“How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
These were the famous words of the character Tyler Durden, spoken both to the nameless protagonist and to an entire generation in the 1999 film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. I don’t know a single Gen X/Y male who wasn’t profoundly influenced by this film, character, and message.
By now, cultural reference to both the movie and to the character of Durden is trite and overdone. But perhaps, to some extent, that’s the point. Worn out sayings and boring maxims are worn out and boring for a reason. They touch upon perennial truths, both about mankind and about the human condition; about some timeless feature or features of how humans are.
Reflection upon Durden’s question forces me to consider why exactly I’ve decided to willfully consent to locking myself in a cage with another adult male, one who is nearly half my age, with the mutual, singular intention of visiting violence upon one another until someone gives up or goes unconscious. Sometimes I wonder myself why exactly I make the decisions that I do and to what degree I have transparency on my real motivations at the time of decision-making.
Any number of explanatory candidates are available. Pick your favorite.
Perhaps, I’m experiencing a mid-life crisis. Maybe I’m bored. Maybe this is all some P.T. Barnum spectacle to sell my ‘brand.’ Maybe my decision, and the decision of my opponent to take part in this fight, are really just surface expressions of a dialectical materialist substructure of underlying economic and class relations. Maybe it’s a totally deterministic and mechanical expression of Darwinian mate signaling for blind ‘selfish gene’ processes. Maybe it’s a sign of culture decadence and civilizational decline. Maybe its toxic masculinity. Maybe its an expression of undiagnosed veteran PTSD. Maybe we both played too many violent video games as children. Maybe we are both being unknowingly exploited by economic forces and structures both beyond our control. Or maybe we are just two idiots looking for an excuse to punch one another in the skull for a few moments in our underwear. Indeed, one’s motivations are not always singular nor are they always immediately known to us.
Despite these explanations, I still think there is something more to the Durden question and to the set of ideas and values at which it intimates. There is indeed a romance, a calling, a sublime and ineffable something to that space and moment within the cage (and spaces like it) that transcends all of these flat, one-dimensional, cookie-cutter answers.
I’d like to think Teddy Roosevelt came close to articulating that something when he wrote the following,
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Indeed, there is something to the old Rough Rider’s quote here, of the importance, value, and dignity of ‘the arena’ and of the comportment and character of the type of man who decides to enter it.
There is, in fact, something in that arena worth striving for.
The other night I was talking with my coach about the similarities between his experience of being in the cage and my experience of jumping out of planes when I was an airborne soldier. What we more or less concluded was that in both cases, and in both contexts, for that brief moment in time, our actions and decisions actually mattered, and there were actual, immediate stakes involved having to do with attributes like carefulness, preparation, heart, and will or the lack thereof.
Seldom are there such places, opportunities, or moments anymore in this now overly-domesticated, modern life to find one’s self in such situations; where one’s actions and decisions actually matter in an immediate sense and have anything even approaching real life-or-death consequences.
In fact, most of the time the world seems too padded to me, too safe, too comfortable as I see people moving through their day-to-day lives half-asleep, half-awake; like we are all underwater; like nothing is really at stake or really matters.
And even though it’s still a ‘sport’ fight, and even though there will be referees, and medical technicians on hand, and various other invisible societal safety-nets of one sort or another, unlike an actual street fight or in an actual combat zone, for this one night and one moment, before I get too old, I’d like to feel like something is really at stake again. If only just for a brief while.
There is something extraordinary about stepping into an arena that most people would never dare to. I am pumped up to watch my friend. Thank you for sharing your blog!
“In fact, most of the time the world seems too padded to me, too safe, too comfortable……..”;
Michael, chose a wife, have a bunch of kids and you’ll appreciate what’s at stake.