Are There Still Masters, or Are There Only Servants of Servants?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2022-12-21 · 0:43:39 · 4,367 words
ideologydemocracyfascism-populismrevolution-violenceecology-climategeopolitics-warpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesshistoryphilosophy-general
Žižek diagnoses the global crisis of liberal democracy thirty years after the fall of communism, arguing that contemporary protest movements (gilets jaunes, Podemos, etc.) reveal a deeper 'discontent in liberal capitalism' that goes beyond mere 'catch-up' revolutions. He introduces the 'eating the last cannibal' paradox to explain how all legal orders rest on a founding violent act that must be concealed, and reads Trump and Putin as openly performing this obscene underside of power. Drawing on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's catastrophism, he argues that confronting ecological and geopolitical catastrophe requires a temporal reversal, accepting the disaster as necessary fate and then retroactively opening new possibilities, and concludes with a defence of the need for new leaders who restore rather than replace people's fundamental freedom.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's ironic label for the left-wing acceptance that liberal democratic capitalism is the best realistically possible order, naming it after Francis Fukuyama.
Habermas's term for the 1989 Eastern European revolutions as merely 'rectifying' revolutions aiming to reach what the West already had, rather than opening a new future.
Implicitly present in the surplus enjoyment framework; not named explicitly but operative in Žižek's account of the excess enjoyment driving populism.
The obscene enjoyment of populist discourse that exceeds even the surplus enjoyment structuring capitalism, the redoubled excess palpable in racist and sexist excess.
Žižek's extension of Freud's 'discontent in culture' to describe the structural unease within liberal capitalism itself revealed by contemporary protest movements.
Used here to describe the obscene racist and sexist enjoyment circulating in populist discourse as an excess over ordinary surplus value, a surplus over the surplus.
The paradoxical founding act of civilization: a community constitutes itself as non-cannibal only through one last act of cannibalism that must be rendered invisible, the sacred violence at the origin of every legal order.
as “sacred violence”
The necessary but invisible moment of illegal founding violence that transitions a community from barbarism to the rule of law, repeated in state power's obscene underside.
The distinction between futur (future as continuation of present tendencies toward a fixed endpoint) and avenir (what is to come as radical discontinuity), borrowed from French and used to frame catastrophism.
Dupuy's term adopted by Žižek for the virtual attractor, ecological breakdown, nuclear war, global chaos, toward which reality drifts if left to itself, functioning as the ultimate horizon of the futur.
as “retroactive causality”
The logic whereby an event, once actualized, retroactively creates its own necessity; used to argue that preventing catastrophe requires first accepting it as fate and then inserting new counterfactual possibilities into the past.
as “superposition of states”
Borrowed from quantum mechanics by Dupuy and used by Žižek to describe today's political situation as a coexistence of mutually exclusive possible futures (catastrophe and survival) not yet collapsed into one.
Žižek's claim that the 'people' invoked by populism does not exist as a real political subject but is a fantasy construct evoked by new masters to legitimize themselves as servants of the people.
Žižek traces how modern leaders, unable to claim transcendent authority, must present themselves as servants, from Frederick the Great through technocrats to obscene clown-masters.
as “obscene master / clown-master”
A new figure of authority (exemplified by Trump) who openly transgresses law and acts as if in opposition even while in power, identifying directly with the obscene underside of state power.
Malabou's term for the de facto anarchism of contemporary capitalism, Uberization, platform economy, dissolution of the welfare state, which Žižek identifies as the other side of rising authoritarianism.
Peter Sloterdijk's concept adopted by Žižek: a social democracy so embedded in state apparatus that its public services (healthcare, education) are beyond political contestation, regardless of who wins elections.
as “freedom as user's illusion”
Cognitive scientists' claim that free will is an illusion because everything is neurobiologically predetermined; Žižek uses this to argue we must act as if we have free will regardless.
Stories he reaches for 4
Uber and similar platform companies are presented as the paradigmatic case of de facto anarchism: they claim to merely mediate between workers and customers without being employers, instantiating the generalized 'Uberization of life' that dissolves welfare-state structures.
“A generalized Uberization of life... these new companies which are not even capitalists in the old sense. They just claim we mediate.”
A cognitive scientist who believes free will is an illusion sees a girl drowning in a pool, the logical inference would be 'I have no free will, so why act?' The example shows that even those who theoretically deny free will must act as if they have it.
“Even if cognitively you know... you don't have free will, you should act as if you have a free will.”
Arendt argues that even parents who are genuinely confused about the world must heroically assume authority for their children rather than confessing their confusion, the ground of authority is assumed, not derived.
“Although we are not justified to claim authority, we have heroically to assume we have authority.”
Assange, held indefinitely in a state of living death with no conviction, mirrors Sophocles' Antigone, punished for making public the obscene dark side of US power, acting as a 'spy for the people'.
“Julian Assange, I think, is something like our Antigone from Sophocles' play. He is for a long time kept in the position of a living dead.”
Works invoked 3
Antigone play
Sophocles' play provides the figure of Antigone, kept in living death for exposing the law's underside, applied to Julian Assange's situation.
The Trial book
Kafka's novel is cited (via Miller's reading) as articulating the cynical position that law is arbitrary but necessary, correctly diagnosing postmodern relativism though not as a sufficient political response.
The Iliad other
Homer's Iliad is invoked via its opening line (the rage/wrath of Achilles) as the origin of Western civilization and as a frame for contemporary 'rage' in protests; Žižek treats it as a profound diagnosis of recurring political fury.
People invoked 20
Franz Kafka positive
Miller's cynical position is identified as essentially a Kafka position (The Trial: the law is arbitrary but necessary); Žižek seems to regard this as a correct diagnosis of the situation but an insufficient response.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Called 'our best theorist of catastrophes'; Žižek extensively deploys Dupuy's concepts of the dystopian fixed point, retroactive causality, superposition of states, and the paradoxical formula for confronting catastrophe.
Mentioned alongside Chomsky as a representative of the anarchist revival; not further elaborated.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Invoked as the namesake of 'Fukuyamaism', the position that liberal democratic capitalism is the best realistically possible order, which Žižek diagnoses even in much of the left.
Donald Trump negative
Exemplar of the 'obscene clown-master' who openly transgresses law (calling for the termination of the Constitution) while claiming to rebel against a 'deep state'; a direct identification with the obscene underside of state power.
Étienne Balibar positive
Cited for going 'to the cracks of the problem' in his reply to Malabou, arguing that anarchist self-organization cannot scale to provide universal public services.
Frederick II of Prussia positive
Cited as the paradigm of the modern leader who, unable to claim transcendent authority, declares himself 'servant of state', the origin of the master-as-servant logic.
Julian Assange positive
Cast as a contemporary Antigone, kept in living death for publishing US crimes, acting as 'a spy of and for the people'; Žižek clearly sympathizes with him.
Catherine Malabou positive
Described as 'a very good Hegelian philosopher' and neo-anarchist; Žižek uses her work on anarchism and anarcho-capitalism to diagnose the double bind of contemporary politics, though he ultimately goes beyond her conclusions.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as 'a conservative philosopher but very intelligent'; Žižek endorses his concept of 'objective social democracy' as the proper model for embedding public services beyond electoral contestation.
Jacques Rancière positive
Referenced via Malabou for his assertion of radical equality between citizens who can both command and obey, identified as the basic premise of anarchism and democracy.
John Ford positive
Called 'the biggest western movie director'; his line 'when the legend becomes fact, print the legend' is used to illustrate how founding myths make originary violence invisible.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Lacan's nephew and follower; cited for his cynical view that law is arbitrary but necessary and one should maintain a knowing distance from it, a position Žižek rejects as fitting postmodern relativism.
John N. Gray positive
Described as 'my severe critic' who 'really hates' Žižek, yet Žižek quotes his observation that we 'are forced to live as if we were free' as a correct diagnosis of contemporary unfreedom.
Hannah Arendt positive
Referenced for her text on education and authority: the idea that authority must be heroically assumed even without metaphysical justification, supporting Žižek's conclusion about new leadership.
Barack Obama positive
The 'Yes We Can' slogan of his first campaign is cited as an authentic moment of a leader restoring people's sense of fundamental freedom, even though Obama 'later disappointed us'.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized as the 'ultimate left Fukuyamaist' for welcoming the 1989 revolutions as mere catch-up revolutions and silently accepting liberal democratic capitalism as the best possible order.
Vladimir Putin negative
Compared and contrasted with Trump as moving toward the Russian/Stalinist variant: legalizing crimes (e.g., in occupied Ukraine) rather than merely committing them openly, institutionalizing the eating of the last cannibal.
Mentioned as one of the figures associated with the contemporary anarchist revival, alongside David Graeber.
Sigmund Freud positive
The concept of 'Unbehagen in der Kultur' (discontent in culture) is invoked as the framework extended by Žižek to diagnose 'discontent in liberal capitalism'.
What it argues
discontent in liberal capitalism as successor to Freud's cultural uneasethe obscene foundation of law — 'eating the last cannibal'futur vs. avenir: linear vs. discontinuous futures and catastrophismpopulism as fantasized 'people' masking new mastersanarchism and anarcho-capitalism as two sides of the same cointhe paradox of authority: leaders who give back freedomretroactive causality and changing the past to change the future
Dialectical moves 8
“The populist right's transgression of law is not courageous truth-telling but a direct identification with the obscene other side of state power itself.”
What looks like bold rebellion against the system is actually the system's own repressed violence made visible, transgression is not outside power but its underside.
“The way to combat the future catastrophe is not to deny it but to accept it as necessary fate — only then can we act to change it.”
The paradox of catastrophism: accepting inevitability is the precondition for effective intervention; denial forecloses action while acceptance enables it.
“In order to change our future we should first change our past — not magically but by reinterpreting it to open different possibilities.”
Retroactive causality: the past is not fixed but is retroactively constituted by present acts, so changing our reading of the past changes which futures become possible.
“If an outstanding event takes place, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable.”
Dupuy's formula: necessity is retroactive, only actualization creates necessity; before the event, it remains contingent; after, it appears necessary.
“The people to which populism refers doesn't exist — populism is by definition a mask of power.”
The reversal of populism's self-presentation: what claims to speak for the people against elites is itself an elite mechanism for constructing a fantasized 'people' as legitimation.
“Authoritarianism does not contradict the disappearance of the state — it is the mask of the so-called collaborative economy.”
Platform capitalism and authoritarian politics are not opposites but complements: the dissolution of public state functions produces the authoritarian demand to fill the resulting void.
“We have to heroically assume authority even though we are not justified to claim it.”
In situations of crisis, the ethical move is to act as if one has authority without the metaphysical justification for it, an assumption of responsibility without ground.
“We are forced to live as if we were free.”
The contemporary condition: choice is obligatory but not genuine, the form of freedom without its substance, which is itself a form of unfreedom.
Claims 13
asserts
The current wave of global protests (gilets jaunes, Podemos, etc.) is not a catch-up movement but reveals a structural discontent with liberal capitalism itself.nature of contemporary protest movements
rejects
Habermas was the ultimate 'left Fukuyamaist' by welcoming the 1989 revolutions as merely rectifying, thereby accepting liberal democratic capitalism as the best possible order.Habermas's interpretation of 1989 Eastern European revolutions
asserts
Every legal order rests on a founding act of sacred violence (eating the last cannibal) that must be rendered invisible to function as legitimate.the violent foundation of law and civilization
asserts
Trump and Putin differ in that Trump openly transgresses law while remaining within its framework, whereas Russia is moving toward legally institutionalizing the violation of its own laws.difference between Trump-style authoritarianism and Russian neo-Stalinism
asserts
Julian Assange occupies the position of Antigone — kept in a state of living death for making public the obscene underside of US power.Julian Assange and state power
asserts
To confront catastrophe properly we must first accept it as inevitable fate and then retroactively insert new possibilities into the past to change our future.Dupuy's catastrophist temporal logic
asserts
The 'people' to which populism refers does not exist; it is a fantasized entity constructed by new masters to legitimize their power.populism's reference to 'the people'
asserts
Anarcho-capitalism (platform economy, Uberization) and the new authoritarianism are not opposites but two sides of the same coin — the disappearance of public services.relationship between anarchism and authoritarianism in contemporary capitalism
asserts
For average American workers the problem is not too much state but too little state — specifically the absence of public services.the role of the state for working people
asserts
We cannot simply get rid of the figure of the master; we need new leaders whose message is not that they know better but that we have a fundamental freedom to change our circumstances.the necessity and proper form of leadership
rejects
Cynical acceptance of law as arbitrary but necessary (Miller/Kafka) fits perfectly with today's postmodern relativism and is therefore inadequate as a political position.cynicism as political stance (Jacques-Alain Miller)
rejects
Local anarchist self-organization (Rojava, Zapatistas) cannot be universalized into a global power capable of providing public services at scale.anarchism as a universalizable political solution
asserts
Even if free will is a cognitive illusion, we must act as if we have free will — the alternative is moral abdication in the face of obvious obligations.free will and moral responsibility
Quotes 12
“We are not cannibals. We ate. Last week we ate the last cannibal.”Slavoj Žižek · the violent founding act of civilization
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”Slavoj Žižek · how founding myths render violent origins invisible
“The populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 the fall of communism was not just a catch-up revolution — that it aimed at more than liberal capitalist normality.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary protest as exceeding the catch-up thesis
“The people to which populism refers, I think, doesn't exist. Populism is by definition a mask of power. It is a fantasized entity evoked by the new masters to justify their role as servants of the people.”Slavoj Žižek · the people as ideological fantasy
“We have to accept that at the level of possibilities the future is doomed, the catastrophe will take place, it is our destiny — and then mobilize ourselves to perform acts which will change destiny itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Dupuy's catastrophist formula for political action
“In order to change our future, we should first change our past.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive causality as political strategy
“We have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional... we are forced to live as if we were free.”Slavoj Žižek · the false freedom of contemporary choice society
“Authoritarianism does not contradict the disappearance of the state. It is the mask of this so-called collaborative economy which pulverizes all fixity.”Slavoj Žižek · platform capitalism and authoritarianism as complements
“We need not leaders who know better than us. We need leaders who give us back our freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · the proper function of emancipatory leadership
“Even if cognitively you know you don't have free will, you should act as if you have a free will. That's the paradox.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessity of acting under cognitive determinism
“For average American workers, the problem is not too much state. The problem is not enough state.”Slavoj Žižek · the left's argument for public services against libertarianism
“He was, as he characterized himself, a spy of and for the people.”Slavoj Žižek · Assange as whistleblower against state secrecy
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
so let me go directly into the heart of the. meta. which is... what went wrong in the last? theade. because even most of the left. 30irty years ago, they were what i ironically call fukuyama is, referring to francis fukuyama. but believing that. order order that we have now. uh. liberal, democratic. capitalism is... not the best. in an abstract sense but realistically the best possible so what is. go come now. so cold. i don't celebrate it. european civilization, we all know, began wait. a boy. homer's iliad. weak, dich. open weak. align line about raid. what? here is the usual translation. raid! goddess. think the rage of peleus son, achilles, murderers doomed that caused the achaeans greeks countless losses. but today, this... rey! brat! fury. it's taken a different forum them. in his interpretation of the fall of east european communism jürgen habermas proved to be the ultimate left fukuyamaist. silently accepting that again, the existing liberal democratic order is the best one possible. and that while we should strive to make it more just. we should not challenge its basic premises. this is that's why habermas welcomed precisely what many leftist saw as the big deficiency of the anti-communist protests in eastern europe. 30 years ago. the fact that these protests were not motivated by any new vision of a post-communist. future. as habermas put it, the central and eastern european revolutions were just rectifying or catch-up, the german term is nachholende revolutions. their aim being to enable those societies to gain. what western europeans already possessed. it may look similar in some protests against russian domination that go on today, even in ukrainian war. isn't ukraine presenting itself as defending european civilization. however, the ongoing wave of rage. of course protests in different parts of the world. of the world. it. they question this very friend. the gilets jaunes, yellow vest in france. podemos protests in spain and other similar protests. are not just catch-up movements. they. embody the weird. reversal. then characterizes today's global situation. the old antagonism between ordinary people. ent. financial capitalist elites is back with a vengeance. with ordinary people. errupting in protest against the elites. who? the elites are accused of being blind. g there. suffering and demand, what is new is that the populist right has proved to be much more adept. in channeling these eruptions in the in each direction then the left. here. then is the paradox. we have to confront. the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 the fall of communism. was not just a k-up revolution. that it aim it more than liberal capitalist normality. freud spoke about unbehagen in der kultur. the discontent or unease in culture. today, 30 years after the fall of the berlin wall. the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness. to a kind of unbehagen une in liberal capitalism itself. and the key question is, who will articulate this discontent? will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit the dissatisfaction with the predominant. week b, predominant social ordered. expresses itself as paradoxically as redoubled surplus enjoyment. not the surplus, not just the surplus enjoyment. or surplus value which sets in motion the capitalist edifice but a surplus over this surplus itself. the surplus excess palpable in the obscenity of the populist discourse. which is full of racist and sexist enjoyment. we are learning the hard way. dead. d. attempt. the attempt of european modernity. do. abolish traditional forms of authority and domination. father of the family, political master and to install. secular democracy. okay. i see. more or less is fly. the dimension of the mach. is returning with a vengeance in all its forms, patriarchal values, political authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and so on. so what is going on? recall the well-known answer. it's an old joke, but i think it's very profound. the well-known answer of the members of an aboriginal tribe. two. a white explorer who visits them for the first time and asks them, are there still cannibals among you? are you a cannibal? tr. the answer he gets is, no, we are not cannibals. we ate. last week we ate the last cannibal. what's the lesson of this? joke. if a he like. non-cannibal community. is constituted. by its members eating the last cannibal. deck community cou. never be constituted if that last act of cannibalism is labeled as such as a criminal so between so-called barbarism and the rule of law, civilization, we need a moment which should become invisible. a moment of, let's call it sacred violence when people. or their leaders eat the last cannibal. you know where you can see this same paradox at work very clearly? in united states. in the passage from barbarism to modern legal order in the so-called wild west, as you know it from western films. this passage was accomplished through brutal crimes. through eating the last cannibals and legends were invented too. obfuscate these crimes. this is what john ford, the biggest western movie director, yeah. indicated in his famous line. when the legend becomes fact. print. the legend. legend becomes fake. not in the simple sense of factual truth, but in the sense that it becomes an immanent constituent of the actually existing order. so that rejecting it amounts to the disintegration of this order. today! something strength and new is. happening with the rise of contemporary practices like what our governments called enhanced interrogation techniques, which means torture, of course. modern illegal state violence or more generally illegal or extra- legal practices supported and enabled. by the legally existing apparatuses of power. could be seen as act repeating the illegal mythic pre-historical constitution of state power. the eating of the last cannibal. is repeated again and again. and julian assange, i think, is something like our antigone from sophocles' play. he is for a long time kept in the position of a living dead, isolated in a solitary cell. with very limited contact with his family and lawyers. with no conviction or even official accusation, just waiting for the extrad. because he! make fablique! the obscene dark side of the united states. pol. he didn't trust in forum. d secret services of the opposite. side he was, as he characterized himself, a spy of and for the people. that's right. a species of leaders is emerging now who take pride in committing this crime. the crime of eating the last cannibal. openly rather than secretly. as if it amounted to some kind of fundamental moral difference or difference of character. namely, you know, all brutal dictators or even not full dictators like donald trump. they claim i have the courage, the guts to do it openly. to violate parts of the law. but what may appear to be their courageous transgression of state laws by avoiding the hypocrisy. that those laws sometimes demand. is nothing more than a direct identification with the obscene other side of state power itself. they, the new leaders, are openly transgressing their own laws. this is why, even when they are in power, these leaders continue to act as if they are in opposition. rebelling against the real power. you know, trump always claimed. the deep state is against. an example. uh are you aware? what does it mean namely what trump now, recently on earth. on the 3rd of december. what he said. he called for the termination of the american constitution. overturn the 2020 election result and reinstate him to power. here is a literal quote from donald trump. do you throw the presidential election results off? 2020 out and declare the rightful winner or do you have a new election? a massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the constitution. so trump is... consciously undermining the very fundamentals of the existing legal order, including the constitution. he openly, yes, we have to. eat the last cannibal. yeah. again. of course. putin is doing many kilar. think. however in russia and some other states. something quite different and maybe even darker is happening simultaneously. they are... bringing back one of the features of stalinism. stalinism also was. continuing to eat the last cannibal. but under stalinism, they mostly did not do it discreetly. they did it openly. their legal system. which regulate that. constant, political. but this. literally, millions disappeared. der legal system. regulated how? we should permanently eating the last cannibal, those who are the threat to our system. enter. what happens now? it is a game. that russia is elevating, eating the last cannibal into a law. something weird. very weird. happened. now, 10 days ago, even less, on wednesday. december 5th. 15. the r duma parl. adopted the first reading of a law saying that any criminal offenses. committed in the occupied regions of ukraine. i quote. will not be considered a crime punishable by law if they. can be considered to have been in the interest. of the russian federation. okay. it's not clear how. would be decided. whether a crime had served r. interest you know that the russian armed forces dided. quite a lot of crimes there. torture, rape. murder, looting, vandalism. but again, are we aware what is going here? death. the state is... it. the state is directly legalizing d. violation of its own laws if they serve of legalization of crimes. if they serve patriotic interests. so what is going on here? okay. h i would like to begin with a linguistic distinction. it will be probably... difficult to translate it into even into english. i don't know about korean, your language if you have different words for it but in french and some other languages we have two words for the future. future, like future and avenir. venir, to come. get! stands for the future as the continuation of the present. is the full actualization of tendencies which are already present. while avenir. à venir, to come, a venir, point towards... more radical break. a discontinuity with the present avenir is what is to come. not just what will b for example, in the contemporary apocalyptic situation. the ultimate horizon of the futur. future is what. our best theorist of catastrophes, i think, jean-pierre dupuy. d-u-p-u-y. uh. he called this ultimate horizon the dystopian fixed point. the zero point of ecological breakdown or nuclear war. or global economic or social chaos even if it never! arise, arise! this zero point is... something like a virtual attractor towards which our reality left to itself thank. the way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts. we. interrupt this drifting towards the dystopian fix. bo. dupuis phys is here. that. please listen now, care. very profound theoretical one. that if we are to confront properly. the threat of... catastrophes. environmental nuclear war and so on. we need to break out of the usual notion of literal of sorry of linear time. web. the future is mostly determined by the past. yes. sometimes this force excuses to make. duuis k. well, the new time. not the time of a project. of a closed circuit between the past in the future. the future is causally produced by our acts in the past. that's true. while the way we act is determined by our anticipation on the future and our reactions to this anticipation. you see the very simple point. it's not just dead. what we do is produced by the past. at the same time, we have certain expectations of the future. end. reacting to these expectations, we... the way we do. this then is how dupuy proposes to confront the catastrophe. we should... f perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable. so we should. uh only then afterwards. project ourselves into this catastrophe, adopting its standpoint, and then we should retroactively insert into our task counterfactual perspective in the sense of, oh my god, if we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have happened. thein results touy's paradoxical formula. we have to accept that at the level of possibilities. the future is doomed. the catastrophe will take place. it is our destiny. and then on the background of. accepting this fact. we should mobilize ourselves to perform acts. which will change destiny itself. which will insert new possibilities into the bust. so this... does not mean that we cannot change the future. it just means that in order to change our future, we should first! change our past. nope. in a naive magical way of changing what happened but we should reinterpret the past in. such a way that opens up towards a different future. future different from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past. now... here the example would have been uhwhat? what... you, jošt, mentioned that early act of revolution in 1949 or when, jošt, you shoot tear it out of its predominant reading. it was just a small communist rebellion directed by north korea, whatever. and you should read it as something that is not yet. dead. that still has a message. to deliver to us pointing towards a different. future. today. we should ask ourselves, will there be a new world war? the answer can only be a paradoxical one. if there will be a new war, it will be a necessary one. this is how history works. again, a quote from dupuy. if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place. nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is no inevitable. it is done. that's the formula. if you are a phil of first. it is thus the event actualization. defect. that it takes place. which retroactively creates its necessity. end of quote. with regard to the new global war. once the conflict will if. it will, let's hope lock. will explode between united states and iran, between china and taiwan, between russia and. nato. around ukraine. it will appear necessary. that is to say, we will automatically read the past. that led to it as a series of causes that necessarily brought out the explosion. if it will not happen, we will read it the way we today read the cold war. it's a series of dangerous moments where the catastrophe was avoided because both sides were aware of the deadly consequences of a global conf conflict. so again, i repeat my point. it's not enough to say we are in a certain situation. and the possibilities are open. we can choose war, we can choose. peace or a third possibility, no, what we are confronting. are not just different possibilities, but literally, different futures. duui... uses here she borrows from quantum mechanics the term superposition, superposition of states. today we live in a superposition political of different states. if you look at our history. not just. ukrainian war, but our entire situation, all signs point towards a mega catastropherophe. ecology is our gradual suicide. there will be hunger because of global warming. tens, hundreds of million people will have to move around. there is that is... a clear prospect of nuclear catastrophe. so this is the fixed point towards which we are moving. it's more than just a possibility. if you look neutrally at our situation, this is our future. in this sense necessary. back we knowing this. weekend. act. we can act. against it. so what to do in this. confused. situation. the first obvious answer is. death. why to have authorities which rule instead of us at all? wait! shouldn't people themselves rainim. but- what do you mean by this? what do we mean by this? in today's populism? the dark obscene side of the reference to the people also made itself palppable. the people to which populism refers, i think, doesn't exist. populism is by definition a mask of power. it is a fantasized entity. evoked by the new masters to justify their role as the servants of the people, enabling them to dismiss their opponents as the enemies of the people. did you notice that all? from the early modernity. on. all... leaders cl. from modernity on, you cannot any longer rely unproblematically on some transcendent source of authority. i'm a king because got invested. in me my authority or because some higher destiny, my sacred origins legitimize it. so the logical solution is the leaders themselves, masters, proclaim themselves servants. like. friedrich the great, the famous german prussian king, proclaimed himself the servant of state. and there are, of course, different modalities of this position of serving the servants from technocracy experts who say we just serve. society, we don't have any interest. to religious fundamentalism two. the new figure obscene. masters clowns. like donald trump. obscene master is not a direct reaction to the failure of the traditional master this figure is a reaction to the fact. debt. but. knowledge pure technocracy. cannot properly. function. it has to be supplemented by the new figure. over. macht. no how should we react? to be. situation. the first, now i will try to be as short as possible. the first version is it's the most tragic version for me it's cynicism. it's dead. we reluctantly accept. the need. to return to some form of social authority. but we. say. just! as if you except. pretend that you accept it. play the game. don't accept it. curiously. for example. lacan's nephew and follower, jacques-alain miller, preaches. this this view. he says literally quoting, i don't think he's aware. franz kafka from his novel the trial. the law is not true, it's arbitrary. but it is necessary. so you know it's not true. but you have to accept it as necessary. you. stop get! not! again you should acquire a distance towards it. this cynical view, i think fit perfectly. today's society where. in our post-modern relativism, nobody really, i think that even religious fundamentalists, they don't really believe in their eternal values, blah blah. they just... clinically act as if they the next so ich. let's drop the figure of the mach. itself and yeah. opt for anarchism. i take this seriously. anarchism is having a revival today, from noam chomsky to david graeber. anarchism is not against public power. catherine malabou a very good hegelian philosopher and another neo-anarchist. refers to jacques rancière, who asserts radical equality between citizens who are considered able to both command and obey. this is the basic premise of anarchism. but it's also in some sense the basic premise of democracy. there are no people who are a priori legitimized by their expertise, authority whatsoever to . ru. every common person, okay, with some exceptions, if you are mentally ill, blah blah. every human person is able of participating also in government. but in his reply to catherine malabou. etienne... balibar goes to the cracks. of the problem. a quote. the anarchists will say that we are able to imagine and realize in practice now an alternate social fabric because the whole society could one way or another emerge from forms of self-government and self-organization that can be experienced at experimented with at the level of cooperatives. end. i finished the quote just on. those who claim this usually refer to like kurdish fighters in rojava. zapatistas in chiapas and so on. problematic point is can this the local anarchist. community can they be? universalized into eight global. power. uh malabou herself points out two problems. first, anarchism is becoming today a key feature of global capitalism itself. a quote from malabou again. our current epoch is characterized by a coexistence between a de facto anarchism and a dawning or awakening anarchism. de facto anarchism is the reign of anarcho-capitalism, which is contemporaneous with the end of the welfare state, creating in citizens a feeling of abandonment. just think of the state of hospitals and healthcare. today. so current capitalism is undertaking its anarchist turn. a generalized uberization of life. uber he means these new companies which are not even capitalists in the old sense. they just claim we mediate between. but workers offer on the market to car owners and their customers. yeah. but malabou, as a good hegelian, noticed also something else, that this anarcho-capitalism is the other side of a new authoritarianism. the last quote from her. authoritarianism does not contradict. the disappearance of the state. it is messenger. the mask of this so-called collaborative economy, which by bringing professionals and users into direct contact through technological platforms pulverizes all fixity. end quote what this means is that the rising authoritarianism is the other side of the disappearance of the state, more precisely of the most precious function of the state, that of providing public services we thereby touch the vast domain of public services, healthcare, education, which cannot be provided through expanding cooperatives and other forms of local self organizations. as etienne balibar emphasizes, for average american workers, the problem is not too much state. the problem is not enough state. what we need today more than ever is what. a german friend of mine, conservative philosopher but very intelligent, peter sloterdijk, what he calls objective social democracy. social democracy which is not a political force one among the parties, but it's so. democracy which. ich. already part of the state apparatus embodied in it. for example, in a countries like nordic countries up to appoint germany france. you need global healthcare, free education, and so on. uh they are not a matter of political choice. they're accepted as the basic constituent of social life. so whoever is in power. through free, so-called free elections. he doesn't dare to talk. d back. here. i will, i. i will just add two fig. may be problematic to some of you. so the problem today. ich. that we do live in a society of choice. but the problem is not that these choices are false choices. you know, the fundamental paradox of state authority. you are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice. no, today. like when you use uber or whatever, you are bombardck! buy or demanded to make massiv choig! but without being qualified. to make properly this. choices i will quote here not a friend of mine, but my he really hates it severe critic john gray but he was right when he wrote this we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. new technologies alter our lives daily. the traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. at the same time, we have little idea of what the future will bring. we are forced to live as if we were. free. end. two. conclude. to provoke you. my solution is... we cannot get rid of. simply of the figure of the master. why not? because when you say not master but free individuals, but these free individuals who experience maybe even themselves as free. what is more free today than serve the web you make all the choices you want. their freedom is already regulated without you even. being aware of it and to become aware of how false your freedom is you need a figure of a master, a leader. let's be careful here. not the traditional leader. wh. pretends to know better than you what is good for you. no we need new leaders whose simple message is you. again, you are not caught. into your determined circumstances, you have a fundamental choice. you can do it. obama used this yes we can. later he disappointed us, we know. but this was an authentic moment in his first electoral campaign. barack obama, when he smashed. that. yes. weekend that's. the leader and take also why my final philosophical boy we cannot simply renounce. in certain situations. acting like masters assuming authority when the situation condemns us to do it. i will not quote it again. i refer here to hannah arendt's beautiful short text on education where she says, let's say you are now. head of an impoverished family, your small children are totally confused. they don't know what is going on what should they do should we and they asked there. parents, father, mother, please give us some orientation. d. literally truthful and honest thing. would have been for father or mother or another authority. yeah, that's true. i forgot where it is taken. thanks. to say, listen, we are confused as you. today's situation is chaotic. we don't know. you just have to find your way. no. you, although we are not justified. to claim authority. we have heroically to a hum. we had to heroically ec eh if. we have. authority. you know, it's the same thing as to conclude with a philosophical point. it's the same thing as, let's say i am. cognitive scientists and i'm not, but i follow the debates there and many of them claim our human freedom is a user's illusion. everything is already decided in advance at the level of neurobiology processes and so on. so... let's say, sorry for this stupid example, let's say i see. in a pool near my house, a small girl slowly drowning. he cannot swim. and then the logical formulation would have been for me a consequence to say, i don't have freedom of my will, so why should i worry? whatever i will do is predetermined. i shouldn't be. held responsible. no, you are, even if cognitively you know, but i don't believe this theory that you don't have free will. you should act as if you have have a free will that's the paradox today we need not leaders who know. better than us. we need experts, but not as leaders. we need leaders who give us back our freedom. not the vulgar everyday freedom of will i go to this movie theater or to another, but this basic freedom of changing the coordinates of our life. if we don't regain this freedom, then we are lost.
so let me go directly into the heart of the. meta. which is... what went wrong in the last? theade. because even most of the left. 30irty years ago, they were what i ironically call fukuyama is, referring to francis fukuyama. but believing that. order order that we have now. uh. liberal, democratic. capitalism is... not the best. in an abstract sense but realistically the best possible so what is. go come now. so cold. i don't celebrate it. european civilization, we all know, began wait. a boy. homer's iliad. weak, dich. open weak. align line about raid. what? here is the usual translation. raid! goddess. think the rage of peleus son, achilles, murderers doomed that caused the achaeans greeks countless losses. but today, this... rey! brat! fury. it's taken a different forum them. in his interpretation of the fall of east european communism jürgen habermas proved to be the ultimate left fukuyamaist. silently accepting that again, the existing liberal democratic order is the best one possible. and that while we should strive to make it more just. we should not challenge its basic premises. this is that's why habermas welcomed precisely what many leftist saw as the big deficiency of the anti-communist protests in eastern europe. 30 years ago. the fact that these protests were not motivated by any new vision of a post-communist. future. as habermas put it, the central and eastern european revolutions were just rectifying or catch-up, the german term is nachholende revolutions. their aim being to enable those societies to gain. what western europeans already possessed. it may look similar in some protests against russian domination that go on today, even in ukrainian war. isn't ukraine presenting itself as defending european civilization. however, the ongoing wave of rage. of course protests in different parts of the world. of the world. it. they question this very friend. the gilets jaunes, yellow vest in france. podemos protests in spain and other similar protests. are not just catch-up movements. they. embody the weird. reversal. then characterizes today's global situation. the old antagonism between ordinary people. ent. financial capitalist elites is back with a vengeance. with ordinary people. errupting in protest against the elites. who? the elites are accused of being blind. g there. suffering and demand, what is new is that the populist right has proved to be much more adept. in channeling these eruptions in the in each direction then the left. here. then is the paradox. we have to confront. the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 the fall of communism. was not just a k-up revolution. that it aim it more than liberal capitalist normality. freud spoke about unbehagen in der kultur. the discontent or unease in culture. today, 30 years after the fall of the berlin wall. the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness. to a kind of unbehagen une in liberal capitalism itself. and the key question is, who will articulate this discontent? will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit the dissatisfaction with the predominant. week b, predominant social ordered. expresses itself as paradoxically as redoubled surplus enjoyment. not the surplus, not just the surplus enjoyment. or surplus value which sets in motion the capitalist edifice but a surplus over this surplus itself. the surplus excess palpable in the obscenity of the populist discourse. which is full of racist and sexist enjoyment. we are learning the hard way. dead. d. attempt. the attempt of european modernity. do. abolish traditional forms of authority and domination. father of the family, political master and to install. secular democracy. okay. i see. more or less is fly. the dimension of the mach. is returning with a vengeance in all its forms, patriarchal values, political authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and so on. so what is going on? recall the well-known answer. it's an old joke, but i think it's very profound. the well-known answer of the members of an aboriginal tribe. two. a white explorer who visits them for the first time and asks them, are there still cannibals among you? are you a cannibal? tr. the answer he gets is, no, we are not cannibals. we ate. last week we ate the last cannibal. what's the lesson of this? joke. if a he like. non-cannibal community. is constituted. by its members eating the last cannibal. deck community cou. never be constituted if that last act of cannibalism is labeled as such as a criminal so between so-called barbarism and the rule of law, civilization, we need a moment which should become invisible. a moment of, let's call it sacred violence when people. or their leaders eat the last cannibal. you know where you can see this same paradox at work very clearly? in united states. in the passage from barbarism to modern legal order in the so-called wild west, as you know it from western films. this passage was accomplished through brutal crimes. through eating the last cannibals and legends were invented too. obfuscate these crimes. this is what john ford, the biggest western movie director, yeah. indicated in his famous line. when the legend becomes fact. print. the legend. legend becomes fake. not in the simple sense of factual truth, but in the sense that it becomes an immanent constituent of the actually existing order. so that rejecting it amounts to the disintegration of this order. today! something strength and new is. happening with the rise of contemporary practices like what our governments called enhanced interrogation techniques, which means torture, of course. modern illegal state violence or more generally illegal or extra- legal practices supported and enabled. by the legally existing apparatuses of power. could be seen as act repeating the illegal mythic pre-historical constitution of state power. the eating of the last cannibal. is repeated again and again. and julian assange, i think, is something like our antigone from sophocles' play. he is for a long time kept in the position of a living dead, isolated in a solitary cell. with very limited contact with his family and lawyers. with no conviction or even official accusation, just waiting for the extrad. because he! make fablique! the obscene dark side of the united states. pol. he didn't trust in forum. d secret services of the opposite. side he was, as he characterized himself, a spy of and for the people. that's right. a species of leaders is emerging now who take pride in committing this crime. the crime of eating the last cannibal. openly rather than secretly. as if it amounted to some kind of fundamental moral difference or difference of character. namely, you know, all brutal dictators or even not full dictators like donald trump. they claim i have the courage, the guts to do it openly. to violate parts of the law. but what may appear to be their courageous transgression of state laws by avoiding the hypocrisy. that those laws sometimes demand. is nothing more than a direct identification with the obscene other side of state power itself. they, the new leaders, are openly transgressing their own laws. this is why, even when they are in power, these leaders continue to act as if they are in opposition. rebelling against the real power. you know, trump always claimed. the deep state is against. an example. uh are you aware? what does it mean namely what trump now, recently on earth. on the 3rd of december. what he said. he called for the termination of the american constitution. overturn the 2020 election result and reinstate him to power. here is a literal quote from donald trump. do you throw the presidential election results off? 2020 out and declare the rightful winner or do you have a new election? a massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the constitution. so trump is... consciously undermining the very fundamentals of the existing legal order, including the constitution. he openly, yes, we have to. eat the last cannibal. yeah. again. of course. putin is doing many kilar. think. however in russia and some other states. something quite different and maybe even darker is happening simultaneously. they are... bringing back one of the features of stalinism. stalinism also was. continuing to eat the last cannibal. but under stalinism, they mostly did not do it discreetly. they did it openly. their legal system. which regulate that. constant, political. but this. literally, millions disappeared. der legal system. regulated how? we should permanently eating the last cannibal, those who are the threat to our system. enter. what happens now? it is a game. that russia is elevating, eating the last cannibal into a law. something weird. very weird. happened. now, 10 days ago, even less, on wednesday. december 5th. 15. the r duma parl. adopted the first reading of a law saying that any criminal offenses. committed in the occupied regions of ukraine. i quote. will not be considered a crime punishable by law if they. can be considered to have been in the interest. of the russian federation. okay. it's not clear how. would be decided. whether a crime had served r. interest you know that the russian armed forces dided. quite a lot of crimes there. torture, rape. murder, looting, vandalism. but again, are we aware what is going here? death. the state is... it. the state is directly legalizing d. violation of its own laws if they serve of legalization of crimes. if they serve patriotic interests. so what is going on here? okay. h i would like to begin with a linguistic distinction. it will be probably... difficult to translate it into even into english. i don't know about korean, your language if you have different words for it but in french and some other languages we have two words for the future. future, like future and avenir. venir, to come. get! stands for the future as the continuation of the present. is the full actualization of tendencies which are already present. while avenir. à venir, to come, a venir, point towards... more radical break. a discontinuity with the present avenir is what is to come. not just what will b for example, in the contemporary apocalyptic situation. the ultimate horizon of the futur. future is what. our best theorist of catastrophes, i think, jean-pierre dupuy. d-u-p-u-y. uh. he called this ultimate horizon the dystopian fixed point. the zero point of ecological breakdown or nuclear war. or global economic or social chaos even if it never! arise, arise! this zero point is... something like a virtual attractor towards which our reality left to itself thank. the way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts. we. interrupt this drifting towards the dystopian fix. bo. dupuis phys is here. that. please listen now, care. very profound theoretical one. that if we are to confront properly. the threat of... catastrophes. environmental nuclear war and so on. we need to break out of the usual notion of literal of sorry of linear time. web. the future is mostly determined by the past. yes. sometimes this force excuses to make. duuis k. well, the new time. not the time of a project. of a closed circuit between the past in the future. the future is causally produced by our acts in the past. that's true. while the way we act is determined by our anticipation on the future and our reactions to this anticipation. you see the very simple point. it's not just dead. what we do is produced by the past. at the same time, we have certain expectations of the future. end. reacting to these expectations, we... the way we do. this then is how dupuy proposes to confront the catastrophe. we should... f perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable. so we should. uh only then afterwards. project ourselves into this catastrophe, adopting its standpoint, and then we should retroactively insert into our task counterfactual perspective in the sense of, oh my god, if we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have happened. thein results touy's paradoxical formula. we have to accept that at the level of possibilities. the future is doomed. the catastrophe will take place. it is our destiny. and then on the background of. accepting this fact. we should mobilize ourselves to perform acts. which will change destiny itself. which will insert new possibilities into the bust. so this... does not mean that we cannot change the future. it just means that in order to change our future, we should first! change our past. nope. in a naive magical way of changing what happened but we should reinterpret the past in. such a way that opens up towards a different future. future different from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past. now... here the example would have been uhwhat? what... you, jošt, mentioned that early act of revolution in 1949 or when, jošt, you shoot tear it out of its predominant reading. it was just a small communist rebellion directed by north korea, whatever. and you should read it as something that is not yet. dead. that still has a message. to deliver to us pointing towards a different. future. today. we should ask ourselves, will there be a new world war? the answer can only be a paradoxical one. if there will be a new war, it will be a necessary one. this is how history works. again, a quote from dupuy. if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place. nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is no inevitable. it is done. that's the formula. if you are a phil of first. it is thus the event actualization. defect. that it takes place. which retroactively creates its necessity. end of quote. with regard to the new global war. once the conflict will if. it will, let's hope lock. will explode between united states and iran, between china and taiwan, between russia and. nato. around ukraine. it will appear necessary. that is to say, we will automatically read the past. that led to it as a series of causes that necessarily brought out the explosion. if it will not happen, we will read it the way we today read the cold war. it's a series of dangerous moments where the catastrophe was avoided because both sides were aware of the deadly consequences of a global conf conflict. so again, i repeat my point. it's not enough to say we are in a certain situation. and the possibilities are open. we can choose war, we can choose. peace or a third possibility, no, what we are confronting. are not just different possibilities, but literally, different futures. duui... uses here she borrows from quantum mechanics the term superposition, superposition of states. today we live in a superposition political of different states. if you look at our history. not just. ukrainian war, but our entire situation, all signs point towards a mega catastropherophe. ecology is our gradual suicide. there will be hunger because of global warming. tens, hundreds of million people will have to move around. there is that is... a clear prospect of nuclear catastrophe. so this is the fixed point towards which we are moving. it's more than just a possibility. if you look neutrally at our situation, this is our future. in this sense necessary. back we knowing this. weekend. act. we can act. against it. so what to do in this. confused. situation. the first obvious answer is. death. why to have authorities which rule instead of us at all? wait! shouldn't people themselves rainim. but- what do you mean by this? what do we mean by this? in today's populism? the dark obscene side of the reference to the people also made itself palppable. the people to which populism refers, i think, doesn't exist. populism is by definition a mask of power. it is a fantasized entity. evoked by the new masters to justify their role as the servants of the people, enabling them to dismiss their opponents as the enemies of the people. did you notice that all? from the early modernity. on. all... leaders cl. from modernity on, you cannot any longer rely unproblematically on some transcendent source of authority. i'm a king because got invested. in me my authority or because some higher destiny, my sacred origins legitimize it. so the logical solution is the leaders themselves, masters, proclaim themselves servants. like. friedrich the great, the famous german prussian king, proclaimed himself the servant of state. and there are, of course, different modalities of this position of serving the servants from technocracy experts who say we just serve. society, we don't have any interest. to religious fundamentalism two. the new figure obscene. masters clowns. like donald trump. obscene master is not a direct reaction to the failure of the traditional master this figure is a reaction to the fact. debt. but. knowledge pure technocracy. cannot properly. function. it has to be supplemented by the new figure. over. macht. no how should we react? to be. situation. the first, now i will try to be as short as possible. the first version is it's the most tragic version for me it's cynicism. it's dead. we reluctantly accept. the need. to return to some form of social authority. but we. say. just! as if you except. pretend that you accept it. play the game. don't accept it. curiously. for example. lacan's nephew and follower, jacques-alain miller, preaches. this this view. he says literally quoting, i don't think he's aware. franz kafka from his novel the trial. the law is not true, it's arbitrary. but it is necessary. so you know it's not true. but you have to accept it as necessary. you. stop get! not! again you should acquire a distance towards it. this cynical view, i think fit perfectly. today's society where. in our post-modern relativism, nobody really, i think that even religious fundamentalists, they don't really believe in their eternal values, blah blah. they just... clinically act as if they the next so ich. let's drop the figure of the mach. itself and yeah. opt for anarchism. i take this seriously. anarchism is having a revival today, from noam chomsky to david graeber. anarchism is not against public power. catherine malabou a very good hegelian philosopher and another neo-anarchist. refers to jacques rancière, who asserts radical equality between citizens who are considered able to both command and obey. this is the basic premise of anarchism. but it's also in some sense the basic premise of democracy. there are no people who are a priori legitimized by their expertise, authority whatsoever to . ru. every common person, okay, with some exceptions, if you are mentally ill, blah blah. every human person is able of participating also in government. but in his reply to catherine malabou. etienne... balibar goes to the cracks. of the problem. a quote. the anarchists will say that we are able to imagine and realize in practice now an alternate social fabric because the whole society could one way or another emerge from forms of self-government and self-organization that can be experienced at experimented with at the level of cooperatives. end. i finished the quote just on. those who claim this usually refer to like kurdish fighters in rojava. zapatistas in chiapas and so on. problematic point is can this the local anarchist. community can they be? universalized into eight global. power. uh malabou herself points out two problems. first, anarchism is becoming today a key feature of global capitalism itself. a quote from malabou again. our current epoch is characterized by a coexistence between a de facto anarchism and a dawning or awakening anarchism. de facto anarchism is the reign of anarcho-capitalism, which is contemporaneous with the end of the welfare state, creating in citizens a feeling of abandonment. just think of the state of hospitals and healthcare. today. so current capitalism is undertaking its anarchist turn. a generalized uberization of life. uber he means these new companies which are not even capitalists in the old sense. they just claim we mediate between. but workers offer on the market to car owners and their customers. yeah. but malabou, as a good hegelian, noticed also something else, that this anarcho-capitalism is the other side of a new authoritarianism. the last quote from her. authoritarianism does not contradict. the disappearance of the state. it is messenger. the mask of this so-called collaborative economy, which by bringing professionals and users into direct contact through technological platforms pulverizes all fixity. end quote what this means is that the rising authoritarianism is the other side of the disappearance of the state, more precisely of the most precious function of the state, that of providing public services we thereby touch the vast domain of public services, healthcare, education, which cannot be provided through expanding cooperatives and other forms of local self organizations. as etienne balibar emphasizes, for average american workers, the problem is not too much state. the problem is not enough state. what we need today more than ever is what. a german friend of mine, conservative philosopher but very intelligent, peter sloterdijk, what he calls objective social democracy. social democracy which is not a political force one among the parties, but it's so. democracy which. ich. already part of the state apparatus embodied in it. for example, in a countries like nordic countries up to appoint germany france. you need global healthcare, free education, and so on. uh they are not a matter of political choice. they're accepted as the basic constituent of social life. so whoever is in power. through free, so-called free elections. he doesn't dare to talk. d back. here. i will, i. i will just add two fig. may be problematic to some of you. so the problem today. ich. that we do live in a society of choice. but the problem is not that these choices are false choices. you know, the fundamental paradox of state authority. you are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice. no, today. like when you use uber or whatever, you are bombardck! buy or demanded to make massiv choig! but without being qualified. to make properly this. choices i will quote here not a friend of mine, but my he really hates it severe critic john gray but he was right when he wrote this we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. new technologies alter our lives daily. the traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. at the same time, we have little idea of what the future will bring. we are forced to live as if we were. free. end. two. conclude. to provoke you. my solution is... we cannot get rid of. simply of the figure of the master. why not? because when you say not master but free individuals, but these free individuals who experience maybe even themselves as free. what is more free today than serve the web you make all the choices you want. their freedom is already regulated without you even. being aware of it and to become aware of how false your freedom is you need a figure of a master, a leader. let's be careful here. not the traditional leader. wh. pretends to know better than you what is good for you. no we need new leaders whose simple message is you. again, you are not caught. into your determined circumstances, you have a fundamental choice. you can do it. obama used this yes we can. later he disappointed us, we know. but this was an authentic moment in his first electoral campaign. barack obama, when he smashed. that. yes. weekend that's. the leader and take also why my final philosophical boy we cannot simply renounce. in certain situations. acting like masters assuming authority when the situation condemns us to do it. i will not quote it again. i refer here to hannah arendt's beautiful short text on education where she says, let's say you are now. head of an impoverished family, your small children are totally confused. they don't know what is going on what should they do should we and they asked there. parents, father, mother, please give us some orientation. d. literally truthful and honest thing. would have been for father or mother or another authority. yeah, that's true. i forgot where it is taken. thanks. to say, listen, we are confused as you. today's situation is chaotic. we don't know. you just have to find your way. no. you, although we are not justified. to claim authority. we have heroically to a hum. we had to heroically ec eh if. we have. authority. you know, it's the same thing as to conclude with a philosophical point. it's the same thing as, let's say i am. cognitive scientists and i'm not, but i follow the debates there and many of them claim our human freedom is a user's illusion. everything is already decided in advance at the level of neurobiology processes and so on. so... let's say, sorry for this stupid example, let's say i see. in a pool near my house, a small girl slowly drowning. he cannot swim. and then the logical formulation would have been for me a consequence to say, i don't have freedom of my will, so why should i worry? whatever i will do is predetermined. i shouldn't be. held responsible. no, you are, even if cognitively you know, but i don't believe this theory that you don't have free will. you should act as if you have have a free will that's the paradox today we need not leaders who know. better than us. we need experts, but not as leaders. we need leaders who give us back our freedom. not the vulgar everyday freedom of will i go to this movie theater or to another, but this basic freedom of changing the coordinates of our life. if we don't regain this freedom, then we are lost.