How Movements Become Toxic

“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.

The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.”

– Fight Club

 

 

I was in my teens when I watched Fight Club for the first time. It felt as though I had been seeing in the dark all the while, until the film turned the lights on.

The film follows a nameless protagonist — a white-collar average joe who suffers from insomnia, and is discontented with the monotonous rhythm of everyday life. In his attempt to feel something other than his malaise, he splurges on IKEA furniture, and occasionally attends cancer support group meetings.

His mundane life takes a huge turn when he meets a man named Tyler Durden, who confronts him about his consumerist lifestyle. He and Tyler engage in a fistfight, through which they discover is an effective outlet for venting out their repressed discontentment with social norms. The protagonist “wakes up” to the ills of society, and decides to turn his life around. He quits his job, and together with Tyler, he forms Fight Club — a secret group in which its members regularly meet up and fight, as a form of therapy.

Definitely, the film’s critique of capitalist and consumerist culture appealed to me as a rebellious teenager, who was cluelessly looking for a cause to blend into. But what I didn’t get at the time — and in fact, what most people still don’t get — is that Fight Club isn’t just about “waking up”, because that’s relatively easy to do.

Most importantly, the film is a warning about the dangerous places that “waking up” can take you. It’s a cautionary tale about keeping that adrenaline rush unchecked, and being too caught-up in contrarian ideas.

Not understanding the message that was being put out, I remember thinking that the latter part of the film was underwhelming. As the story goes, the Fight Club quickly grows in membership, and much to the protagonist’s dismay, it escalates to being more than just about fistfights. Under Tyler’s orders, they start running public pranks, and eventually full-blown acts of terrorism, as they rage against the social system.

As the club spirals out of hand, the protagonist realizes that Tyler is in fact, himself — precisely, a figment of his own inner discontentment. Eventually, the protagonist manages to regain control over Tyler by shooting himself in his mouth, after which he gazes at the damage that he is already too late to stop.  

It’s much more common than you think, for our relationship with contrarian beliefs to follow the same trajectory as that of the protagonist and his Fight Club. At first, it’s exciting and life-changing. But over time, it morphs into something unhealthy or even dangerous. It may not be to the same extreme extent that you’re bombing banks, as in the film. But you similarly find yourself unable to co-exist with people who don’t think the same way as you do.

As author Robert M. Pirsig wrote in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

Obviously, it’s not wrong to think outside of the norm or to be part of a movement per se. Because if we were to hold on to the same failing yet unchallenged beliefs, well, we’re always going to be screwed. And ultimately, it is our duty as artists to see and think differently.

But this beautiful duty of ours can easily get toxic, especially once it escalates into a movement or a tribe of like-minded individuals. Caught in the snares of groupthink, we tend to divide the world into “us” and “them” — or in other words, the people who share our contrarian beliefs, and the people who don’t.

A fitting example to think about is the Just Stop Oil movement. While their message on overcoming climate change is perfectly reasonable and even crucial, how they get their message across is plainly insensitive and selfish. They protest by deliberately disrupting everyday events, like vandalizing buildings and prized artwork in museums, crashing weddings and concerts, and gluing themselves to walls and floors.

Worst of all, they love to cause massive traffic jams by standing in traffic, even to the extent that people have died, due to ambulances being unable to make their way through. Yet, when confronted about their tactics, they would tell the people to think of what’s “more important” than going to work, or to the hospital, or sending their kids to school, or the people who have died — which is, climate change.

The protestors may be right on some level, but there’s always a more empathetic way to voice out your opinions. To them, it is as though the average person doesn’t care about climate change, just because they’re not out there protesting. Instead of inspiring other people to listen and take action, they are only pushing them away further and further. 

We see this “us and them” mindset a lot in the “woke” media as well, especially in the sense that people cling to their beliefs so tightly, that any form of criticism is seen as a bigoted remark. For instance, people who have called out the Israeli government for their apartheid towards Palestine — including former US President Jimmy Carter, and even some Israelis and Jewish people themselves — are automatically branded as antisemites.

Similarly, this goes on in regards to LGBT-related issues. Musician Alice Cooper recently courted controversy for bringing up a valid concern about gender freedom, particularly how harmful it could be for very young children to be allowed to make their own decisions about which gender they would like to be. But of course, like many others who have spoken out, he is simply labelled a transphobe.

With all of this being said, then, how do we better deal with our relationship with our contrarian ideas? How do we prevent it from turning toxic?

There’s a reason why the first two rules of Fight Club are that you don’t talk about Fight Club (even as the characters in the film did end up violating these rules). Because when you believe in a contrarian idea, it doesn’t mean that life has to be any different, that you have to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. It doesn’t have to be “us and them”. Instead, you can peacefully act on your own beliefs, while also acknowledging and respecting the fact that other people have their own, too.

You could share your message with the world, but you can’t jam it down other people’s throats. You can’t make other people do anything. Not everyone is going to agree with you, and that’s fine. They’re not your enemies for believing differently. You can still co-exist and be friends.

It’s also worth reminding yourself often that you could be wrong. After all, there is no perfect philosophy. There are always grey areas in your ideas which may be hard for you to see, but that other people could more easily point out. Always imagine the possibility that, down the road, your beliefs could evolve. This way, you can treat your beliefs, as well as other people’s beliefs, with a little more humility.

As Mahatma Gandhi put it, rather than clinging tooth and nail to your ideas and beliefs, see them instead as “experiments in truths” — though on a side note, Gandhi did have his share of shady experiments, like sleeping nude in the same bed with young women to put his celibacy to the test. Nevertheless, unlike beliefs that are set in stone, experiments could be proven wrong, and improved on.

Lastly, just remember that everybody dies. Life is just too damn short for the drama, for the cancel culture that comes from the “us and them” mindset. There probably isn’t an idea that is worth dying or killing for — both literally and figuratively.

At the end of the day, don’t we all just turn into dust? — tiny, irrelevant, insignificant specks of dust in an infinitely large and indifferent world — and nothing resembling our grandiose ideas and ideals that we cling so adamantly to.

To quote that quintessential line from Fight Club, “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Simply live by your own ideas, and let other people live by theirs. Live and let live.