Fight Club with an eye on Human Nature and Mother Nature

Fear inside of us is easily ignited by expectations and not being able to express ourselves. Is this why we see so much anger and violence in the world – especially now?

I confess I’ve never seen the movie, but I did read the book (my first Kindle read!), which I thought was brilliant. This quote caught my eye and soul years ago in Moteti, South Africa during my first 3 months of Peace Corps service.

For thousands of years human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history excpected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.

And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and burned gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

… I wanted to breathe smoke.

… We wanted to blast the world free of history

… Recycling and speed limits are bullshit; they’re like someone who smokes on his deathbed.

Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant long enough for the earth to recover.

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

It’s too easy to destroy Mother Nature when we think stepping on her will help us ‘win’.

I found this quote going through old notebooks. Now, it seems this quote can relate to anything in our physical and emotional world: we pay for the past one way or another. Chuck Palahniuk called the violence in “Fight Club” a metaphor for ‘destroying how we see ourselves’, specifically how men of his generation had trouble defining their manhood – all because of how history wrote the laws on masculinity. Add femininity, ‘success’, and, health, and more of us are likely to jump in a ring to destroy that ‘image’ that society broadcasts.

Identity is more than DNA and looks – it’s about how we feel about ourselves.

Without the ability to get needs met, or be heard, it’s easy -too easy – to turn to violence.

This spring, let’s stop beating ourselves up for who we are/who we aren’t. For that matter, isn’t consumerism beating up Mother Nature, not to mention us? Maybe there’s a new way to define a successful life that doesn’t define buying things no-one needs wrapped in paper that will be stuffed into garbage cans. Future generations will thank us.

My host mother, Elizabeth, in Moteti, Limpopo, South Africa: I sat in front of the house and read ‘Fight Club’. And yes, South Africa is a land of turmoil as is the rest of the world, especially now.