Resiliency
As Webster and Rivers (2018) point out, the notion of resilience has been promoted in a variety of fields and essentially research on it has focused on the need for individuals to “toughen up”—particularly in what has been called a “snowflake” culture, a term popularized by the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club. As Palahniuk said later when the book was made into a cult hit film, “Every generation gets offended by different things but my friends who teach in high school tell me that their students are very easily offended…The modern Left is always reacting to things. Once they get their show on the road culturally they will stop being so offended” (Londoner, 2017). While there is a lot to unpack in that statement (offense and culture are implicitly linked to resiliency and the ability to cope with conflict), the essence of the point made by Palahniuk is that people in the modern world do not have much of an ability to take a hit, to absorb a blow to their mental acuity. In response to a popular need for everyone to be politically correct, society has developed a “cancel culture” where anyone who offends or crosses an imaginary line of political correctness is written off, blacklisted, maligned on social media, and turned into an object of scorn, derision and hate. There is no ability to weather differences of opinions or cope with the stress that living in a world where conflict arises naturally brings. Palahniuk’s novel was about a man dealing with his own lack of resilience and through a clever but twisted plot the hero (at least in the film adaptation) reaches a higher level of resiliency by overcoming adversity and taking responsibility. He is surrounded, too, by a support system—a telling point. As Domhardt, Munzer, Fegert and Goldbeck (2015) have shown, even one of the most awful experiences imaginable—child sexual abuse and its attendant trauma—can be overcome if there is adequate social support for the child. What Domhardt et al. (2015) and Palahniuk both appear to suggest is this: resilience is needed in the modern world to cope with stress, anxiety, trauma, and conflict—but it is not something one can do on one’s own—which is the point Webster and Rivers (2018) make in their criticism of recent literature on the subject of resilience. This paper will show how the cult hit film Fight Club can be used as a guide for thinking about resiliency today with a focus, in particularly, on how the building up of resilience requires support from others.

People are Social Beings

The idea behind resilience is that individuals have to be able to bounce back from adversity and weather the storms of life, whether they are physical, mental, social, or cultural. Students must be resilient in order to face and overcome the challenges of the academic and social worlds they navigate. Adults must be resilient to face and overcome challenges in the professional world. Conflict and adversity are to be expected, and those who cannot cope will either perish and sink into a negative state, characterized by depression, anxiety, trauma, or anger (Domhardt et al., 2015), or they will turn authoritarian and dictate laws that target anyone who dares to “trigger” them. As Koerner (2017) writing for the Foundation for Economic Education notes, “When we can't control ourselves, we tend to control others.” The current snowflake culture derided by Palahniuk is what happens when an entire society exists, full of individuals who find it unbearable to control themselves: they set up and take part in a draconian system where they seek instead to control the actions and thoughts of everyone else so that no one ever crosses a line or upsets or rocks the boat in any way. Palahniuk’s unnamed hero in Fight Club is an example of what happens when one realizes that, rather than being empowered he has been rendered powerless by a lifetime of submission to a culture of innocuous platitudes ultimately designed to make everyone into a mindless, soulless consumer. The unnamed hero (he is christened Jack at one point) finds that in spite of society’s attempt to regulate everything, including his own inner workings, he still suffers: he cannot sleep, he has no purpose in life, and the only relief he gets is from going to Men with Cancer healing sessions where he is socially permitted to weep in front of others (even though he does not have cancer—he is there for catharsis).

Jack shows through his own situation (and thus it could be said that he serves as an excellent subject for case study) that protective, politically correct world of his is insufficient to prevent depression, insomnia, or despair—all of which Jack suffers before beginning his development of his own resilience (thanks to the help of a friend he makes named Tyler Durden). Jack complains to his seat companions on planes when traveling for work (really the only opportunity he has to actually socialize with other human beings—which says something about the state of the artificial society in which he lives, as there is no human interaction among people: they are just bumping along or into one another and making the appropriate politically correct comment and scurrying on their way to their own private, isolated cubicle). After investigating a grisly car crash in which a family died, Jack...…and fuzzy” but bracing and honest: he tells his followers that they are not unique, beautiful snowflakes but rather that they are nothing special, that they must work for a higher purpose, a higher calling. Their work must not be self-centered but dedicated to a higher good, a higher moral principle—liberation from the authoritarian, consumer culture of the politically correct land of the dead. Tyler is offering them life through awareness. Each week he gives them challenges that are meant to test their resolve and grow the capacity to suffer that which the world throws at them and overcome it.

In the process of learning from Tyler, Jack comes to understand more fully his own place in the world. The trick of the novel and the film is that Tyler is actually Jack’s alter-ego—a projection of Jack’s internal need for a leader and guide. Jack realizes that he is actually the one running the show and that even as the fight club spirals into its own morally questionable activities, he has to take ownership of it, take responsibility, and assume control of that through which he has been sleepwalking—life. At the end of the film, Jack sends Tyler away and steps into the role of leader of the fight club as the world that he has served up till then collapses into a dystopian landscape. He stands ready to accept the new challenges, having learned how to be resilient under Tyler’s tutelage.

Conclusion

Thanks to the support that Jack receives from Tyler, the hero of Fight Club is able to acquire resiliency and face and overcome the challenges of his life. Though story is helpful in showing that resiliency is not something one can obtain on one’s own. It shows that the macho myth of going off into the words, ala Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV, is an unrealistic approach to resiliency development. Palahniuk shows, rather, that to develop resiliency, one needs support. This idea is seconded by researchers like Domhardt et al. (2015) and Reivich et al. (2011). It is the idea of Webster and Rivers (2018), too, that resiliency is all-too often thought of as this kind of “snowflakes need to toughen up” approach. And while Palahniuk does indeed embrace that approach, he shows that it is only possible if one has an adequate social support system in place. The system that Tyler provides Jack works: it fills a gap in Jack’s own life, which is utterly devoid of real social interaction and real social support. In Tyler’s fight club, Jack finds authentic meaning and legitimate social support. Under Tyler, Jacks learns how to become resilient.