Leo D.M.J. Aurini - August 21, 2012


Fight Club & CS Lewis

Topics
science alienation
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
C.S. Lewis Plato John Robson Marxists Marla
Psychology VI - Susceptibility to Schedule 2 Personality Disorders Lewis Vs Palahniuk Pt 2： Food Porn and Making Love

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

108.59

Word count

2,149

Sentence count

168

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the parallels between the movie Fight Club and the book The Abolition of Men by C.S. Lewis, and how the movie celebrates nihilism, while the book is an attack on it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Once we killed bad men, now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and
00:00:10.000 diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are potential officer material.
00:00:16.920 Most wonderful of all the virtues of thrift and temperance and even ordinary intelligence are
00:00:22.080 sales resistance. That is a quote from the book The Abolition of Men by C.S. Lewis, and it
00:00:34.200 has the exact same flavor as the speech in Fight Club about how we are a generation of
00:00:40.960 boys raised by women, about how the world has no place for us, about how we've been reduced 1.00
00:00:46.380 to numbers and effects, how we're nothing more than our IKEA furniture and data on a spreadsheet.
00:00:57.740 Both the movie Fight Club and this book The Abolition of Men are focused upon that, about
00:01:04.300 how the individual is being degenerated into an object, how they're being alienated into
00:01:12.860 an object, how society only uses people for what they can produce at the end of the day,
00:01:18.700 how they have no inherent value in the individual person. But here's the interesting thing.
00:01:28.540 Fight Club was a celebration of nihilism, while this book by C.S. Lewis is an attack on it.
00:01:34.300 Now we need to do a brief aside. A brief aside. One of the interesting arrogances of the modern era
00:01:47.740 is how it dismisses all non-scientific knowledge. How it regards the myths and superstitions of prior
00:01:58.060 errors as just that myths and superstitions. They become prejudicially bad things. When,
00:02:06.780 if you actually study the occult at all, you'll see a lot of sense in that, a lot of parallels to what
00:02:15.420 we're learning about humanity nowadays. One example, and I believe this comes from Daoism initially,
00:02:24.060 but it was probably present in a few more cultures, that the left side of the body is the feminine side, 0.89
00:02:33.740 and the right is the masculine side. Of course, we know today that the left hemisphere of the brain,
00:02:42.060 which controls the right side, is the analytical, and the right the emotive intuitive side.
00:02:47.980 And the particular one that comes up in this instance, which is why I want to go aside here,
00:02:57.100 is, well, what it reminded me of, was the chakras. In Indian, uh, supposed to call it mysticism,
00:03:06.700 Indian mysticism, there's the the seven chakras of the body, but you can boil them down to three
00:03:13.660 particularly important ones. Uh, the the head, the heart, and the gut. And again, C.S. Lewis, this time
00:03:23.260 quoting Plato, not an Indian source, from, uh, the Republic, by the way, says as follows.
00:03:33.420 As the king covers his executive, so reason and man must rule the mere appetites by means of the
00:03:43.580 spirited elements. The head rules the belly through the chest, the seat, as Alanis tells us, of magnanimity.
00:03:53.580 And even today, in our common language, we still talk about getting a feeling from the gut,
00:04:00.300 going with your gut, going with your gut sense. And that quote, the bit where he quotes Plato,
00:04:05.820 is in a chapter, Men Without Chests.
00:04:14.060 And this is what he argues.
00:04:17.820 That there's, now there's two types of men in society. Those dominated by the intellect.
00:04:24.540 The intellectuals that think they have such big brains because their chest is just so small.
00:04:30.300 And those guided by low base instinct. Guided by the gut, the groin. The
00:04:39.580 pickup artist that never considers the consequences of their actions. The
00:04:45.420 the degenerate overweight person. That there's a lack of chest. And chest is where you find this 0.75
00:04:55.660 combination of the higher intellect, but the purposefulness of the gut. And so this is where
00:05:03.100 you get stuff like love, patriotism, self-sacrifice. All those positive elements that truly make us
00:05:10.060 human. Not mere number crunchers and not mere animals, but something that's a combination of both.
00:05:16.060 And we see this exact progression in Fight Club.
00:05:28.940 In Fight Club, the narrator starts out as a man dominated by intellect. He works as an insurance
00:05:37.420 claim adjuster. He counts numbers all day, reducing people down to little facts and figures. He collects
00:05:44.620 all the garbage that he's supposed to collect in society. And it finally drives him mad. 0.93
00:05:51.820 And so then he goes from the mind down to the gut, to the groin. He starts Fight Club,
00:05:58.780 starts having extremely hard sex with Marla, if I'm getting the character's name correctly.
00:06:05.980 It becomes just a visceral being, rejecting the empty world of pure intellectualism.
00:06:15.020 And then the book and the movie diverge.
00:06:17.180 In the final act, we see the nihilism present. But in the book, he discovers the abyss. And in the movie,
00:06:33.900 he becomes the ubermensch. Let's consider the book first.
00:06:38.540 So in the novel, he decides to target the Museum of Natural History, to try and destroy the past.
00:06:53.660 When both the intellectual and the gut fail him, he tries to destroy history, basically causing
00:07:01.660 civilizational suicide. He fails. His friends from the counseling groups show up, but their love isn't
00:07:14.620 enough. He winds up in a mental hospital, and the evilness that he has wrought is still present in the
00:07:20.700 world. He falls into the abyss, losing all faith, falling apart, losing all hope.
00:07:31.660 Now, to go back to C.S. Lewis for a second here.
00:07:42.940 C.S. Lewis, that is what he's writing about in this book. He's talking about the necessity of theology.
00:07:51.980 That theology is a filter to view the world. It's a heuristic that lets you see what's important
00:08:00.940 and what's not. And he points out that something without this filter, that if you can know everything
00:08:08.060 in the universe, if you can perceive everything, you perceive nothing, because nothing has any
00:08:14.700 significance.
00:08:15.580 In regards to science, he says, it might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement
00:08:24.540 was tainted from its birth, but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy
00:08:29.340 neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price.
00:08:36.860 Reconsideration and something like repentance may be required.
00:08:45.100 See, what he's getting at here is the same thing that I've said about atheist cult before.
00:08:51.500 So what they do is they use the scientific method of questioning things to question things that they
00:08:58.460 consider enemies. So they'll use this analytical method to break down, for instance,
00:09:06.940 arguments against abortion, or they'll break down maybe communism or whatever. Whatever they label
00:09:13.020 as the enemy, they'll start breaking down using the scientific method. But they never seem to realize
00:09:18.860 that that scientific method can also be applied to the things that they believe in. Their ethics and
00:09:24.860 their theology, which is largely, if not entirely, derived from Christianity. And C.S. Lewis criticizes
00:09:32.780 contemporary intellectuals of his, this was written in 1944, for doing the exact same thing.
00:09:39.820 These intellectuals were trying to teach school children how to see through 0.96
00:09:45.020 bullshit propaganda from advertisers. Except the problem was that the methods they used to break down 0.97
00:09:52.700 these advertisers could equally as well be applied to beautiful poetry or a celebration of national history.
00:10:07.020 And so the comment that history or that rather science was born at an inauspicious hour
00:10:13.420 can't help reminding me of Professor John Robson, and a link below to his one-hour lecture.
00:10:28.460 Robson argues that how it's typically taught, how history is typically taught, is that the renaissance
00:10:38.380 with the beginning of the modern era, and that the medieval dark ages and the Roman period before that
00:10:47.260 were part of the same dark history of long ago. Robson thinks it's the opposite, that the modern era
00:10:55.900 began with the collapse of Rome and the rise of Christianity. And I mentioned some of this in my last video,
00:11:01.740 about how it was Christianity, the concept of God being a vulnerable baby that could be killed, about God
00:11:10.460 suffering, that led to the conception of slavery being morally wrong.
00:11:21.580 And so to go back to science for a moment, science
00:11:25.340 science was developed during the renaissance era, and the renaissance era was a rediscovery
00:11:33.900 of Roman thought. And so when C.S. Lewis talks about science being born at an ill hour, under ill conditions,
00:11:42.460 you can't help drawing a bit of a connection there between the Roman self-alienation
00:11:48.940 and the way that science alienates us from ourselves. When you apply science hard and fast, you get the concentration camp.
00:12:00.860 We become nothing more than blind products of our genetic code. Nothing has an essence inherent to it
00:12:09.500 that's worthy of anything. It becomes nothing but the raw data that builds it up.
00:12:18.940 And this is why C.S. Lewis says that we need theology, because he somewhat foresaw
00:12:28.460 the world of Fight Club leading to this nihilistic abyss.
00:12:34.220 But something telltale near the end of the book.
00:12:48.060 He says,
00:12:48.380 Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps in the nature of things, analytical understanding
00:12:57.820 must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.
00:13:07.740 There might be a possibility, he says, that the analytical nature of science
00:13:12.460 science is inevitable to science.
00:13:19.740 He claims not to be an obscuritist, not to be anti-science, not to be a primitivist.
00:13:27.820 He hopes that science can somehow be not analytical and not destructive.
00:13:43.020 I don't think he has much hope of finding a non-corrosive science.
00:13:48.700 I'm afraid.
00:13:59.900 So, is the abyss inevitable?
00:14:06.540 If Fight Club the movie celebrates nihilism,
00:14:10.380 why is C.S. Lewis so desperately attacking nihilism?
00:14:18.140 C.S. Lewis is an amazing theologian.
00:14:21.820 He is not the greatest historian, however.
00:14:24.700 And this book, remember, was written in 1944.
00:14:28.300 He considered the Nazis more dangerous than the communists.
00:14:31.180 Here's the thing about nihilism.
00:14:42.380 It does involve fundamental questioning.
00:14:44.780 It does involve corroding away your every element, your every bit of faith.
00:14:53.340 And it comes with a great risk of an abyss.
00:14:56.540 But there's also the Ubermensch.
00:15:03.500 In Fight Club the movie, rather than attacking the Museum of Natural History,
00:15:09.260 rather than trying to destroy himself, to destroy history, to destroy humanity,
00:15:18.060 he attacks the financial centers.
00:15:19.580 He attacks the buildings that devolve us into mere numbers. 0.97
00:15:28.380 And through putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, 0.87
00:15:32.460 he doesn't wind up in a mental hospital. 0.56
00:15:34.620 He finds transcendence.
00:15:41.100 In this book, C.S. Lewis actually discusses an early version of transhumanism.
00:15:46.380 Of course, he's talking about eugenics. 0.85
00:15:51.980 It hasn't quite got the...
00:15:53.660 It's 1944, okay?
00:15:55.100 He's not thinking about encoding an emulation of a brain on a computer.
00:16:01.980 He's talking about eugenics.
00:16:03.560 How eventually science will get to the point where we can breed a man with his own ethics.
00:16:10.700 We can recreate the ethics of man.
00:16:14.220 He acknowledges that biological science will get this powerful.
00:16:20.140 Although in the present era, it looks like it's probably going to be artificial intelligence research
00:16:25.100 that does that before biology does it. 0.94
00:16:27.740 It's a moot point.
00:16:29.180 The point is that science will eventually allow ourselves to rebuild what a mind is.
00:16:35.900 To rebuild ourselves.
00:16:37.900 And he sees nothing but the nihilistic void.
00:16:44.060 He points out that a race selected by humanity will be a race limited by humanity.
00:16:57.020 The more technology we have, the more power we have, the less power our descendants have.
00:17:03.020 Because we have made choices for them as to how they will live.
00:17:08.060 And he only sees the abyss.
00:17:14.540 There's also the ubermensch.
00:17:17.420 The fact that we can rebuild ourselves.
00:17:21.820 The fact that we can go out naked into the void and recreate ourselves.
00:17:30.380 We can achieve transcendence through this.
00:17:33.820 Whether you're talking about the singularity or you're talking philosophically for yourself.
00:17:38.780 C.S. Lewis looked at the Marxists and mistook them for nihilists.
00:17:47.500 The Marxists have fallen into the void.
00:17:51.180 They have thrown away objective natural law and replaced it with no other objectivity.
00:17:59.580 All is subjective to them.
00:18:03.100 There is no inherent value in anything.
00:18:05.820 Everything is just a number on a spreadsheet.
00:18:11.180 And this is why their ideology, their cult, is a cult of death.
00:18:20.220 All they have is power over one another.
00:18:24.460 That's all that matters to them.
00:18:27.340 And that blind search for power will result in extinction sooner or later.
00:18:34.140 The nihilist recognizes the flaw in theology.
00:18:44.060 That theology will eventually be corroded by mathematical reality.
00:18:48.620 That we are deterministic.
00:18:51.660 That we are part of a universe that doesn't care about us.
00:18:57.020 But that we can build ourselves to be something greater.
00:19:00.300 The nihilism and Christianity aren't quite as deeply opposed as most Christians seem to believe.
00:19:18.860 Christianity and nihilism are up here.
00:19:23.260 And it's Marxists that we truly have to worry about.
00:19:30.300 It's compassion for us.
00:19:38.060 There is no doubt about it anymore.
00:19:40.220 The truth can be about it.
00:19:41.100 Because of pouvaitation is so hard.
00:19:43.340 I saw the truth about it.
00:19:44.300 I saw the truth with that it is abeiwa of Warlock.
00:19:46.460 And it is exactly what weeeeeeable to taste the truth about it.