Do you remember the movie Fight Club?
Fight Club was and still is one of my favs. It was a late-90s nihilism flick where underground groups of men disaffected by modern society punched each other senseless and congealed into an anarchist gang plotting the overthrow their society.
I always liked it because it had a deeper layer to it: Fight Club told a story of people rejecting the standards thrust upon them by the world into which they were born, and given my upbringing in a strict religious household it offered me a kind of mental liberation from the rules into which I myself was born.
It’s deep, dark flaw, of course, is that the story stops at the triumph of anarchy over order. The bombs go off and the system is seen falling into ashes as the credits roll. No consequences are revealed. No plan is in place. Nothing remains but chaos.
The allure for most for that film was the chaos itself. It was the brutal fights. It was the middle finger to the establishment. It was the perception that control could be obtained by balking the rules and subverting the system. And maybe, deep down, quite a few of us have little “what if” nuggets in our minds of how that other side of collapse might look.
Most of us stop at speculation.
And that’s what irks me about the Alberta Separatist movement. It is a Fight Club. It is from all appearances grotesquely organized around chaos. It’s a tearing down the order without a realistic plan for what happens after the collapse. It is a middle finger to the establishment simply because of vaguely articulated grievances.
Sure, if the system has not been working for you, the allure of belonging to a secretive underground no-holds-barred movement might be strong. Burning down the system to re-roll the dice might be a gamble you are willing to take.
But on the other side of chaos there is not necessarily better odds for anyone. By most measures, and likely for generations, the impacts to such societal collapse will be detrimental to all. In the pain caused by disaffection there is a temporary salve to be found in anger and chaos, but the real healing comes from hard work and building stronger for everyone.
Architecting collapse, no matter what you call it—freedom, sovereignty, or righteousness—seems like little more than a kind of diagnosis of social mental illness, failing to understand the plot, and definitely not thinking beyond the roll of the credits.