“Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving friends.”
-Narrator

“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
-Tyler Durden

“…every Saturday night we were finding something out: we were finding out more and more that we were not alone.”
-Narrator

“Nothing is static. Everything is evolving. Everything is falling apart.”
-Tyler Durden

Watching Fight Club the other night, I was reminded what an excellent example it provides of the dynamics of anti-modernity terrorist movements.

At root, this is about looking for a sense of belonging. Feeling like you have meaning in your life. Fight Club revolves around a brutally nihilistic philosophy, so clearly there are substantive differences between Tyler Durden’s Project Meyham and al Qaeda. Durden offers a sense of self through self-destruction; al Qaeda offers an identity through adherence to an anachronistic form of Mideaval Islam. But the dynamic which alienated youths become aligned with each movement is the same: a disillustionment with modern life and a search for meaning, comraderie and satisfaction. A desire to feel whole, human and alive.

Marc Sagemen, in Understanding Terror Networks, gathers an impressive amount of original, open-source data on Global Salafi terrorists and offers a compelling picture of the process by which young, culturally Muslim men turn into suicide terrorists. The philosophies of Fight Club and al Qaeda are different; the dynamics are the same.

The Narrator, like the majority of the 9/11 hijackers, starts out as a reasonably well-educated and comparatively successful young man. He is not on the bottom of the social ladder. He has a classicly comfortable white-collar job: desk, office, salary, apartment, and general material comfort. Yet he is dying in his single-serving life, riddled with insomnia and constantly obsessing over what Ikea end table defines him. He is living an empty, anonymous consumer hell. He looks at what the modern world has to offer and finds it desperately wanting. Like Sageman’s description of future al Qaeda terrorists, he feels “a lack of spiritualism in a utilitarian culture…” leading him to feel that he is “underemployed and discriminated against by the local society” leaving him with “a personal sense of grievence and humiliation” p97.

“Future mujahedin,” Sageman says, “were socially alienated, or temporarily disembedded, from their societies of origin.” In Fight Club, the future terrorists are “by-products of a lifestyle obsession,” “slaves with white collars… chasing shit we don’t need.”

Later, as Project Meyham grows, recruits from the lower rungs of society show up. The waiters, the gas station attendents and the janitors. Just as we have seen a second wave of terrorists coming out of the ghettos of London, the Netherlands and France. But the movement did not start with the low-status, underemployed
proletariat. No, it started with the comfortable yet unsatisfied: the Narrators and the Tyler Durdens of the world. Those men who were successful enough to ask themselves “I’ve worked hard and made sacrifies… and this is all there is?” Sageman argues that “jihad… was a result of rising expectations” p78.

These lonely, alienated men connect somehow. In the case of al Qaeda maybe the young man goes to a local mosque, not because he is seeking Islam, but because he is seeking something familiar. A place where there are people like him. In the case of Fight Club, the Narrator befriends someone who shares and understands his dissatisfaction with the superficial and commodified culture of 21st century America. However the connection was made, a bond of friendship forms. As this bond strengthens, a process of self-radicalization and isolation begins. The young alienated Pakistani or North African ex-pats move into an apartment together. The Narrator moves in with Durden. Then the radicalization increases. The young men start reading radical Salafi materials and start criticizing their local mosque as being too moderate. The Narrator and Durden’s fights turn into a masochistic club.

As time passes, ties to the outside world fall away (witness the decrepit house miles away from any other people in Fight Club) and dependence upon the group increases. And then the next step is taken. Durden moves Fight Club out of the basement and into the streets, eventually creating Project Meyham. The young militants (note that they have now self-radicalized to the point that they are militants and not just radicals) seek out a contact who will help them realize their desires for jihad.

This is not a process of top-down recruitment. These disenchanted young men are not approached on the street by an al Qaeda representative who asks them if they want to be all that they can be. Emasculated young men are not approached by Durden on the street and asked if they want something more out of their life. No, these charismatic leader are searched out by young men who have already decided that they want to join the movement that they previously have only heard the buzz about. In his study, Sageman observed that “the formation of a network of friendship… preceded formal induction into the terrorist organization.” p108

Durden plants the seeds of his movement with calculated acts, not sales pitches. He threatens the life of a convient store clerk to motivate him to do something with his life. He instructs his Fight Club members to start fights and lose them. It is a tactic also employed by the Reavers of Josh Whedon’s Firefly, who intentionally leave a single survivor after a raid on a transport ship. The horror of having to witness the Reaver autrocities causes the survivor to deal with the trauma in the only way he can: by turning himself into a Reaver.

An actual popular movement is less dangerous than nihilistic terrorists. A popular insurgency can be negotiated with, it has a political position and it trusts that its numbers will allow it to succeed in a political setting. It is embedded in the population. Nihilistic terrorists, however, are trying to unleash forces that will tear the whole system down. They are leverging economies of scale and targets of opportunity to have effects larger than their numbers and they know that their only chance for success is pulling the whole system down. The Triad of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is what our nightmare looks like, not the Vietcong.

Seen this way, the mindset of the terrorist is disturbingly familiar. It is angst, a quarter-life crisis, it is loneliness in a rapidly changing world, viewed through a dark prism of violence. For those of us who are not recent immigrants to our current countries, and who do not have a personal relationship to Islam, Fight Club offers a chillingly charismatic vision of how these dynamics feel. We are happy to see the Narrator throwing off Durden’s control at the end, but part of us is disturbed by how much we enjoyed watching Tyler Durden.

We aren’t going to fix the roots at this depth, because on this scale we’re dealing with the human condition. But we still need to understand.