On Pessimism and The Origins of Violent Conflict

fight club and FIGHT CLUB resurrected The Idea of Creative Destruction on a personal level —

of Male on Male Violence for Recreation and Rebirth.

"Anyway, this optimism stuff is 130 years out of date. 

Let me see if I can remember that poem:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Now, that is pessimism: 

Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach," 1859. 

And you know, people didn't generally write poetry that pessimistic before 1859. 

That, by the way, is the same year that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, the book that really got people to look at the human race 'realistically'. Most people think that Darwin's book is devoted to evolution. It's not, really; as a matter of fact, Darwin didn't even use the word "evolution" in that first edition. The full title tells it all: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. 

Darwin got people to realize that life is not progress or development, but an endless struggle; you can't be optimistic, because how things turn out is not a question of morality, or a Divine Plan; it's a question of biology—over which you and I have very little control.

Thomas Huxley, Darwin's good friend, said it best: "I know of no study which is so utterly saddening as that of the evolution of humanity. Man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than other brutes, a blind prey to impulses ... a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a burden, and fill his life with barren toil and battle."

This stuff changed the world back in the 1860s and '70s; everybody had to explain the universe in terms of Darwin. Even Hermann Helmholtz, the mechanist physicist, told his colleagues that the "struggle for existence" was "the highest principle of explanation, in the face of which not even the molecules ... and the stars in heaven are safe." And Sigmund Freud said that the two most important influences on him were Charles Darwin and Hermann Helmholtz. He even tried to study with Huxley in London and with Helmholtz in Berlin. "

- Michael Minnicinno