Up in Ontario

Fight Clubs are the stories we tell ourselves

Today I read on the Globe and Mail website about real fight clubs, places where men meet to fight. It felt surreal to learn. Here was reality imitating fiction. Specifically, Chuck Palaniuk's novel Fight Club, and, more importantly, the film of the same name with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt that has developed a cultish following.

...underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys and disgruntled youths to vent their frustrations and prove themselves.

"This is as close as you can get to a real fight, even though I've never been in one," the soft-spoken (Shiyin) Siou said (34, a Santa Clara software engineer and three-year veteran of the clandestine fights).

Despite his reserved demeanour, he daydreams about inflicting pain on an attacker. "I have fantasies about it," he said.

In recent months, police in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have broken up fight clubs involving teens and preteens who posted videos of their bloody battles on-line.

Earlier this month in Arlington, Texas, a high school student who didn't want to participate was beaten so badly that he suffered a brain hemorrhage and broken vertebrae. Six teenagers were arrested after DVDs of the fight appeared for sale on-line.

Adult groups are more likely to fly under the radar of authorities.

Menlo Park police hadn't heard about the local club and said they wouldn't be likely to take action because the fights are on private property between consenting adults. That could change if someone complains or is sent to a hospital, police said.

Between these fighting clubs and the Japanese phenomena to pay for women to serve and talk to them in cafes, I wonder if public wish fulfillment is going too far and we're moving back to base values and need fulfillment in a kind of post-needs-fulfillment world. We are certainly all animals at our core, a fun fact that folks too often overlook when looking for reasons things are the way they are or happen the way they happen. But this seems to be moving further to a primal, individual society where collective norms imitate the more basic levels in Maslow's hierachy of needs, without actually needing those levels. We're regressing voluntarily.

The best part of the article is when one of the interviewees parrots part of Fight Club to the interviewer: '"You get to be a superhero for a night," Klimanis said. "We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do."'

I know I'm beating a deadened horse here, it makes me think again of how important the stories we tell ourselves or let ourselves be told are to the way we make sense of the world. They are the foundation. Our myths make our reality.

(Image courtesy of Andrew Goodman, who got it from an article in The Atlantic, which he summarized very nicely in Does Values Research Explain Where Global Opportunity Lies?, an article definitely worth reading if you like these sort of big-picture, sociology questions.)