First, in order to explain the thought, some background material is needed: [the things you own end up owning you](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zp-eEVkKh60) Ok. Fortism. [His name was xyz](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=JgLkdth62eI) What the hell is Fortism anyway? You watch the videos above, what do you see? It boils down to just a bunch of dudes playing Fort. No seriously. Go watch again. They're playing fort. A *very* serious game of fort. But fort none the less. Training together. Playing army. I think theres this basic instinct, at least in europeans, back from our proto-saxon caveman days, before we were even the great great great grandfathers of saxons, and even earlier. And this instinct is to group up, build a protective wall, and decide group direction by fighting. You can see the 'wall building' in their shit-fort of an abandoned building they took over--this urge to "revert to agregarianism". And you can see the fight for group direction in the back and forth between norton and the other guys in the group over the death of rob, and what that means to them *as a group*. ("in death, members of project mayhem have a name"). The protagonist unwittingly reinforces this when he says the body is not a piece of evidence. He's asserting that that shit doesn't matter, the law, or what rob's body means in relation to society, doesn't matter. These aren't ideas that exist in his reverted pre-industrial world. This connects back to the ideas highlighted in the first video, hunter-gatherer vs being consumers. Organic rules and ideas derived on the fly, like in the his-name-is-xyz scene, vs the formal power process of society at large. Fortism is none other than the urge to burn it all down, tear it down, when systems get too complicated for us to understand or control. Because without understanding what we're living in, then the systems we build to control our environment, end up controlling us instead of the otherway around. The real message is, when we buy things, rather than make them, those things don't just end up owning us, but every transaction in that chain is itself a form of debt, a form of dependence, that can be taken over, infiltrated, bought, monopolized, exploited, and it always devolves into ownership and slavery sooner or later. This is even eluded to in the first video, when Tyler Durden exclaimed "let the chip fall where they may." Discarding the existing order, rather than trying to build a new one. He already knows that his approach, this thing he's built, fight club, is *itself* doomed, even as it emerges as a withdrawing, a defensive retreat, from existing order. He sees the flaw, and the solution is shown in the end: to build the one (fight club and project mayhem) to simultenously destroy itself while also destroying the existing order. And having reset everything, again, letting the chips fall where they may--but for everyone. In particular the debt system that had come to own the consumerist class. Year zero. My take on fight club is this-- Fortism: *we build hunter-gatherer communes n sheeiiit n we don't like laws against guys having bro-only groups. We also like to punch each other sometimes.* This idea that deprivation, on the primitive level, especially because of production inefficiencies introduced by worker-organized volunteerism, combine with large external threats, gives people's lives greater purpose, however contrived. And applied on a large scale, it becomes none-other than a microcosm of the three warring superstates in 1984. Now, that aside, what do we see in the fall of empires? Rome? Greece? Sodom? Weimer? America? 1. the mixing of men and homosexuality, confusing male bonds with sexuality, and atomizing brotherhood. 2. Blanket bans on organic hierarchy, derived from infighting and violence-among-peers. 3. Restrictions on land use, tight control of property 4. A large bulk of useless bureaucrats, and useless laws and artificialities that greatly interfere with regular society. Witness people trying to bury loved ones on their own property, and being told they have to get permission. Or rob's body being seen as evidence. Even funeral rites, something sacred, become subject to society' external considerations. On a tangent: This last one is particularly egregious, because why should a member of a stupid group, dying doing something stupid, be an indictment of the whole? From this we've seen a whole swath of new laws, policies, and practices, often using deaths or coerced crimes under suspicious circumstances, being used, by society, to shut down entire movements, or ideologies. This is an example of one, very specific process of control, that arises from the intrusion of 'law' into protoculture. 5. Intrusion on, limitation of, and suppression of, natural affiliation. We see this in modern america and the west. It takes the form of gays forcing a bakery to bake a cage. Trannies forcing their way into chilren's bathrooms and school locker rooms. Sundry other forms include desegregation, which many of the blacks didn't want, or to the changing definition of "nation" from "an ethnic and cultural *group of people*" to "a geographic location ruled by a particular national government." It can be seen in the out-right genocide propaganda of "white and european is evil", while "black, jewish, muslim, minority are good". It can be seen "diversity, equity, and inclusion", forcing male clubs to include women and trans. Or women's sports being forced to accept men. It can be seen in religions being forced, by courts, to accept women as their ministers or equivalent. In all of this and more, we see the complete deprivation that follows from the open violation of boundaries, and people's right to *draw* boundaries. To the point that even the family, and private property like ones home is now considered, by the mob, as a sort of "theft against the community". Eventually the men working within the confines of these artificial deprivations say fuck it, and join the mob in accelerating the collapse, wanting to see it all torn down. And having accomplished that they draw a new sacred circle of their peers and fellow men, and erect walls they retreat behind, to build a new, simpler, saner, order. And let the mobs starve and burn outside the siege walls. That is Fortism.