If you had a bulldozer and could destroy whatever u wanted..

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this made me laugh. it just seemed so silly to me, and i am still being forced to watch the end of how the grinch stole christmas, since the cartoon has burst in full techinicolor into my head and little cindy lou is blinking her big eyes. and the grinch is shaking his head in confusion and trying to understand how chistmas could have come without boxes or bows. grrr. i'm going to have that stupid song in my head all day!

Read Nausea Its like Fight Club, except his search for authenticity leads him to stop writing about a dead man, and start writing about a living one. Fight Club, Durden figures living authentically combines fighting and living as close to rock bottom as possible. You can really see the combination of the philosophers Diogenes, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Kaczynski in Mr. Durden. Kaczynski, of course, being the Unabomber (a staunch luddite who called for man to get back to his primal nature, and also started bombing stuff). Did you know he wrote a very insightful philosophical work called "The Industrial Society and Its Future", which was probably the inspiration for Chuck to write Fight Club? "This film is now popularly considered to be an uncompromising critique of humanity's loss of identity through mass consumerism" - Wikipedia. Sounds like Kaczynski!

Also, when he says "You are not your car, or your job, or how much money you have in the bank.", he is describing Sartre's concept of Bad Faith.

"Sartre cites a café waiter, whose movements and conversation are a little too "waiter-esque". His voice oozes with an eagerness to please; he carries food rigidly and ostentatiously. His exaggerated behaviour illustrates that he is play acting as a waiter, as an object in the world: an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. But that he is obviously acting belies that he is aware that he is not (merely) a waiter, but is rather consciously deceiving himself. [1]"
- Wikipedia

See The waiter thinks he is his job. Philosophy rocks

I don't universally hate anything

Last edited by Kalister1 on 04 Feb 2008, 4:58 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I love this topic, because when I was 6, I would daydream about operating a wrecking ball crane to destroy buildings i hated

yes. but don't forget he tries to undo things at the end, only to find everything grown bigger than him, unescapable, and when he wakes up in that hospital and they call him sir... well, has he actually changed the order of things or just his place in it?

Dun Dun DUN! Man is an irrational animal, stuck in an irrational UNIVERSE!

Isn't that a tough question?

um, No.

Yet you would keep Westboro intact?

What's the Kodesh Hakodashim?

Last edited by Tim_Tex on 04 Feb 2008, 5:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Why do you say that?

I've only read parts of the book, I've seen the movie. I know bout the hospital scene , and some other little differences. Tell me what I missed out on.

As you can see from this article:

http://downsupremacy.blogspot.com/2005/ ... chuck.html

He is well versed in philosophy, talking about Kierkegaard, an existentialist philosopher who was a contemporary of Nietzsche.

"You can live Kierkegaard's inauthentic life."

Told you, right from that article. Fight Club is an existentialist novel about the search for authenticity.

oh. well for me, part of the great suckerpunch of the book was that-- No, he had not really changed the order of things, just his place in it, and now he was basically a CEO of a giant underground franchise, and his balls were in sense cut off, because they wouldn't listen to him and he was just a figurehead, a rallying point. he ends up in a different place, but it is the SAME place.

but hey, i'm not a professor of literature or anything so i could of course be wrong. but that did strike me very strongly... also the book hit me in a very personal way because at that time, i had a whole "where the hell is my rock bottom?!" thing going on already. this is a fact i blame on Oprah, since i used to watch that show sometimes, and people were always talking about how they finally "hit rock bottom" and then they were inspired to change their life... and i got very facinated with this because i felt like i was just hanging out at rock bottom and it was not insipring me to do anything at all, so i thought i must not be there, there must be further hells to find, and so i was mentally trying to find this elusive thing called rock bottom which i thought would be some profound wonderful thing if i could get there, and then i would find that trickster motivation...

so when i read fight club, (ironically considering this post) i actually felt like it was an answer from god, because i had been praying and praying to hit rock bottom, and then i found fight club, and it helped me to find some peace, because it made me see that there is no such thing as rock-bottom, is it just a nonsense dream, at least the concept that i was imagining from oprah, and there was not any bad experience i needed to wake me up, because my problem was actually the opposite and i was already awake.

Thats what I always wondered too, and its a problem with the author of OTISAIF. After modern society is destroyed, whats going to replace it? The people who destroyed it! I guess Chuck figured the same thing too.

I just saw the movie, and was immediately struck by the philosophical undertones. "The things you own end up owning you" is almost a direct Diogenes quote. The book sounds like a great rebuttal to Kaczynski's anarchism, with its prediction that governments/corporations will simply be replaced by new ones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKh1mOeXfqE

Ship of Fools by Ted. Awesome story, and this is an AWESOME lego rendition. You can tell he was a fan of Nietzsche, its so nihilistic. I agree with a lot of his points, but I don't know of anarchism will solve everything, and I have the belief that technology is beneficial.

The story is about everyone complaining about insignificant matters, while the Earth is on its way to destruction. The professor is like most Californian professors, a bleeding heart socialist. No one wants to involve violent ("Its immoral!"), something that Nietzsche would of chided. Great story

Note: When it says apathetic nihilism at the end of the clip, its talking about the pre-Nietzschean nihilism, which was "Life has no meaning, who cares?", where Nietzsche said "You make the meaning, it has none before that".

and you are living an inauthentic life by not questioning that statement and just repeating it.

anyway, it's a good book because it's thought provoking, and it's going to have slightly different meanings for everyone.

and now we are back to the orginal post topic i think-- if you bulldoze everything, other stuff will just rise up to replace it. yes?

still want to bulldoze a bunch of religious buildings?

Er.. I think you are confused. I came up with my conclusion on its own, I didn't even know Chuck was well versed in philosophy. I just now saw the obvious parallels, and just saw in an interview that it was true.

Yes, I believe we can all interpret everything differently. This is how I interpret it through my knowledge of philosophy.

Thats a common question to atheism, because of the old rule that no anti establishment movement can last because it does not have anything to work towards after the destruction of the establishment. What can we replace churches with? I don't want to replace it with some sort of humanist temple, as I don't believe in humanism. I would replace it with a college/gym, so people can worship themselves.

The Labour Party headquarters.

The Westboro Baptist Church compound
The Aryan Nations compound
Those wacky anti-Semitic traditionalist Catholic churches

Hell, any hate group's compound.