so…. then it’s the billionaires. got it.
For real. Both sides guy is an idiot.
Both sides are now 30% of the electorate or less (pick your poll, D&R are very close).
Independents are now 40% of the voters.
Both sides is a pretentious asshole, are you seriously suggesting that 30-40% of all politically active US citizens are pretentious assholes?
I am an independent and I have zero issues seeing the ruling class and the culture they have created as the problem. Blaming it on the government is short sighted and plays into the wealthy’s hands. That is just stupid in my book.
Why does everyone always miss the point that Tyler Durden is a fucking fascist.
Really changes what this meme means.
He’s not a good person’s identity, by any means. But he’s not fascist.
He wants to return to a glorified past that never existed by tearing down the current system, a return to where everyone is living off the land like early humans (“climbing the vines growing along the Sears tower”). He promotes the idea that men must return to being warriors, and something about the modern world has made them “weak.” He promotes that such strength must be used to dominate, and claims it can be used to improve people’s lives, as he claims with Raymond K. Hessel (whom Tyler threatens to murder if Hessel does not follow his dreams), despite the fact that Hessel is most likely left devastated with trauma and unable to move forward due to fear of being murdered. We never see Hessel’s outcome, so Tyler gets to pretend he “helped” by completely traumatizing a person (reminds me of Trump bragging about “lifting people off of food stamps” when he actually kicked them off and made them more hungry, his followers don’t see the outcome so they just believe the lie). Tyler captures the attention of disaffected, alienated young men and brings them under his wing to become part of their in-group, making them more likely to go along with extreme demands because now they have found family in Project Mayhem. He literally beats the living shit out of one of his men, destroying his pretty face, and yet still commands the respect of his men while disfiguring one of them potentially permanently. With Project Mayhem he intends to bring about his ideal world by force.
So we have numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Umberto Eco’s 14 features of Ur-Fascism in Tyler and Project Mayhem, in my opinion.
But sure, he’s not a fascist.
Its been a long time since I’ve seen the movie but I always thought he was an anarchist who just wanted to burn everything to the ground.
I mean, presenting themselves as just standing for the common man and wanting to tear down a broken system and don’t have ulterior motives is one hundred percent on brand for fascists.
Also “waahhh, my penthouse is too nice, my job is too boring, I get paid too much and I’m a bored white man” is the narrator, the man Tyler was covering up, a weak man’s idea of a strong man. “I look how you wanna look, I talk how you want to talk, I fuck how you want to fuck.” He is literally a manifestation of what the narrator, a weak person, thinks a strong person is.
Without your bad rephrasing:
1 - “The cult of tradition” - At no point he gives any shit to tradition
2 - “The rejection of modernism” - That’s partial at best, and partial hits do not count on that scale
3 - “The cult of action for action’s sake” - Yes
4 - “Disagreement is treason” - Absolutely not
5 - “Fear of difference” - Dude, how the fuck did you claim he hits that one? Absolutely not
6 - “Appeal to a frustrated middle class” - Yes
7 - “Obsession with a plot” - Yes
8 - cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak” - Their enemies are never strong
9 - “Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” - Absolutely not
10 - “Contempt for the weak” - Absolutely not
11 - “Everybody is educated to become a hero” - Yes
12 - “Machismo” - Yes
13 - “Selective populism” - Yes
14 - “Newspeak” - No
Anyway, it’s complete bullshit to just list those criteria like they are a checklist. I’ve listed them here just to show that even that bullshit argument is bullshit by its own standards.
Are you claiming that fascists don’t need to be authoritarian? It’s not on the list, by the way.
- Rejection of modernism. He literally wants to return to a tribal society. He says this specifically in both the book and film, he describes the future he sees:
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
-
Fear of difference. He literally beats the shit out of the pretty guy for being “different” and pretty. Project Mayhem are all forced to dress the same and have no names. They are forced to shave their heads and become his “space monkeys.” They are berated for a week in front of the building before being accepted. EDIT: Further, this treatment of the Project Mayhem recruits is authoritarian, they have to follow all Tyler’s rules which they repeat them ad nauseum and they have to shed their prior identity to fit into the new group.
-
Cast the enemies as both too strong and too weak. In the film Tyler plans to destroy credit card companies and reset debt to zero, a lot of people would claim the financial system is an enemy that is strong, but also portrayed as weak when they strong-arm the politician threatening to cut his balls off. In the book he wants to destroy museums, destroying history, writing a new history, which is also fascist. He says museums represent a dead world and that “this is our world now.”
-
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. They threaten to cut off people’s balls who threaten to expose them, the cops are literally about to do it to the narrator/Tyler himself at the end of the film, because stopping Project Mayhem is a pacifist route.
-
If you don’t see the contempt for the weak here and how they only accepted Bob into their fold because the narrator pitied him, I don’t know what to tell you. Tyler would have rejected Bob as unfit and weak. When their homework is to go start a fight, the lesson is that most people will avoid fights (and by extension this makes them “weak”). Fight Club is portrayed as “strong” because they will chase a fight. They’re different, they’re special, they’re enlightened by violence (once again, fear of difference).
These are the ones we obviously disagree on, so these are the ones I’m addressing.
But yeah, 10 out of 14 is pretty telling in my opinion. No, this list of Eco’s isn’t definitive, but it’s got good depth and is a good starting point showing that clearly Tyler has fascist tendencies. Enough that I am comfortable calling him fascist
EDIT: Also while there is no strict nationalism, the entire plot is deeply Amero-centric and treats the rest of the world as though it functionally does not exist when it comes to Tyler’s plans.
“You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”
Not. a. single. foreign. airport. Not even Canada.
Tyler Durden is not the good guy holy shit
Well…in my defense…I’ve never heard of Tyler Durden before. Is that the guy in the meme on the top right?
Bottom-center. This is if like the bottom was Steve Bannon.
…that’s not Brad Pitt??? I thought that was Brad Pitt.
Brad Pitt plays the character Tyler Durden in the film Fight Club, from which the bottom is a still photo. Thus that is Tyler Durden, from the film Fight Club, as portrayed by Brad Pitt.
Probably the same people who thought RATM went political in the mid teens…
In 2007 I was in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s shitty Kia because I didn’t have a car.
We stop at a stoplight and up next to us pulls up a shiny new blue Audi, and two fratbros with popped collars and sporting Oakleys.
Their speakers are on extremely loud and blasting System of a Down, specifically “Fuck the System.”
I couldn’t help but think “Man, I’m pretty sure these guys are the system.”
Wait what
What fascist wants to destroy all the debt records
The left also thinks corrupt government is a problem
Meanwhile the right proudly advertises their love for corrupt billionaires
Corrupt paedophile billionaires
Fun fact! The picture of the girl in this meme comes from this video, (relevant portion about 3 minutes in) in which she’s by far the calmest and most reasonable person involved. She’s not even angry, she just has kind of an expressive face, and she looks like that for all of exactly one frame
Some psycho combed through this video frame by frame to find the least flattering picture of her possible. Rightoids need to die out man
I actually didn’t know this. She really does seem like a sweet and friendly person. It’s a shame she’s being used as a symbol for crazy by the right, when she’s actually the opposite.
Ahh the ‘enlightened centrist’ take, how very boring.
This has to be one of the most boomer out-of-touch I’m-a-cool-smart-guy memes I’ve seen on here, and that’s saying something.
Was it them making themselves Tyler Durden that gave it away?
Its not like that at all.
The left is saying billionaire are the problem. Their existence is a sign of corrupt system.
The right is saying all the left is corrupt. They don’t mind their corrupt politicians.
Also everyone should go check how this left meme started. The lady in the picture was actually very calm and reasonable. Perfect metaphor for how the right manipulates the media into creating stories out of nothing.
Billionaires aren’t corrupt, they’re ethically bankrupt; they’re the corrupt_ors_.
Government officials are corrupt because they’ve been corrupted by the billionaire corruptors.Getting rid of the billionaires solves both problems at once.
It’s always funny to me when people say to put the billionaires in charge, it’s always just like
The farmer is doing a bad job because they just let the fox into the henhouse, so instead we should put the fox in charge of the henhouse. The fox is best suited for the job because they have a lot of experience with hens and they know all the problems with the henhouses.
Read that again. Slowly.
So that would put you on the left.
No…it wouldn’t.
Corrupt billionaires running the government means you think the problem is corrupt billionaires.
What exactly do you think socialism is?
Where did you get socialism from?
We’re talking about the meme saying left wingers oppose billionaires.
Anyway socialism is when production, distribution, and exchange are owned/regulated by the workers/community.
I’m so tired of libs on this site dude. Go read Rob Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, it is ahistorical to suggest that the thing you’re calling definitive of “left” (whatever the fuck that means to you people at this point) is enough to determine of someone is “left.”
Or are you arguing that Elon Musk is correct about National Socialism?
We really gotta stop using that girl in memes that make her seem crazy. She was the calmest most reasoned person in that video.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
Corrupt billionaires was the problem when it was a monarchy. It was a problem when they were plantation owners. It was a problem when they were railroad barons. It was a problem when they were automotive industrialists.
During Hoover, even the US people, who were taught to be terrified of communism knew that what we had wasn’t working. FDR pushed the New Deal through as a last bastion of western capitalism, and at that very moment, the ownership class started working to roll all that back.
Curiously, billionaires can’t seem to remember the whole thing about the social contract, that to keep the working class from burning it all down, you have to make sure they are compensated enough to survive. They’re not doing that, and eventually too many people are going to have a grudge and would rather no system than this system.
The right in the US only says what their cult leader tells them to say. If he says the government is bad (which he often does when he’s not the one running it), it’s bad, but when he says it’s good, (which he often does when he’s the one running it) they say it’s good.
