the the quest for more of it and the right kind of it ends up defining you as a person but it feels like you know I mean at some level it's hard to define what authenticity means or being really you but at some level bound up in it and central to it is is the ability to express yourself to have a means to express who you are and so we can do that through our language we can do that through our actions but we also do that through the things that markets make available to us so it's not that you know he's that the line where he's trying to find like what dining set defines me as a person it's more like what dining set expresses the person that I am or what music or what set of clothes as Tyler Durden is doing and so I I wonder if the very fact of pushing against consumerism and then pushing against markets and then pushing into this primitivism where you know you wear so they say in the I think it's in the book that you know these you're going to have these leather clothes that are going to last you for the rest of your life and presumably everyone's wearing the same leather clothes that that this push in fact makes it harder to enable actual self-expression and actual authenticity because we've taken away so many of the channels by which we can express who we really are well I mean that's it when when energy and time is consumed by chasing consumer products then we lose emphasis on things we'd rather and more authentically express ourselves through right so I mean it's just ridiculous the kind of things that the the protagonist column Jack is interested in right what kind of dining set defines me as a person right well it's possible for a 30 year old male to authentically have that that thought but it's it's also pretty odd and pretty ridiculous and we get the into the dialogue with with Jack and Tyler Durden where he's asking you know what a duvet is right oh it's a comforter right yeah but I mean why does a guy like me a 30 year old single male know what a duvet is in the first place right I mean it seems kind of ridiculous I mean sure it's not that it's by default necessarily inauthentic maybe some guys really do genuinely like dining room tables and bed linens and things like that but it but it seems like you know they've been led into a realm of desiring things they really wouldn't want if they could free themselves from it I mean it's like the importance of sort of second-order desires and second-order choices right it's fine to have the desire and find to have the option and find to even want something but you need to ask yourself do I want to want it right so here if we think of consumerism not not it's not necessarily that consuming and wanting things is a problem it's the ism right and it's the similarity between say alcoholism and consumerism it's fine to want a beer as they do in the movie and in the book but the problem is when you have no real desire for it and yet you find yourself drinking anyway right when you don't have the desire but the desire has you I suppose what do you think the relationship is between views of authenticity and political beliefs because I thought I thought a lot about this because people use that word in a lot of different policy areas that I that I sort of operate in as a as a policy analyst and and I hear I understand that one's view of what a human being an authentic human being is really and I'm putting these in scare quotes an authentic human being is really like affects your views of policies to some degree and so for example I one of the things I do here Cato is some second amendment policy and firearms policy and I think that a lot of people have a view if you view humans as inherently violent for example as authentically violent then you might be wary about giving people guns to carry around on their hips because you think it would make it would perpetuate that violence so it kind of that because civilization teeters on the edge of collapse and then guns would would kind of make this happen or if you view people as authentically cooperative then maybe you'd have a different view about guns or in the campaign finance realm when you have people criticizing corporate speech and Citizens United I often tell people that it's not the the views against Citizens United and corporations spinning in elections are not wildly different than that guy you knew in high school who said well yeah because like the corporate radio stations they tell you that you like have to listen to Lady Gaga and so you're all listening to that because the corporations are telling you that and that's what they think people how people form political beliefs too so there's this this sort of weird mix of authenticity where every single side in ideology has an implicit theory of authenticity that maybe affects some of their views sure I I think that's the case if you think that there is a human nature that tilts in one direction or another that certainly is going to influence the policies that you endorse the politics that you have so there was a book published about a year ago I suppose called Fishing for Fools by a couple of economists who basically think of all of us as suckers and easily let it ground by our desires all the time and the the example that they use and come back to over and over again is the the Cinnabon stand at the mall or at the the airport where I mean there's all this kind of great science behind the way they position it and and how they how they market it and you know we're just suckers like people who fall for a fishing scam through email every time we walk by a Cinnabon right and so their their view of human nature is very much that that we're really out of control that we don't have very much chance of controlling our desires we don't even realize what they are my own view on things is that well listen sure when I when I smell the Cinnabon I want a Cinnabon but I also want to not want the Cinnabon right I don't want to endorse that desire and I think that people really have much more of a chance to to endorse their second-order desires right where I can recognize what I want to want and don't want to want and put that into into play and you know in the realm of policy and politics as you mentioned I mentioned Hillary and and Trump before but I mean you'd have a hard time finding anyone in the in the realm of politics who would really be comfortable as describing as as genuine and authentic but I think probably in the recent election cycle Bernie Sanders was the one who was most authentic and probably the person I liked much although I had the least in common with in terms of my political orientation I think on the Cinnabon I mean part of the reason that all those things work is because when it comes down to it the Cinnabon is authentically delicious and so paid for by Cinnabon I mean the Cinnabon if you would like to send me money I'll take it but but on this one of the things that you bring up and you send us a couple of essays that we can we in link to in the show notes on on Fight Club but one of in one of them you mentioned so this this notion like it begins in anti-conformity like the problem is conformity is all these men conforming to social rules and a certain expectation of what masculinity means and and so they turn radically anti-conformist but then quickly that that radical anti-conformity turns into just as radical like collectivist conformity so Project Mayhem and the the space monkeys when they start showing up all dress the same all act the same don't ask questions and this seems to be a a pretty common thing in in our experience that that movements that begin in anti-conformity end up adopting their own extremely strict sets of rules and then punishing people who deviate from them we see this and you can see kind of play out in like the forms of campus activism right now of we're going to we're going to stand up to the societal structures we're going to break with the expectations of racism sexism and so on and so forth but quickly has become like the the worst form of shame based and calling out conformity is this is this almost like an inevitable turn is there something in the drive for anti-conformity that makes it susceptible to or pushes it in that direction of becoming collectivist conformity quite quite possibly and and as mentioned before there there's a kind of a Hegelian movement with it right where an idea meets its opposite and and hopefully in the end the two come together and you find some reasonable middle ground but we see too often and in terms of for example campus politics and shouting down speakers etc at this historical moment we see an extreme ugly opposite and I mean you can think of this going back to the Avril Lavigne example or you can think in terms of different fashions or different kind of music right I mean think of punk as kind of a rejection of mainstream music and mainstream fashion and then you know you move pretty quickly from authentic punk into very inauthentic punk where it's specified as to what will actually count as punk and what will not and of course you have all the permutations on that with faux punk and portrayal of certain stances and views and music as being punk that really is nothing like punk and you know in my mind not to get too far off on on that tangent I think punk happened once in the 1970s and you can't go back to it. I would disagree with that. He's the punk rock fan more than I but I agree with the 80s and into the 90s and it still exists today but okay there's one punk album Ramones Ramones. There's more than that. That's it sorry Aaron you're wrong on this one but sorry continue on the authenticity well the thing I wanted to kind of tie onto that too is something Aaron and I were discussing before we were recording which is the alt-right and the Trump world seem to be pretty related to the Fight Club narrative quite before their time. I mean the term snowflake that gets kicked around a lot today I think actually comes directly from Fight Club. It certainly is used in Fight Club and I noticed that in just re-watching the film lately I wonder if it got picked up from there. I want to say I read somewhere which I know is a bad way to do scholarship but I want to say I read somewhere that that's where the term I mean yes the term snowflake itself does not originate there but using snowflake in that way comes from Fight Club. Right yeah well I mean there's something really disturbing about that and the sort of paramilitary look of the of a lot of the alt-right folks and I mean if you were to parody if you would imitate anything in Fight Club the sort of space monkeys look and the project mayhem behavior is really not what you would want to imitate but you're right there's something disturbingly similar about the feel and the look and the vibe that you get off of a lot of alt-right folks that is resonant of that part of Fight Club. Well especially the the view of masculinity I think is is important there because it's all men except for Marla I guess in Project Mayhem correct do they ever say that there are any women. No there's no women. Yeah so and there they feel somehow emasculated by women. Very bad graphic novel follow-up Fight Club 2 that was published a year or so ago there are women in Project Mayhem expanded Project Mayhem but but then but the question about men feeling that they don't have a role in the world that their unique contribution in terms of ability to do violence for example has been taken out of progress as it's now construed and so men are looking for a place to fight kill those kind of things and that's what Tyler Durden and Project Mayhem eventually bring to them that there are similarities there with I would say the Trump movement. I think that's very true and one of the kind of comic ironies of that is one of the ways it's not what Chuck Paul and Nick himself really had intended but one of the ways that Fight Club has been interpreted as a homoerotic novel and so really what they're doing is fucking and not fighting if you read it that way that's not something that would be very appealing to the alt-right folks I'm sure. I've encountered that interpretation and I think that's a valid definitely a valid one. There's also I mean to with the the alt-right and kind of the men's rights movement online there's Fight Club also seems to have a blame the women angle to it a bit so we get the discussion that these are men our fathers are absent then he says like we're a generation of men raised by women and then asks like if getting married if a wife is a good next step and Marla Singer seems to be I mean she kind of is the the savior at the end in a sense but through most of it she's the she doesn't belong here she's not part of this she doesn't get it that that angle seems to be picked up on too in the you know we see like there was that that shooting in California where he it's this notion that you know I can't that the problem is women that you know I can't get in this case I can't get a girlfriend and that's the fault of women and the fault of feminization of society as opposed to and it goes back to that you know that kind of victimization that you mentioned you know that they're they're mistakenly they're blaming everything but themselves for the position that they're in and so I mean it seems obvious if you can't get a girlfriend the problem is you it's not women but but that angle seems picked up too and it's part of like I think one of the striking things about rereading is I reread the novel for this conversation I rewatched the movie is these came out the movies 1999 the novel is either 94 96 I can't remember which 96 96 is how much prescient these are is how much Fight Club has become kind of part of the culture and you can see aspects of it at play like I think you could you make the argument that it's certainly maybe with a more more most important texts of the late 20th century as far as talking about where we are today in the 21st century well yeah I think it's held up incredibly well and even as you suggest been a bit prescient in that way and you're right I mean there is something very strange about the the maleness of it all I'm not so sure that things are blamed on women in the film or the book so much as women aren't the answer right so I'm not going to get married there's never really have any mention of the of the character's mother it's just that the father is absent but but that message that a woman isn't the answer can easily be taken on and saying that women aren't important or women don't matter or women are just kind of scenery or window dressing or accompaniment and you surely do see that attitude taken on and it was really taken on in horrific and tragic effect by the but was it San Bernardino Santa Cruz I believe Santa Cruz Santa Bernardino was was different right our colleague our colleague Brink Lindsey wrote a book Age of Abundance came out about 10 years ago maybe but in that book he discusses the evolution of of post war life as sort of a movement of people who suddenly have all of their their basic needs covered in America specifically that they know where their shelter is they know most people know where they're going to get food they're going to get water and so on Maslow's hierarchy they've they've got that covered and then so then they have to move up to these next realms of spiritual and personal fulfillment as methods of living their lives and so post war is defined by you have the sort of Christian right emerging and you have the left emerging with two different theories about how to achieve fulfillment this seems to me to be part of the entire story we're talking about here that we have two different groups looking for authenticity looking for meaning in life in different ways and in terms of the political realm they're they're often at odds with each other and they're trying to control each other while they're living an incredibly affluent world and have different entirely different interpretations of what keeping it real to make it just a very colloquial entirely of interpretations about what the good life is what you should be striving for in life not necessarily either one of them being incorrect but maybe not very good for everyone in a country trying to kind of enforce that upon everyone else right I mean delivering an answer in any form is not going to suit everyone right and there's the line I can't quote quite exactly in the film about our generation as no great war no great depression right our great war is is a spiritual war our great depression is our lives right so it's this sense of being really comfortable as opposed to a pre-industrial way of living and and and not having to struggle not having a war to fight and so searching out for one and you know I I see this in all kinds of of little ways I take my dog for a walk with my son and the dog loves to find crap on the the sidewalk if you can find something to eat there he's much happier with that than any kind of food that we give him he's got this whatever foraging instinct in that way and I see my son playing video games for hours and hours upon end I'm not a video game guy myself but you know I see what he's doing you know there's no real conflict in his life and he's seeking out the kind of conflict or hero's journey online in these in these games that he plays and I don't think that's an altogether bad thing we need to have some sort of outlet for it and the fantasy outlet of video games you know there could be worse so long as you're in touch with your your real life and don't end up living all of your life in the video game but I mean that the consumerism that is the bad guy in Fight Club could as easily be today what we see with so many people living so much of their lives online whether it's in video games or or some other kind of fora where they kind of lose sense of a pursuit of an authentic self outside of that so why is I mean Fight Club is certainly not the only instance of kind of making this argument and it's a rather common one and we see a lot today that why is it that notions of authenticity and specific like masculinity and male masculine authenticity so bound up in in violence in a return to violence that you know they discover themselves through punching each other or I mean it turns out it discovers himself through punching himself in the face a bunch of times but like that there's something you know one of the problems with modernity is that it has it stripped violence from our lives why do that which seems which seems very odd like the stripping of violence from our lives is almost by you know is by definition progress so is there like why are we telling men that they necessarily in order to be real men have to be violent men well I think it is progress you're right what we're freed from is the is the constant threat of of violent death but evolution has equipped us to have to respond to the near constant threat of violent death is a great book by a guy I think his name is gone John got Shaw called the professor in the cage where he writes about he's an adjunct English professor and he writes about his experience of training for mixed martial art fighting and he does a lot of interpretation of literature through an evolutionary lens and talking about men fighting in literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Beowulf up to the the present and while I think it's great that we're stripped of the need to have to fight we're also given some evolutionary endowment to be inclined to fight or inclined to violence and I think it's it has to find its safe outlet as my dog has whatever inclination to forage or hunt that he can exercise in some limited form while he's out for a walk most men have an excess of testosterone at least compared to what's required for decent life in civilized society these days and need to find some way to discharge it whether it's through physical exercise or playing video games or whatever the the case may be so in fight club we as we've been discussing there's all these themes of anti-consumerism maybe anti-anti-consumerism authenticity and a bunch of different things it's it's definitely something worth both reading and watching but what are some of the interesting things that you think that the the movie forces us to ask her examine that you think not a lot of people realize well advertising gets demonized and in some ways not rightly so I think right because advertising presents choices to us and if we don't look at whether or not we want to endorse them we can easily go along with them one of the ways in which I determine what to listen to on my iPod some days is to just flip through the the list of artists and let one of them pop into my head and advertising will do that for you and some people think well any any consumer spending is good for the economy any spending is good spending but I'm not really sure about that I think we have something like the emperor's new clothes meets the broken window fallacy listeners to this podcast will know that broken window is not something that's a good stimulus for the economy anymore than the cash for clunkers scheme back a few years ago was something that stimulated the economy and I don't think that just any consumer spending is good for the economy either right when a kind of an idea desire pops into your head simply as a result of that advertising it really pays to stop and consider hey I've got this desire now whether it's for the Cinnabon or for the Budweiser or for the Chevy do I really want to endorse that right would my money not be better spent on something else right we vote with our dollars we vote with our consumer choices and no more than I would want to kind of walk into the voting booth and let somebody's name and the kind of nice sound of their name determine who I'm going to vote for should I want the sound of an advertising jingle determine where I'm going to put my dollars and you really need to reflect on the desire that I have as a result of the advertisements thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org