What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt.

I wanted to destroy
everything beautiful I 'd never have. Burn the Amazon Rain Forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight
up to gobble up the ozone. Open the dump valve on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted
to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that
wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.
Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and
now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And
account for every drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge
dumped a generation before I was born.
I held the face of mister angel like a baby or football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my
knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he
fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and
turned black.
I wanted to breath smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with
the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
We wanted to blast the world free of history.
We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting
radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.
You'll hunt elk and deer through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and
dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the
skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat
to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and
watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. “They're like someone who quits smoking on
his deathbed.”
It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark
age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into recession long enough for the Earth to
recover.
“You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. “You figure it out.”
Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can
make something better out of the world.
“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful
rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life, and
you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the Beanstalk, you'll climb
up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn
and laying venison to dry on the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-
lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”
This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away-destruction of
civilization.