We were once savage and unbound. We belonged only to our nature and instinct. Now we are tame and domesticated. We did it to ourselves. We built this thing, society, maybe out of necessity, perhaps convenience — it doesn’t matter. It is an imaginary bubble that divides acceptable and unacceptable behavior, leaving infinite space for unacceptable behavior outside of its sphere. For the average man acceptable behavior has become the way, the only way, of life. It is all he knows.
But he wants more for himself. He wants to break the rules. He wants to be wild. He wants to fight back against these constructs, some of which he may even be liable for — for perpetuating or even having engineered — have ruined him. And that’s exactly the way he sees it. He is the victim. It happened to him. It is beyond his control.
No, he’s doomed. Because it’s too late now, it has him and there’s no getting out. He is recklessly obedient to rules and regulations, relationships and responsibilities. Indentured for at least forty of his best hours every week. He accumulates abstract value in a system that he lets determine the quality of his life. He buys not what he needs but what he wants. Rarely can he earn what he needs. More often it can only be taken, or captured. And, he is too ashamed, feeble and pathetic to do either.
However, our evolution into civilized beings did allow one survivor. This creature, “One of God’s own prototypes, too weird to live, too rare to die” (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) exists beyond definition. Our relation to him can only contrast. He is everything that we dream for ourselves. “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look how you wanna look, I fuck how you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable and most importantly I am free in all of the ways that you are not” (Fight Club). The protagonist of this movie, Tyler Durden, is a hallucination of the narrator’s, a product of a mental fracture caused by a depressing and formulaic lifestyle much like that of the average man.
In fact, he is a dream, a ghost. This mythical creature that we believe in doesn’t actually exist but in our minds. There, he is more everything than he ever could be in reality. A figure of our collective imagination, he thrives on our desires. We envy this fiction.
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden” (Fight Club). In reality, we are always asking each other if we know the guy — the anyman that was there, that saw the whole thing, or was behind it all. When Jack the narrator opens proudly with this line he represents us well, us gossipers. We are proud of Tyler Durden, e.g., so we validate him and his actions which in turn validates our thoughts. The cycle devours the shroud of unheard-of we siphon through our television telescopes.
We tell enthusiastic stories about this man. This is our only access to him. They exaggerate his actions and swell our idolatry for our fantasy. We do so carefully, because “…to describe his physical appearance or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading superficialities” (Pirsig 71). When we tell his stories we gloss over his form and define him by his action. Whereas the average man can be defined by his inaction.
Our exclamatory language commemorates his every appearance. A fine idea, received by an “Are you crazy?!? You can’t do that!” is not uncommon. In fact, “That’s crazy!” will often punctuate an only temporary disbelief. Phrases such as “He was… like a crazy man,” “It was absolutely insane,” or even “incredible” all demonstrate the positive connotations of insanity. How often do the words we choose deny credit to the actions they describe, when truly, we exalt those actions as achievements.
Our stories are always extraordinary. We want to astonish and amaze. So we embellish. We lie. We inflate our own accounts and even the rumors that pass through us. We want to be this man so badly that if we can’t we at least want to know him or somehow be a part of his momentum.
We want anything but to be who we are in any given moment. It’s always “any place but here,” “any time but now,” yet we are unwilling to go and too afraid to leave. He goes there for us. He leaves. We worship him when he does.
There is only one kind of person, Phaedrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is ‘insane.’ To go outside the mythos is to become insane.
Pirsig, p. 316
To leave the logos takes courage. “To go outside the mythos is to become insane,” regardless of your business there (Pirsig 316). To remain outside of the mythos is delinquent.
To be insane is to be free and brave enough to leave the world that contains you, and the idea of its prisons and cells. We pity the insane. Shame on us. They would pity us if they weren’t so preoccupied with their victories. No they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t spare the time.
The brave few who stand tall and liberated outside of the mythos will merit respect and fame. Legendary status is a given, and it’s “fifteen minutes” if you fall out of line by accident, but if you have the gall to step out and stand tall then your fifteen minutes will play time and again on network. You will become an icon. You will have been insane, but only for a moment.
With enough cameras and people watching, you won’t get very far. You’ll be wrangled back in before you make any real progress. Everything you’ve accomplished will be assimilated into a new normalcy. You’ll be sane again.
The real shame is that you’ll crave it while you expect all of the things you left, and more, to be waiting for you when you return. It all just might, if we get your story right. But, you can count on him walking away with all those dreams you had while you were gone and that precious label you earned when you stepped outside because they don’t belong in here with you, and neither does he.
Note on terms. The term logos, the root word of “logic,” refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos (Pirsig 315).