The other day, while watching TV with my roommates, I came across Fight Club on HBO. My three roommates, all female, hadn't seen the movie and were having a fairly unfavorable reaction to Edward Norton's character beating the crap out of himself. And sitting there watching the shards of glass embedded in his wrist as he dragged himself over to his boss, I found myself unable to describe the context in which the scene illustrates an enlightened male in contemporary society. Their focus transfixed on the graphic imagery, they got disgusted and lost interest. I couldn't give them the sentence they needed... because it's only a sound bite that people want anymore in order to make up their minds. Some things just take awhile to explain, though.
Fast forward to my friend, M, making the case to me last night at Oktoberfest at the Penn Brewery that now, more than ever, do we need motivated, ambitious, and committed people to solve the problems we're facing in the world instead of complacent, happy-with-what-they-get, "enlightened" citizens. The evidence is another friend of ours who, after coming across The Power of Now and/or A New Earth seemingly lost his drives and ambitions, one of which was financial independence. If the whole population becomes like that, nothing will get solved, nothing will change... we'll continue to destroy the environment, we'll keep fighting wars we can't pay for, we'll continue destroying the financial system, we'll keep socializing everything, we'll get fewer and fewer individual choices, and we'll ultimately lose our freedom.
Instead, it's time for action. It's time to get something done.
But what action. Why fight these fights? Do they really matter?
The illusive question here is who are we?
We think we know the answer..... We are the loans we took from Freddie Mac, Fannie May, AIG, and The Lehman Brothers. We are struggling tax payers. We are the declining wealth of the nation. We are military victors. We are our government entitlements. We are not them (whoever we want to make "them" out to be today).
When I say that, I mean that we are attached to and have become dependent upon finances, wars, and government working the way we think they should. We take them for granted and make our plans for the future assuming they can't go wrong. Then we freak out when something happens that's "not part of the plan" ...to quote the Joker from The Dark Knight. This usually results in an overreaction... trying to fit everything back into the plan, trying to save the plan but really trying to save who we think we are.
Fight Club is about a guy who had put all his ego, who he was, into his job, his condo, his clothing, his collection of IKEA furniture, etc. We then watch as it all slowly decays and gets destroyed... everything... including his mind and body. He resists it through the whole movie, only to discover that he's really responsible for it all. And in the midst of everything crashing down around him and inside him, everything falling apart, when we'd assume there's nothing left, he finds that he's still there. He's alive. He still exists. He still has choices. He can still do what needs to be done.
That's enlightened.
We could save the mortgage companies, then the auto industry, then the oil companies (when the oil runs out). We could keep giving up freedom to make us feel safer. We could monitor everything to make sure it always stays in place as part of the plan. We can give control of our lives over to big brother.
Or we can let it all go and find out who we really are.
When all that does not matter dies away, what's left... is just us.
Then we can do anything.... and maybe finally the right thing.
