Plight Club: in the end, it will be too late to stop it.

Rating: 9/10 (26 June 2012)

There are two basic modes in which every animal (including human) lives its life. The first mode is characterized by security, safety, comfort, patience, defensiveness, caution, consolidation, inhibition, staidness, mildness, meekness, suppression, submission and conformity, whereas as a complete contrast the other mode is characterized by aggression, assertion, excitement, risk, initiative, boldness, spontaneity, impulsiveness, recklessness, violence and domination. Often the shift from the normal staid mode to the aggressive mode takes place very rapidly, even as small as a fraction of a second.
Modern man has been forced by the need to attain social control of the masses to suppress the aggressive mode which was a necessary mode for the hunter-gatherer and warring man to survive and thrive. Today, most people have been programmed to live the staid life of a 9 to 5 routine, neatly dressed up, working to build a comfortable life, accumulating possessions that fortify this life style of maximizing luxury. But there is a downside to this: there is no sense of adventure left, it is a lifestyle of ultimate boredom because it is totally predictable, it leaves no room for a creative, innovative choice driven life style, and the mass aggressive outlet is in the contrived wars that dominating nations unleash upon the hapless smaller nations that dare to defy them even in the most trivial of issues. The only positive mass channeling of this aggression is in competitive sport or games, but come to think of it, that too is a contraption which is a distraction from the genuine aggressive response whose real value is in creativity.
The other result of this suppression is in the development of a neurosis that leads to mental disorders, drug addiction, life of crime and ultimately an irresistible urge to destroy it all without even being consciously aware of it.
Fight club is a story that vividly encapsulates this plight of modern, civilized man, the developing neurosis, the urges of aggression that are a response to boredom, the need for genuine excitement and adventure that are now a near impossibility, all build up to the inevitable destruction that is the only default genuine excitement that is left for man, an urge to destroy, that modern man is not even conscious of and will not be conscious of until the last moments of 'recorded time', and by that time it will be too late to stop it.
"Perhaps only poetry had the strength to rival the attractions of narcotics, the magnetism of TV, the excitements of sex, or the ecstasies of destruction."(Saul Bellow)