His Name was Robert Paulson： Fight Club, Nihilism, and The End of History
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
107.08738
Summary
The God of softness and kindness is dead, and we are the unwanted children of a broken, coddling, soft-hearted, weak, megalomaniacal society. We are not the weak, pathetic little creatures that God created us to be.
Transcript
00:00:05.000
And it's not because I'm Jack's raging sense of megalomania.
00:00:12.000
This does not belong to us. We are not special.
00:00:17.000
The reason I love Fight Club so much, and I reference it so heavily,
00:00:25.000
It is the defining piece of fiction which describes the 21st century.
00:00:32.000
If you want to understand the 20th century, you read All Quiet on the Western Front,
00:00:37.000
which is a book I heavily, heavily recommend, and it should be free with Project Gutenberg right now.
00:00:45.000
You want to understand World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the peaceniks, the fall of Europe?
00:00:52.000
All of that is in All Quiet on the Western Front.
00:01:05.000
We're not living in the era of trench warfare, of machines eating people.
00:01:10.000
For us, Martha Stewart's polishing the brass poles on the Titanic.
00:01:22.000
It's debatable whether there are going to be historians in the future.
00:01:29.000
As things stand, we are looking at the end times.
00:01:32.000
And maybe Tyler Durbin's anarcho-primitivism is the best that we can do with the whole thing.
00:01:37.000
But if we do survive, if society doesn't collapse, historians are going to look back on Fight Club as one of the defining films of our era.
00:01:49.000
And it has such an interesting mix of nihilism and hatred of God.
00:02:01.000
Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
00:02:06.000
What you're feeling is premature enlightenment.
00:02:17.000
And yet it's also chock-full of religious imagery.
00:02:25.000
There's the one scene where Tyler fights the bar owner and bleeds for his sins, shedding his blood to redeem mankind.
00:02:56.000
I have a podcast coming up where me and my friend, we go into great philosophical detail.
00:03:03.000
In fact, he even goes above my own head in some of the matter.
00:03:13.000
The thing is, we know, as a matter of fact, that no system of mathematics can contain itself.
00:03:21.000
That there are forms of knowledge that we know to be true, but we can't understand.
00:03:41.000
So often we hear about nihilism, and we see this empty-souled materialism connected to it.
00:03:54.000
This depression and this sense of failure in modern life.
00:04:02.000
But I challenge you to show me a philosophical nihilist that embodies any of those traits.
00:04:19.000
He saw this low brute of a man beating this horse.
00:04:25.000
And the horse was taking his blows with great dignity.
00:04:31.000
And Nietzsche had a psychotic break when he saw that and flung his arms around the horse.
00:04:37.000
Because here he saw the lesser beating upon the greater.
00:04:41.000
The funny thing is that nihilists actually do believe in something.
00:04:53.000
This line from Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not an advocation of policy.
00:05:04.000
That the Christian God became such a loving, namby-pamby God.
00:05:08.000
And we rebelled against any of the rules that he put upon us.
00:05:12.000
We wanted to have equality in marriage and equality in sex.
00:05:16.000
And all of these other absolute nonsense that winds up being the upper echelon of the Puritan church going for the soft harem.
00:05:26.000
And creating all of these double standards, fake openness about sexuality that allows the lower males to be excluded.
00:05:39.000
Saturday Night Live did a skit about sexual harassment.
00:05:43.000
Where what it boils down to is sexual harassment is when a guy hits on a girl and she's not interested in him.
00:05:50.000
So to avoid the lawsuit, be attractive, be popular, be good looking, etc.
00:06:08.000
We no longer had room for an actual masculine force of creation in the world.
00:06:14.000
All of a sudden we needed the God of softness, of kindness, of crying.
00:06:25.000
That we are not these weak, pathetic little creatures that God can love and coddle.
00:06:39.000
The nihilist rejects God, not because he doesn't believe in him, but because we must.
00:06:46.000
Because in such a sick and broken society, we need to start out as damned individuals without redemption.
00:07:04.000
This meaningless life with no spirit, no goal to live for.
00:07:13.000
To be that vagina, never satisfied, no matter how many times it has penetrated.
00:07:23.000
The nihilist goes out into the world naked, without armor, and actually fights.
00:07:55.000
Does not cry and pray and beg for divine salvation.
00:08:06.000
And really is the best way to honor God possible with the degenerate churches we find nowadays.
00:08:19.000
The nihilist recognizes that the existence of God is a bracing challenge, not a comforting lie.
00:08:41.000
And that's why he was trying so hard to pound on that reset button.
00:08:46.000
To start history anew with tough sons of bitches.
00:08:55.000
The three days of standing on the front porch being abused with no support.
00:09:06.000
That's what it means to finally accept this noble challenge.
00:09:13.000
To fight against entropy rather than just giving in to the comfort and the seduction of the opiate drip which we are all offered in society.
00:09:34.000
Of our generation of the struggle that we are going to need to face.