The struggle of our time
Our great war is a spiritual war.
‘We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.’
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Millions of years ago, while our distant ancestors were still hairy apes dwelling in the treetops of the African continent, the struggle of their time was the carnivorous foes on the ground who would pick them off when they ventured onto the forest floor when foraging for fruit.
When Hominids adopted meat as a staple part of their diet, the struggle of their time was chasing down prey using their unique power to sweat, thus regulating their body temperature, and gifting them more stamina than the unfortunate animals which panted themselves to exhaustion.
With the advent of the agricultural revolution, the struggle of this time involved combatting droughts and famines, along with disease as a result of living in close proximity to farmyard animals as well as a growing number of humans who had advanced beyond the hunter-gather stage.
Since the dawn of life, the struggle has been for survival. While humanity has existed in a wide variety of geographic circumstances over thousands of years, the very fabric of our DNA - along with every other species within the animal kingdom - is ordered to fight a war on behalf of its own continuation and expansion.
For billions of years, life has danced on a pinhead slowly submerging into lava - a burden carried by all creatures great and small. Yet one species has successfully beaten the game fairly recently (and can break it completely by stopping death entirely).
The twentieth century brought a tidal wave of death and destruction. The two deadliest wars in history were fought within a span of 31 years, with one of the most lethal pandemics – that being the Spanish Flu – claiming more lives than trenches. The utopian ideals of Communism snatched many millions in turn.
Once the hot wars had ended, the Cold War began, and the threat of nuclear annihilation with it. For the first time, humanity possessed the power to wipe itself off the map and cause a man-made extinction event equal in power and rapidity to the asteroid that vanquished the dinosaurs for good.
But nuclear war never came, and the fall of the U.S.S.R in 1991 put any remaining doubts to bed. The End of History had arrived: the Western world was not just safe from the Red Terror, it was much more economically prosperous, hygienic, and technologically advanced than it was when Nazi Germany waved the white flag in May 1945.
Life expectancy began to shoot for the stars, and survival was not fought for, but guaranteed in this world of abundance. Only freak accidents or medical bad luck could take a man of the West off the census now.
Yet the West had unknowingly but expectedly swallowed a sweet poison. When Empires become triumphant over their surroundings and resource-rich beyond their wildest dreams, they become lazy, which leads to stagnation, which becomes degradation, that eventually leads to dissolution, and its people are left to struggle once more.
Weak men create hard times, and so on. In the early ‘90s, the West, to take a famous phrase from Joseph Stalin, became ‘dizzy with success’. Its victory over the forces of fascism and Marxist-Leninism were so absolute that the West coated itself with the armour of the glorious recent-past and declared itself invincible. But pride comes before the fall, and nature has a way of plaguing Francis Fukuyama with nightmares.
History does not stop, and there will always be struggle of some variety, which leads us to now. As Tyler Durden says, there is no great war. Machines and flying mini nukes do that for us; the average fighting age male is too fat, unfit, and disloyal to take up arms regardless. Furthermore, the nuclear weapon, contrary to expectations, does a spectacular job of keeping the bearers of atomic power from firing upon one another under the MAD doctrine.
We have no great depression. Yes, we are in a cost-of-living crisis (that may get worse), and yes, an increasing number of people have had to resort to foodbanks through no fault of their own, but we aren’t at mass starvation levels (not yet at least – let’s pray it stays that way). Food is but a click away for the average man on the street, with more choices to flick through than the emperors of old ever got their hands on. All other survival essentials are covered by a combination of supermarket behemoths and Amazon delivery, along with an army of cheap, limitless dopamine more common than the nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere.
Instead our great depression is our lives. For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in sociological climates that our genome folded into, in order to give our ancestors the best chance of survival. With the rapid changes crashing into society from around the end of the Cold War to the present day, our innate nature has been thrown into a hostile land where its genomic needs are openly mocked, subverted, and despised.
Despite worshipping the material abundance which surrounds us, the very animalistic desire to reproduce is hampered by housing shortages, expensive living costs, and the necessity of funnelling both parents into the Corporate Hellscape meatgrinder.
The act of finding a suitable mate itself has been mutilated into a labyrinth of landmines and spider’s webs thanks to social media and online dating. Easy access to contraception has permitted the human race to experience the most primal dopamine high without the responsibility which comes after.
This ended the stigma of engaging in such promiscuous behaviour, instead giving birth to a hook-up culture that needs to be destroyed at the earliest available opportunity, by any means necessary.
And if you thought the dating market was an arid desert light years away from anything inhabitable, social life in general is lonely and atomising. This country has a loneliness minister for a reason.
So, how do we survive and thrive in spite of the challenges that are presented to us? Well, that’s for each individual soul to work out for themselves, because we all live our own lives. But as Tyler Durden proclaims: ‘Our great war is a spiritual war.’
We must reclaim what it means to be human. Pick a hobby that doesn’t involve a screen (with some exceptions), join a social club, support the local, fight in a martial art’s gym, find God; it is imperative that we all improve ourselves within the world we have been bequeathed, so we can then improve upon the world handed down to us and the world we will hand down to the generations to come.