The narrator doesn't fight Tyler Durden because he's evil.

He fights him because Tyler offers the one thing the narrator's entire life has systematically denied him: permission to stop pretending the pretense matters.

The Ikea catalog isn't decoration—it's the binding contract. When the narrator lists his possessions ('IKEA nesting instinct'), he's not critiquing consumerism, but rather describing the machinery of self-sedation — each lamp, each piece of pressboard furniture, each monthly payment functions as a micro-surrender, a small death you can purchase and feel productive about, and the system works because it doesn't ask you to fight it but only to build it, piece by piece, in your apartment, alone.

Tyler promises the opposite: a life without the furniture, without the job that pays for it, without the exhausting performance of wanting it. But here's what the book actually shows — the men in Project Mayhem don't want no-things, but rather the same comfort delivered through different machinery, the comfort of belonging to something that has already decided what they should want, and they traded the Ikea catalog for the condo rules of a fight club, same transaction, different vendor.

The narrator's final choice—to destroy both systems simultaneously—registers as the book's only honest moment because it's the only moment that doesn't offer a replacement comfort, so most readers miss this because they're still looking for which system to join.