Authoritarianism includes controlling and abusing or abused by others. (Fromm
142) Why people want to be abused? Because only in the crowd that have the same belief
with them, they can feel safe. According to Fromm, the masochistic feels that he shares
the power and glory of the body. His life’s meaning is defined by the body, like a “space
monkey”, a metaphor for the members of fight club, who sacrifice itself for a space
project and don’t know what it is doing. (Palahniuk 78)
Although Tylor has the power to rule, he has no right to be himself. “Worker bees
can leave/ Even drones can fly away/ The queen is their slave.” (62) The sadist is harder
to escape. The protagonist, he wants to leave but was greatly threatened by fight club. The
sadist and masochist have symbiosis: without the protagonist, Tylor will die too.
In Sanhe, the ID sellers seemed to buy the identity and future of people using less
than 100 RMB (Yang), but they also form a symbiotic relationship with the people in
Sanhe. Now people are dismissed in Sanhe, who can they exploit? The bond of symbiosis
is easy to break.
When things break, and the loneliness and fear remain, people go explosive, toward
themselves and others. The impulse towards themselves is suicide. Like the gunshot the
protagonist did on his own head, eight workers in Foxconn jump off the building. (Liu and
Yang)
“Only in death do we have names” (Palahniuk 201)? In a world that people have to
enter society to be normal, maybe it is right. But death can never be a solution; it is simply
a way similar to escape from freedom.
Marla, a female character in fight club, is the chance of surviving from the escape
from freedom for the protagonist. She is a doubt to life, a glimpse of freedom, a sting that
remind the protagonist of every trap of “freedom”. she tries to use love and healthy rela-
tionship to bring him back from the last way of escaping, suicide. (197)
Back to the problems I stated in the beginning. On the way to university, some
people fill themselves into the mode of "volunteering" or "leadership", some escape and
sink into games. In the end of the movie version (I watched after I read the book), the
protagonist kills Tylor, takes Marla’s hand, and watches the city burns. It symbols the end
of old rules in the society and new authorities of Tylor, also the beginning of healthy bond
instead of Sadistic relationship between humans. Fromm’s final thought moves me:
people should live in a society base on what they really want, staying unique while work-
ing. To stop escaping from freedom, every individual need critical thinking to find what
one actually like and want, and to be oneself.