In the movie Fight Club, charismatic terrorist Tyler Durden chastises the more timid, never-named narrator for advocating what Durden disdainfully calls “premature enlightenment.”
Durden uses this colorful, vaguely obscene-sounding expression to refer to the tendency of an individual, following a protracted period of mental anguish and spiritual suffering, suddenly to succumb to “wishful thinking”: that is, all at once to see only what he wants to see, pushed into this state of willed myopia by a desperate desire to manufacture inner peace for himself.
Such willed deceit, however, cannot stand. In fact, a person cannot emerge from darkness until he genuinely discerns that light does indeed exist. No one can artificially construct this light he seeks, nor can anyone attempt to impersonate a state of illumination, absent personal knowledge of said light. As long as this light eludes the seeker, the seeker—whether he likes it not, and whether or not it wounds his ego to admit it—is still in the dark. His wish to find relief is understandable, but his concomitant inclination to force “enlightenment” amounts not only to a self-betrayal, but to a betrayal of the very cause of truth-seeking. If one values truth for truth’s sake, then one will always be honest in one’s reportage, even if the result is a dark portraiture indeed.
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