#namely the creation of such a heavily propagandized war that consent was manufactured and became uncriticizable

[jacksoldsideblog]

On the loss of the worker class and the lack of hypocrisy in Project Mayhem

"What," he says, "what will you wish you'd done before you died?"

...

My job, I say. I wish I'd quit my job.

...

The mechanic starts talking, and it's pure Tyler Durden. 

"I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived," he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver's window, "and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables." 

The drop of his forehead, his brow, the slope of his nose, his eyelashes and the curve of his eyes, the plastic profile of his mouth, talking, these are all outlined in black against the stars. 

"If we could put these men in training camps and finish raising them. 

"All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction. 

"You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. 

"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression. 

"We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them. 

"Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon. 

"Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world. 

"Imagine hunting elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.

"What you said about your job," the mechanic says, "did you really mean it?"

.

Chapters 18-19, Fight Club.

Well known, probably, for the facetious nature of stating there’s no war in the generation in the 90s as having no war when the Gulf war ‘ended’ in ‘91, and in ‘03 we’d be back in Iraq. Also known well for its inclusion in the movie. 

But like, what’s actually being said there, when you get past that?

You have: The working class of America was emaciated as jobs flew overseas and were rerouted to prison ‘labor’, rapidly deindustrializing the country and leaving those left behind to be shoved into bullshit jobs to create a consumer managerial class, a fangless servile underclass without real power to affect the day to day of society, and a very, very small remaining working class. People who once would have been integral to the function of society are now further alienated and reduced to consumers in a deindustrialized feedlot. All that’s left is the hopelessness, which everyone can see is a cataclysmic disease. A problem that has to be solved. You have such a severe loss of power, such strong alienation that fight club develops as a way to grasp even a sense of control and purpose.

You have: Men especially have been promised war and hard times as the catalyst for their own purpose, but now this generation has seen war, has seen hard times, and none of those promises are stacking up. The poisoning and bombing of civilians in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, doesn’t quite match with the image of righteously dying to end nazism. There is no sudden government program buying up the labor of the beleaguered man down on his luck, to create massive publics works projects and revitalize the surrounding world and economy, a la the New Deal. The propagandized images of the past have been tarnished. There is an acute sense of lack of purpose, lack of value. There is an acute sense of something needing to shift, something massive.

You have: a manufactured rejection of the working class, a debridement of labor, a world in which salary has no relation to the importance or effort of the work you do; there is no value.

He says, imagine; the American people revitalized to the power and importance of before. Strong and undistracted, no longer pacified by petty admittance to jobs with no purpose, no longer accepting of their devaluation, no longer allowing their importance in the world the predicted value of their ad-influenceable leanings. 

Imagine; you’re afraid of history, you cannot imagine crafting a better world, anyone with a concrete plan has been gunned down and removed from power and all you’re left with is limpdicked fools who sit around waiting for a miracle to happen. Imagine you can only see destroying this one and hoping what rises from the ashes will be better as the answer. 

He's an accelerationist; make everything worse, so bad, hit bottom so all you can do is rise. 

So: accelerate. Take the average wage slave, already stripped of true individuality in favor of corporate signage, already stripped of power, and push them farther. Imagine, you think, only will everyone be strong if they finally accept that they are weak. Become the opposite of free. Join a cult. Become nothing and no one. Manifest the death cult already intrinsic in society. Become the nexus of all of society’s ills. Push people into such inhumanity that they will inevitably revolt against you and learn the true value of themselves in the world. 

And try to collapse society. Accelerate the fall of finance. Hasten the destruction of society so it can blossom again.

So yeah, it’s like… I think Project Mayhem’s hypocrisies are on purpose, really. Self improvement is masturbation if you’re never going to actually make a difference. Self destruction is the only thing that will allow you to reach even a moment of perfection. Destroy what you were, let go, fucking take action for once, unfreeze, DO something. Project Mayhem is an advanced version of fight club; it promises actualization through destruction. It isn’t like, some happenstance thing that results in Tyler making the space monkeys what they are. 

I think it’s moreso simply the manifestation of the accelerationist aspect of Tyler’s anarchist, nihilist ideals. And like those two, it’s also a criticism. The monkeys do not drag themselves free. They still await orders. It is a failed, ill planned philosophy of a rabid dog.