Freedom: A Revolt Against Established Rule

Our lives are governed by rules and limitations. Like an infinitely complex game, civilization is built upon rules that provide boundaries for our actions. They come in many forms, from laws to constitutions to commandments, but they all share the common goal of giving the masses of civilians a guide for how to play the game of civilized life. In order for these rules to be followed, however, there must be a threat of punishment for those who break the rules. Whether it be by fines, imprisonment, or ostracism, punishments serve to protect the order created within the game world. Johan Huizinga describes this need to protect rules in his book Homo Ludens when he says that one who breaks the rules “must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community” (Huizinga, 11). Although there are punishments that deter most people from breaking the rules, sometimes one will find the game so odious that they can no longer passively take part in it. It is at this point that Huizinga’s “spoil-sport” is created. By refusing to abide by the rules of the game, the spoil-sport “reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others” (Huizinga, 11). He reveals the game for what it really is, just a temporary world of order that belies a chaotic reality.

This is precisely what the protagonist, Jack, does in the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. He had successfully mastered the game of his civilization, and yet he was a slave to it. A slave to his heartless job, to his IKEA catalog, to the material rewards that come with playing by the rules of his civilization. What he really wanted was freedom; freedom from the illusory game-world in which he was “perfect and complete” (Palahniuk, 46). While he may have been perfect and complete in his game-world, he knew that there was something very wrong with the game he played. He had no control over his life. His hopes and desires were dominated by the rules of the consumerist society he lived in. He gets his first taste of freedom at the support group meetings. “Losing all hope is freedom” he says, after witnessing the pain and hopelessness of the terminally ill patients. Losing all hope allowed him to see the insignificance of the arbitrary rules that he lived by, and realize that there is more to life than his game-world. After leaving the meetings, he “felt more alive than [he’d] ever felt before” (Pahlahniuk, 22). By seeing the futile nature of the game he played, he experiences what Huizinga would call “the first main characteristic of play: that it is… freedom” (Huizinga, 8). According to Huizinga, civilizations are founded on play, yet “as a civilization becomes more complex, more variegated and more overladen, and as the technique of production and social life itself become more finely organized, the old cultural soil is gradually smothered under a rank layer of ideas, systems of thought and knowledge, doctrines, rules and regulations, moralities and conventions which have all lost touch with play” (Huizinga 75). This play aspect has been mostly lost in Jack’s game world, to a point where he no longer feels the freedom of living. He is biologically alive, yet he is bound by the restrictions of a civilization that keeps him trapped in his “single-serving butter and cramped airline seat role in the world” (Pahlahniuk, 173). He is a walking zombie, a body evacuated of its soul yet still going through the motions of life. The closest he can get to feeling alive is through the temporary façade he puts on during his support groups. By pretending to be dying, he is able to temporarily feel freedom from the burdens of his society, he can “relax and give up” (Palahniuk, 18) playing the game that he is trapped in. But his façade is eventually broken when Marla discovers his act. He can no longer fake the feeling of being free, and in his desperation, his alter ego Tyler Durden springs from his psyche to deliver him from the game he had become a slave to.

Tyler’s mission is to destroy all the rules of conventional civilization so that it can be rebuilt into something better. To do this he must become the spoil-sport, the one who transgresses the rules so that the game-world itself collapses (Huizinga, 11). He questions the established rules of society, the rules that keep people from living in the moment. He wants to demolish the rules that keep people from expressing their anger when provoked in the street, the rules that tell you what furniture you need, what clothes to wear. He is at war with the cultural norms that tell you how much money you should make, how you should treat other people, and what repetitive job you should perform to maintain your place in society. He calls this a “great war of the spirit…a great revolution against the culture” (Palahniuk, 149). Tyler’s solution to end this great “spiritual depression” is to bring the “spontaneity and carelessness” of the play-spirit back into existence, and to abolish the “spirit of the professional” that had taken over Jack’s life (Huizinga, 197). The spirit of the professional is what Jack had been living before the start of fight club. Huizinga describes this spirit in terms of the sports professional who has raised the game “to such a pitch of technical organization and scientific thoroughness that real play-spirit is threatened with extinction” (Huizinga, 199). Such was the life Jack lived prior to fight club; a life so organized by the rules of civilization that each individual was consigned to performing one task with professional perfection. “You just do your little job. Pull a lever. Push a button” in a chase for “cars and clothes [you] don’t need” (Palahniuk, 193, 149). To bring the spontaneity and carelessness back into Jack’s life, Tyler must bring him back into the moment.

In order for Jack to experience the complete freedom of living in the moment, he would have to be broken down to his lowest point. He would have to hit rock bottom. At that point, there would be no past history of civilization or hope for a future to bind him. He would not be bound by his bank account, his job, his hopes, or even his name. Tyler wanted to demolish all of the rules that held him in his previous life, so that Jack could be completely free. He had to be free from all of the material possessions that once owned him. “The liberator who destroys my property… will set me free” says Tyler, after blowing up everything Jack owned (Palahniuk, 110). He had to be free from his job, so Tyler kills his boss. Even the most fundamental rule of all living things, the preservation of life, was an obstacle to his freedom. It is only when he gives up this most fundamental rule that Tyler’s job is complete, and Tyler is no longer needed.

It is ironic, however, that in his attempt to bring Jack into this state of complete freedom, Tyler creates a culture of his own that is bound by its own rules and limitations. At first, fight club was created as a way for people to “mutually withdraw from the rest of the world and reject the usual norms” (Huizinga, 12). Although this new game also had rules, the rules in this game served to keep participants in the moment. The first and second rules of the game give a solid definition to the duration of fight club; it “exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends” (Palahniuk, 48). When it ends, there was to be no mention of fight club until the next meeting. This defined duration is what gives fight club its play spirit, because all “play begins, and then at a certain moment it is over” (Huizinga, 9). Play requires not only a defined time, but a defined space, and requires that all participants play voluntarily. These were all true of the original fight club. But fight club eventually grows into a movement that is no longer about just fighting at night in the basements of bars. It begins to stray from the original play-spirit of fight club, and towards the seriousness of doctrines, rules, and moralities that Huizinga describes as typical of complex societies. Out of fight club evolves a new game that is as restricted by rules as the one Jack is trying to escape.

In an effort to abolish all rules, the project had created its own illusory game-world that mirrored the doctrines and moralities that they were trying to escape from. The elusive freedom that Jack sought was not to be found in paradoxical Project Mayhem. While Tyler tries valiantly to engineer a system in which Jack can be free of his past rules and obligations, the act of guiding someone towards freedom is a paradox in itself. To guide someone requires showing them a path to follow and to tell them that there is a destination for them to reach, both of which limit a person from doing what they want. By sending a mechanic to engineer Jack’s freedom, Tyler is only able to give Jack a temporary illusion of being free, much like the support groups that Jack had once turned to. As in his support groups, Jack is able to grasp a fleeting sense of being free in the moment by being on the brink of death, and “for that moment, nothing matters” (Palahniuk, 143). It is in this moment that Jack realizes his true desire, the one thing he wishes to do before he dies, to quit his job (Palahniuk, 144). This realization is what Tyler had in mind for Jack’s rebirth as a free man. Tyler even went so far as to plan a birthday cake for his rebirth, and also carry out the birthday wish that he knew Jack would make. This is where his guided freedom falls apart, however, because in guiding Jack towards freedom, Tyler has simply replaced one job with another. While his old boss and old rules were blown up, Jack is now trapped in a new job with a new boss, Tyler Durden. Jack makes his wish to be free of his job, but his wish does not come true because he is not able to blow out his birthday candles (Palahniuk, 147). Jack eventually comes to the realization that the freedom that he seeks cannot be achieved through guided meditation or guided destruction. True freedom comes at the expense of all rules, because all rules will limit your actions.

Project Mayhem, in essence, is no better than the civilization that Tyler was trying to bring down. With Project Mayhem comes a new set of rules that members must follow. These rules are no longer about keeping the play-spirit alive, and instead are meant to obscure the members from what is really going on. Just like the old civilization that they were fighting so hard to destroy, the spirit of play in fight club has been turned into the spirit of the professional in Project Mayhem. The members of Project Mayhem “all know what to do… no one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (Palahniuk, 130). It loses all the elements of freedom and the play-spirit that characterized fight club. It is no longer a game with a defined time; members of Project Mayhem are constantly working, rendering fat, gardening, causing destruction. It no longer has a defined space, as the endeavors of Project Mayhem could happen anywhere, from shopping malls to public parks. And no longer is it a voluntary activity, as unsuspecting victims are forced to be a part of homework assignments and participate as human sacrifices. Although the members share a goal for these actions, “to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them” (Palahniuk, 149), the mere thought of having a goal distances them from playing in the moment, and from complete freedom. Jack eventually sees the resemblance between Project Mayhem and the world he was trying so hard to escape from. He once again feels “trapped in [a] clockwork of silent men with the energy of trained monkeys” (Palahniuk, 130). Jack has broken free of his old game, but now has a new one in which he is still a slave to the goals and aspirations that the game prescribes him.

The moment is where freedom lies, where the purest play-spirit exists. As play extends beyond the boundaries of the moment, it becomes tainted by the past and the future. Beyond the moment, there is less freedom of action. The play you must make in the current moment is defined by your past actions and future goals. In the most extreme form of this, the professional player of any game, all the optimal plays are calculated beforehand so that the player is never in the moment. The plays have already been spelled out, and he has no choice but to follow the path to reach his goal. To play a game to achieve an end is to be a slave to the game. The game provides you with many possible endings, some in which you are a winner and other in which you are a loser. It then gives you rules to play by in order for you to become a winner, and one who strives to become the winner is bound by the rules and terms of the game. In playing this game, the professional becomes his goal. His every moment is defined by what he wants to achieve, and not by what he wants in the moment. This is not to say that play cannot exist outside of the moment, but instead that play lies on a continuum, with its purest form existing only in the moment. It is when the rewards of a game extend past the desires of the moment that our freedom is threatened.

References:
1. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: The Beacon Press
2. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company