The Durdenist Manifesto: A Fight Club Guide to Society

In 2016, New York-based clothing brand Supreme released a revolutionary product—a product which would change any purchaser’s entire life. For hours, consumers would wait in lines to get their hands on one of these literally groundbreaking items from the skate-culture-inspired brand.

The item in question is none other than a brick.

Yes, people spent a fortune to get themselves a simple, branded clay brick from Supreme. For what exactly? To sell? To throw? To build a house? This isn’t the only instance of high-end fashion brands “trolling” customers. Fashion house Balenciaga recently released limited edition “destroyed sneakers” which retail for over $1800 and look as if they were found in a dumpster in New York City. Chanel is selling a branded boomerang for $2000. Even the coveted Louis Vuitton has a set of $3000 monogrammed ping pong rackets for the financially-loaded, mentally-eccentric individual. 

Even more preposterous than these luxury brands selling these items are the people who actually buy this. There are plenty of social media influencers, self-proclaimed crypto bros, and people with money to burn who buy into the hype and end up mindlessly making foolish purchases. (And yes, someone did indeed try to build a house using Supreme bricks.) You look at these people and rightfully ridicule them; why would you buy something you don’t need solely because it has a logo or a name on it?

My dear reader, your hypocrisy is palpable. Of course, items like bricks and boomerangs may be on the extreme end of things, but all of you eventually end up falling for the same silly marketing tricks. That bag you bought for your mom or girlfriend with the stupid little upside-down GG’s pasted all over it? The scented alcohol in the fancy bottles with complicated French-sounding names like Dior Sauvage Eau de Toilette you slather all over yourself in the morning in your pathetic attempt to swoon members of the opposite sex? You’re just another puppet chained to the strings of materialism and consumerism. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

This conspicuous consumption is the idea behind the 1999 cult-classic movie Flight Club. Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club tells the story of an unnamed narrator who joins an underground fight club in an attempt to rebel against society’s consumerist tendencies and find true purpose. The narrator, who suffers from insomnia and works a corporate 9-to-5, was on the search to find purpose in his life, which he did by meticulously arranging his house with IKEA furniture and immersing himself in a materialistic lifestyle that left him empty and emotionally detached. However, after losing all of his possessions and meeting Tyler Durden, a charismatic but nihilistic soap salesman, he becomes entangled in the titular fight club to engage in raw, animalistic fights—a stark contrast to his numb and sterile life filled with material goods and name brands. The club, led by Tyler’s vision, eventually spirals into a violent domestic terrorist organization bent on dismantling society’s hierarchy—a hierarchy built on the envy of other people’s things and status. Finally, it is revealed that Tyler Durden is actually a figment of his imagination, an Übermensch-like alter-ego created by the narrator’s own mental fracture whom he switches into at times.

While the film was released over two decades ago, its messages are just as relevant today as it was back then, especially with our society’s greater emphasis on social status and corporate-branded lifestyles. Consumerism, this driving force behind societal shallowness, is not a new idea in society. In fact, the reason why consumerism has stood the test of time and works so well is because it toys with our innate, primitive desires which haven’t fully evolved since caveman times.

Well, society changes. Your brain doesn’t. Your primitive mind has now been overloaded with new information, sensory experiences, and stimuli in modern society. You now have to deal with finances and education, and have to give a damn about things like motivations and the future. And what are you doing now? You’re wasting your morally reprehensible life away, one reel at a time, one vodka shot at a time, one Plinko ball at a time. It’s like you’re trying to hit rock-bottom.

Unfortunately, dopamine is now easier to find than ever, with the neverending influx of alcohol, porn, weed, and social media. But perhaps, most importantly, our desires for social acceptance and status have manifested themselves in ways our primitive brains can barely comprehend. We justify our purchases with our need to fit in, and our behaviors are reinforced by the dopamine released when we are successful in assimilating. Yet, after a while, those dopamine hits become less satisfying, and we have to continue engaging with the consumerist system to receive bigger and bigger hits while draining our wallet and livelihood. Thus continues the cycle.

Is living like this fulfilling? You fill that miserable void in yourself with even more material possessions, and you envy those who have what you don’t have.  Unlucky for you, that envy never goes away, regardless of where you sit on the social hierarchy. You can always find someone with a faster, louder car. You can always find someone with one more zero on their paycheck. You can always find someone with a more expensive, self-winding, Swiss-made, gold watch in a more expensive, self-winding, Swiss-made, gold watch box. And it reminds you that their social status is out of reach, and you’ll realize that our lifestyle is incomparable to the other materialistic scumbags of the world no matter how hard you try. But that’s what you all are. Materialistic scumbags. You are all trapped in that endless cycle of envy and hatred and shallowness until the day you die. 

This feeling of being stuck was exactly what the narrator in Fight Club was experiencing, so he created himself Tyler Durden to serve as a manifestation of countercultural ideas—a savior, if you will. Tyler, dropping sermon-like monologues throughout the movie preaching against society’s values, was everything the narrator wasn’t. Tyler didn’t need to buy IKEA furniture for the sake of buying something. Tyler wasn’t trapped in a corporate job he hates. Tyler was alive. He was free. He was real.

You let the things you own morph into your identity; you do what society tells you to do, and buy what the brands tell you to buy. You busy yourself with useless information. Do you care about a famine or a genocide happening on the other side of the world? Do you care about making genuine connections with others? No. You care about the sex lives of celebrities and classmates, the design of the newest pair of Jordans, and taking a blurry selfie of a quarter of your face and religiously sending it to a dozen other people every day for God-knows-what purpose. 

But then again, who am I to say all this? I’m a nobody, the unnamed narrator, and I should probably take my own advice. I’m just another high school student, so of course I care about things like my social status and my reputation (but not enough to bother maintaining it, as some point out). And yes, while I do understand the importance of financial literacy, I am guilty of buying things I don’t need, just to get rid of that feeling of envy and receive my undeserved dopamine hit. I am also guilty of engaging in the pursuit of meaningless pleasures through doomscrolling. I’m just another cog in the machine of society. Still, Fight Club has helped me realize that there is more to life than superficial things like brands and status and dopamine, and am trying to change my pathetic life for the better. I’m Jack’s small, dissenting voice in the crowd.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. Realize this, and you are free. The only way out of your nightmare is to unlearn everything that society has shoved down your throat and rebuild your entire belief system. It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. 

Fight Club is more than just a movie. It is a documentary into our own lives, a revealing portrait of our own search for meaning. Unfortunately, too many people find meaning in the shallowest of things, by buying consumer goods, and the movie ridicules us for it. At the same time, it is also a cautionary tale against the destruction of social order and cynical outlooks on society. The film is what can be considered as Hollywood’s greatest parable for society. So, before I end, I want to leave you with the words of Tyler Durden, shown at the beginning of Fight Club:

Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think everything you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity, you will become a statistic. You have been warned.