is you do not talk about fight club.

James Burnette has a good post here about that very subject, ignoring the first (and second) rules.

Look: Violence and death are an integral part of life. Humans have known this for ages, and that knowledge, I believe, is the reason we play games, and hunt, and race cars, and etc.

Men, by their nature, want to test themselves. Against themselves, against other individuals, other counties, other states, other nations. They do so peacibly by playing games, they do so un-peacibly by going to war. It is an integral part of masculinity, and to attempt to separate masculinity from the contest is probably bad, possibly very bad. Everywhere guys get together for a pick-up game of baseball, or hockey, or go hunting in a group, or shoot in a competition, they are testing themselves and one another, measuring themselves against each other and against themselves. Am I better at this than he is? Am I cleverer? Am I stronger? Have I improved? Am I better than I was last week? Can I kick his ass? Can I shoot more hoops? Can I hit the X ring more often?

Tyler Durdin attributes the “Lostness” of the generation. And in the main, he’s right. No, I am not anxious to go out and get pummeled, but I have had more than my share of that already. And I am not lost.

You see, if you look at Fight Club, you don’t see many guys who got off their tractor to join. Or put down their rifle to join, or parked their stock car to join. That is because the people riding that tractor, or hunting those deer, or driving that car, see, they already belong to Fight Club. They pit themselves daily against the hard soil, to make it fertile. Or the wiliness of the whitetail, or the abilities of their fellow drivers. Men- real men- have known for ages the need to brace themselves against something- some, like crab fishermen, or farmers, do so against their jobs. Some, like hunters, do so against their quarry. Some do so on the baseball diamond against other players, or on ashalt courts all over the place.

We have no great war, as Durdin says. We have no obvious foe- (Though the left is doing a pretty good job of providing us with those, these days)

A large number of the people in cities do not have the opportunity- nor take the opportunity- to engage in any kind of personal contest of skill, or strength, or cunning, and instead engage in automated video contests in the form of televised pro sports. I cannot personally think of a single thing more pathetic than “testing yourself” against others by watching any kind of sport on TV- and unless you’re out there playing it yourself, that’s what’s going on. Think you’re better because your Red Sox beat the Yankees? You didn’t throw a single fucking ball, you sat on the couch and yelled and ate nachos.

I’m not even remotely surprised that the “blue” on the map is where a lot of people live who have no outlet for that testosterone, nothing to brace themselves against but the skills of others, vicariously. Men once taught their sons to be Men. To put their shoulders against life and give a hearty shove. To put up their dukes and fight, to put the bat on their OWN shoulder and swat that ball, to tune up that car and make it sing, to lay that bike into the curve and roll the throttle on. To find the thing they most want to lean into, and lean into it.

As friends lean on one another to remain standing when their ability to stand on their own falters, Men lean into something, fight something tooth and nail, to keep their skills honed. Not a lot of people get that we fight the war against our chosen opponent because we have to, but because we choose to. We choose to see just how good a shot we are. How well we can hit that hoop. How often we can bring home dinner, quite literally. We do so because we do not want to be adrift, wanting something undefineable to justify our existence. We are not adrift. We are men. We just do it, we don’t talk much about it.

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about fight club.