In the reading last week, Sarmiento described Argentinian society as being split in half. The gauchos were the front-runners of the "Barbarians" and the white elites were the front-runners of civilization. In this post, I'm going to make a modern-day comparison to this societal struggle. When I first read Sarmiento, I wasn't very quick to pick up on the fact that Sarmiento was a white elite who had personal bias on the matter. After reading both chapters it became apparent that Sarmiento was a white elite, he had been to Europe, and what's more, he had political aspirations as well- as he would one day become President of Argentina. I realized that Sarmiento wasn't just making a comment on the state of Argentina's nationhood because he was just a concerned citizen.
Sarmiento played his part well. He clearly stated his position on the matter as if it were completely factual, divine and natural. It was very convincing, but a big part of me knew that Sarmiento wasn't completely right. I even pointed out in my last post that the whole idea of a nation wasn't everything it was supposed to be and would eventually lead to terrible things. Sarmiento was definitely wrong in that regard. I ended my post by suggesting that perhaps those men who are sort of "rough around the edges" should be left to lead their cattle because they certainly aren't fit to lead men.
This is exactly where I want to pick up. This week I watched a movie called Fight Club. You may have heard of it- some of you may have seen it. But i'm not here to recommend the movie to anyone. It's not a Disney movie. To put it plainly, Fight Club is rude. It's supposed to be.
Some people call Fight Club a guys movie. For one, people shouldn't label movies based on gender stereotypes. But even more importantly, Fight Club is much more than a "guys movie" with guns and explosions and fast cars. Fight Club is truly a commentary on society. It is a wake-up call.
In the movie, an unnamed man, frustrated with his dull desk-job, TV-dinner, lonely lifestyle, decides to take action on his life and creates a fight club. Eventually, all sorts of guys, all frustrated by the system of society, begin to meet each week to release their pent-up frustrations, boredom, sadness, and lack-of freedom by getting beat to a pulp. These men are like the gauchos of Argentina with no horses and no open fields to run on. Without those freedoms, the men slowly begin to die as they sit in their offices, filing away papers and buying new dining room sets off the internet. Many of these guys are living what others might call "The American Dream" and yet they are some of the most unhappy people in the world.
Unfortunately. I believe there is a lot of truth to this representation of modern society. We convince ourselves we need that new t-shirt, or that new oven, or that we care about our job approving (or more likely not approving) loans. We're just like the "civilized" people of Argentina who believed that they needed steamboats and railroads and industry and European fashion. They were just the beginning.
The men in Fight Club eventually take their Fight Club idea too far. I don't want to give away much detail other than that. But, I think that you can understand that the main idea of the movie was to point out the negative effects our societal structure and our obsession with consumerism have on the people.
Fight Club goes to show that the Civilization Vs. Barbarism theme hasn't gone away. Some of us are still fighting it today. It's why we play football. It's why people climb mountains and jump out of airplanes. It's why some people choose not to go to college. People can't just always be so civil all the time. The frustration builds up. It wears you down and puts crazy ideas into your head. That's what I meant when I said that rough guys like the gauchos should lead cattle and not men. If you force them into a society they don't fit into, the results won't be good.
That's what happened in Fight Club. The main character hated his shallow, meaningless life so much that he had gone crazy, inventing a new personality for himself and starting a cult that would eventually go on to do some spectacularly horrible things. He wasn't born crazy. He became crazy when he realized that no matter how many clothes he bought or how big his apartment was he was never happy. You really can't blame the guy. Thousands of other men felt the same way he did and followed him to the grave.
I think that something similar to this really does happen to people as a result of our "civilized society". To further a previous example, this is what may have happened with Hitler. People thought that Germany needed to become a strong nation with a big army and a pure people, in a similar way to how people thought Argentina needed to become "civilized" like Europe, and also similar to how people today believe all the ads on TV. Hitler simply had a powerful voice that could be extremely convincing. Like the main character of Fight Club, Hitler got others to follow him, and with the words of people like Sarmiento, he was able to disguise his misguided aggression as Nationalism, Imperialism and politics.
In the end, people realized Hitler was a mad-man, just as viewers of Fight Club realize that the main character is a multi-personality psychopath. The movie isn't about a hero. It's about the villain. The one called society. The Nation. The thing that Sarmiento so eloquently convinced everyone we needed.
With Fight Club and the Holocaust as evidence, the struggle of Civilization Vs. Barbarism within the Nation has never gone away.
I wish that people like Sarmiento would stop writing books trying to eradicate it. His essay was wrong in a lot of ways, but we should know that, considering his motives. People will never fully lose their wild side, and forcing them to will only make things worse. The fight is internal as well as external.
That's all for now. If you've made it this far, congratulations and thank you for reading the whole thing. Oh and side note- If you can't already tell I love Fight Club, it's an awesome movie, but my point was that I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. Here's a quote from the movie. You stay classy, Honors 280.
"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
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