Is Democracy Still an Option Today?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2021-04-18 · 0:53:05 · 5,797 words
democracygeopolitics-warideologycommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismhistoryrace-antisemitismphilosophy-general
Žižek addresses a Kurdish audience to argue that the Kurdish experiment in self-governance represents a rare example of actually building a new social order, not merely protesting. He diagnoses the crisis of liberal parliamentary democracy, its erosion of a shared 'basic social pact,' the fragmentation of 'the people,' the collapse of unwritten social norms, and the rise of post-truth culture, while insisting truth is not neutral but partisan (aligned with the most radical fighters for freedom). He calls for a reinvention of democracy that goes beyond electoral mechanics, requiring visionary leadership, new forms of political organization, and the construction of new everyday customs.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “actually existing utopia”
Žižek's designation for the Kurdish experiment in communal self-governance, an empirically functioning alternative social order, not merely a theoretical aspiration.
The leftist ideal of unmediated popular voice that Žižek critiques as insufficient and paradoxically shared by right-wing populists like Trump.
Žižek's characterization of the current global situation in which fundamental ideological divisions make unified political agency ('the people') nearly impossible.
as “ideology inscribed in everyday experience”
Žižek's insistence that ideology is not an abstract system of values but is embedded in mundane practices, how we eat, marry, react to foreigners on the street.
Implicit in Žižek's account of how capitalism exploits unpaid domestic labour and destroys indigenous land, forms of extraction invisible in classical exploitation models.
Lenin's term for a privileged stratum of the working class incorporated into the system; Žižek invokes Badiou's application of it to the entire Western working class.
Badiou's proposed new emancipatory agent, homeless migrants moving to Europe, offered as an ersatz for a corrupted Western working class; Žižek reports but partially resists this formulation.
The minimal pre-political solidarity and shared background trust that Žižek argues is the precondition for functioning liberal democracy, currently dissolving in the West.
Following Hegel, Žižek identifies the unstated customs and implicit permissions of social life as the 'ethical substance' holding society together, now threatened by pandemic disruption and right-wing populism.
as “ethical substance”
The Hegelian layer of lived customs and implicit norms (not just explicit laws) that constitutes the underlying coherence of a social community.
Žižek uses the psychoanalytic term to insist that Trump is a symptom, a sign pointing to something already wrong in liberal democracy itself, not an external cause.
The mainstream media concept of an era without shared facts; Žižek accepts the diagnosis of relativism but rejects the implication that there was ever a 'truth era,' and insists truth is always partisan, not neutral.
as “new universalism”
Žižek's prescriptive political horizon: a universalism built not on neutrality but on the engaged standpoint of the most radical fighters for freedom, embodied for him by the Kurds.
Paradoxical formulation for the construction of new everyday customs, habits, and modes of social life needed to replace disintegrated traditional norms, the true political task of the present moment.
Stories he reaches for 4
Lacan's clinical point: even if a wife really does sleep with other men, a husband's pathological jealousy is still pathological, because the question is not factual accuracy but the psychic function jealousy serves.
“Even if his wife really sleeps with other men, his jealousy is still pathological. Because the problem is not: 'Does his wife really sleep with other men or not?'”
Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, told his scriptwriters used too many old clichés, wrote back demanding 'more new clichés', Žižek deploys this as the perfect formula for today's political task: not original grand ideas but new everyday customs.
“We urgently need more new clichés. That's what we need today in politics.”
At Biden's inauguration, presented as a joyful restoration of normalcy, the lone figure of Sanders attracted more popular attention than the ceremony itself, demonstrating that millions sensed something wrong and wanted an alternative.
“Just with his presence, sitting alone, as if he wanted to say, 'Sorry guys, I'm not part of that show,' he gave body to an alternative.”
In the UK, a poll two weeks before Labour's election victory named Tony Blair the most hated person in the country, illustrating a dissatisfaction that escapes the regular voting mechanism.
“Who is the most hated person in the United Kingdom? The same person: Tony Blair.”
Works invoked 2
Kill All Normies book
Angela Nagle's book described as 'wonderful'; used to support the argument that transgressive dirty language has migrated from the left to the alt-right.
Žižek admits to watching 'ordinary TV series' and cites a line about leaders losing sleep as his best definition of leadership.
People invoked 17
Vladimir Lenin positive
His concept of 'workers' aristocracy' is cited (via Badiou) to characterize the privileged position of the Western working class.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek calls him 'my teacher in psychoanalysis' and cites his clinical observation about pathological jealousy to illustrate the distinction between factual and structural truth.
Treated as a symptom of liberal democracy's internal crisis rather than its external cause; Žižek concedes he 'played a certain positive role' in destroying the hegemony of unwritten liberal norms, though he strongly rejects Trump's populism.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Žižek says he 'absolutely doesn't agree' with him but credits him with a good point about democratic legitimacy requiring shared bonds between voters.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Described as 'my good friend the ex-Bolivian vice-president'; cited as the source of the lesson that focusing on the old working class is 'madness' given the diversity of exploited subjects.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my friend'; Žižek reports his pessimistic view that the Western working class is a 'workers' aristocracy' and his concept of 'nomadic proletarians,' partially endorsing it while noting its limits.
Bernie Sanders positive
Used as an embodied symbol of the desire for an alternative at Biden's inauguration, his solitary presence 'gave body to an alternative' felt by millions.
Mentioned as the Turkish leader who could mobilize crowds against the Kurds; used as an example of why formal elections alone do not protect minority rights.
Angela Nagle positive
Described as 'a wonderful book'; Žižek uses her analysis from Kill All Normies to support his argument about the inversion of transgressive language from the left to the alt-right.
His inauguration is described as 'a pretty disgusting ideological event', a spectacle of return to normality that masked the continuing need for a new order.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
Described as 'a relatively progressive good guy' known for 'intelligent nonsenses'; his demand for 'new clichés' provides the closing joke-formula for Žižek's political prescription.
Called 'a great man'; used as an example of how achieving formal democracy (end of apartheid) does not automatically resolve underlying structural inequalities.
Henry Ford positive
Cited for his aphorism about giving people cars rather than better horses, used to illustrate the need for visionary leadership that creates new desires rather than satisfying existing ones.
Described as someone 'who criticized me a lot'; Žižek cites Chomsky's conditional support for Kurdish protection by the US as evidence that anti-imperialist logic must allow paradoxical positions.
Abraham Lincoln positive
His 'fool all the people' saying is used as the classical statement of democratic trust, which Žižek then darkens with a pessimistic update.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Called 'my favorite philosopher'; cited for the distinction between explicit rules and unwritten norms/customs as the real substance holding society together.
Used as a data point: simultaneously winning an election and being named the UK's most hated person, evidence of the gap between electoral mechanics and actual popular sentiment.
What it argues
crisis of liberal parliamentary democracyKurdish self-governance as actually-existing utopiathe fragmentation of 'the people' and collapse of working-class unityunwritten social norms as the glue of democratic orderpost-truth, relativism, and the partisan nature of truththe need for visionary leadership beyond direct democracyconstructing new everyday clichés and customs
Dialectical moves 11
“The true miracle of the Kurds resides not in their suffering but in their ability to build a new social order when given space—they are not just a symbol of resistance but a symbol of how to install a new order.”
Inverts the usual frame of victimhood: what matters is not Kurdish suffering but their constructive political capacity.
“Trump is not the cause of liberal democracy's crisis but its symptom—he didn't fall from the moon.”
Reverses the causal diagnosis: Trump is a sign pointing back to pathologies internal to liberal democracy itself.
“The populist language of 'giving power back to the people' is not leftist—Trump used it verbatim in his inauguration speech.”
Collapses the assumption that direct-democracy rhetoric is inherently emancipatory by showing its mirror image in right-wing populism.
“The task of revolution is not only to represent the people but to construct the people—people do not simply know what they want.”
Reverses the passive-democratic premise: the revolutionary subject is not pre-given but must itself be produced through political organization.
“Being a classical stable-employed proletarian is already almost a privilege today—paradoxically, the stable worker is no longer the most exploited.”
Inverts the Marxist hierarchy of exploitation: job security has become a relative privilege vis-à-vis the precarious, unemployed, and women doing unpaid labor.
“Even if a wife really sleeps with other men, a husband's pathological jealousy is still pathological—the question is never whether the fact is true but why the subject needs it.”
Distinguishes factual truth from structural-psychoanalytic truth: the real question is always the function a belief serves, not its correspondence to facts.
“Ideology is most dangerous not when it lies but when it lies with elements of truth.”
Reverses the naive view that exposing factual errors defeats ideology; partial truth is precisely what makes ideology effective and difficult to counter.
“Truth is not a neutral objective category—it can only be formulated from the standpoint of the most radical fighters for freedom.”
Inverts the Enlightenment assumption of perspective-free truth: objectivity is itself an ideological stance that serves domination; truth is constitutively partisan.
“We are not in a post-truth era—as if there was ever an era of truth. Both sides were lying throughout the Cold War.”
Deflates the post-truth panic by showing the supposed prior 'truth era' was itself a myth of ideological control of public space, not actual truth.
“The new right appears as the partisan of human freedoms and the left as the partisan of law and order—a total reversal of the 1960s configuration.”
Documents a historical inversion of political roles: the transgressive/dirty language once belonging to the left has migrated to the alt-right, while the left retreats to moralism and censorship.
“What we need today in politics are new clichés—not big original ideas but new customs and habits of everyday life.”
Inverts the usual demand for political originality: the real revolutionary task is the humble construction of new everyday rituals, not grand ideological innovations.
Claims 20
asserts
The Kurdish experiment in self-governance is one of the rare examples of actually building a new social order, not merely protesting—an actually existing utopia.Kurdish political experiment
asserts
Standard multi-party parliamentary democracy is in crisis in the developed West itself, not only in so-called third-world countries.crisis of liberal democracy
asserts
Democracy functions only against the background of a basic social pact—a minimal pre-political solidarity—which is now dissolving.preconditions of democracy
asserts
The popular discontent expressed through mass demonstrations cannot be adequately translated into the language of parliamentary politics, revealing a structural gap.limits of parliamentary representation
asserts
Trump is a symptom of something already wrong within liberal democracy itself, not an external cause of its crisis.Trump and liberal democracy
asserts
The populist rhetoric of 'giving power back to the people' is not the exclusive property of the left—Trump's inauguration speech used identical language.populism and left-right convergence
rejects
Leftist enthusiasm for the Capitol mob's direct action because 'it's the right idea, just the wrong people' is an unacceptable position.left reactions to January 6 Capitol riot
asserts
The revolutionary task is not only to represent the people but to construct or constitute the people—people do not simply know what they want in advance.political subjectivity and leadership
asserts
Visionary political leadership is necessary and irreducible; pure direct democracy is insufficient to translate popular energy into a new order.leadership and democracy
asserts
The Western working class can no longer function as the primary emancipatory agent; multiple overlapping forms of exploitation (environmental, unpaid domestic, precarious, student) must be recognized.revolutionary subject under global capitalism
asserts
The Bolivian focus on indigenous and non-wage-labor forms of exploitation over the traditional working class was the correct strategic lesson.emancipatory politics in the Global South
asserts
Today's ideology is most dangerous not when it outright lies but when it lies with elements of truth.ideology and truth
asserts
Truth is not a neutral objective category but an engaged, partisan one: in conditions of oppression, truth can only be formulated from the standpoint of the most radical fighters for freedom.truth and partisanship
rejects
We should reject the view that we now live in a 'post-truth era' as if there was a previous age of truth; both sides in the Cold War were lying.post-truth discourse
asserts
The collapse of unwritten social norms—not just of explicit laws—is the deepest dimension of the current democratic crisis triggered by the pandemic.social norms and pandemic
asserts
The struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle for Palestinian rights are two sides of the same struggle and must not be traded off against each other.anti-Semitism and Palestinian rights
asserts
Supporting the Kurds while they were backed by the US was strategically correct and not a concession to imperialism; geopolitics demands paradoxical alliances.Kurdish-US alliance and anti-imperialism
asserts
Democracy must be radically reinvented; simply achieving elections after dictatorship does not resolve underlying structural problems.reinventing democracy
asserts
The biggest coming crisis is not primarily economic or epidemiological but one of mental health, as everyday rituals and customs have been destroyed.mental health as political crisis
asserts
Europe and the United States are ethically catastrophic and 'the true barbarians today,' while Kurdish society is more civilized despite its suffering.ethical state of the West
Quotes 15
“The true miracle resides somewhere else: in the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life.”Slavoj Žižek · Kurdish self-governance as the true achievement
“You are more than a symbol of resistance. You are a symbol of how not only to resist but then to install, experiment with, build a new order.”Slavoj Žižek · from resistance to construction of new order
“Trump is what in psychiatry we call a symptom, a sign of something that was wrong in liberal democracy itself. Trump didn't fall from the moon.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as symptom of liberal democracy's internal crisis
“You can fool most of the people most of the time, definitely. It's in very rare moments that collectively people can live in truth.”Slavoj Žižek · pessimist revision of Lincoln's democratic premise
“Ideology is not some abstract system of values and so on. Ideology is inscribed into your everyday experiences.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as lived experience not abstract doctrine
“Paradoxically, being a classical proletarian with a stable job is almost already a privilege today.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of the classical proletariat as exploited subject
“Ideology is most dangerous where when it lies with the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · partial truth as the most effective ideological weapon
“Truth is not an objective category. What you discover with an objective analyst is just how best to exploit people.”Slavoj Žižek · truth is partisan, not neutral
“The struggle against anti-Semitism in Europe and so on, and the struggle for Palestinian rights are two sides of the same struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-Semitism and Palestinian rights as inseparable
“We, Europe and United States, are ethically a catastrophe. We are lost today.”Slavoj Žižek · the West as ethical catastrophe relative to Kurdish society
“We urgently need more new clichés. That's what we need today in politics.”Slavoj Žižek · the political task as constructing new everyday customs
“A true leader... the message of a good leader is not 'I know better than you what you want' but 'I give you hope.'”Slavoj Žižek · visionary leadership as giving hope not orders
“People need leaders or at least a leading organization... people don't simply know 'I want this.'”Slavoj Žižek · the people must be constituted, not merely consulted
“In a country where there is oppression, you can formulate a truth about that country only from a position of those who are most radical fighters for freedom in that country.”Slavoj Žižek · the partisan, engaged nature of political truth
“The world will live in a freer world where what is happening to you could no longer happen. That's important.”Slavoj Žižek · Kurdish cause as index of universal freedom
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I am very honored to be here with you and I will try, usually I make this mistake, not to talk too fast and I will keep to minutes as I was ordered, maybe a minute or two more. And when I say I like to be with you and so on and so forth, these are not the usual empty phrases how people begin talks politely. I mean it very seriously. Why? Because, as the gentleman who introduced me already pointed out, the fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of today's geopolitical games. Spread along the borderline of four neighboring states—Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran—their full autonomy is in nobody's interest. But the true miracle resides somewhere else: in the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life. This ability was tested in an almost experimental way. The moment you Kurds were given a space to breathe freely, a little bit freely outside the conflicts of the states around you, you surprised the world. You quickly built a society that one cannot but designate as an actually existing utopia with a thriving intellectual community. So you are more than a symbol of resistance. You are a symbol of how not only to resist but then to install, experiment with, build a new order. This is what is needed today. We get again and again the same boring picture—remember in Istanbul, in Athens, in Madrid, blah blah—we get big demonstrations, million people cry, shout together, and then, and then the enthusiasm is lost and more or less nothing remains. You remember what happened in Egypt? Almost million people in Cairo on the main square, then you got your freedom, free elections, and you get Muslim Brotherhood and you are glad that the army makes *coup d'état*. What you tried to do is—it's not me giving you a historical talk—I am addressing you as one of the few examples in the world how you have, you've demonstrated, proven that—this is my formula—that a new order can be built. People want this new order. Let me give you a simple example, we all watched it probably on the screens. You remember the inauguration of a new president Joe Biden. This was, I think, for me, a pretty disgusting ideological event: all happy together, we got rid of Donald Trump, things will return to normality. But then, you know who was the star of the event? A lone old man sitting there, and everybody talked about him: Bernie Sanders, of course. The fact that millions talked about him—I don't want to talk about Sanders, but about the importance of the fact that he attracted all the attentions, millions downloaded those images and so on—meant that it's not just a couple of us crazy radical leftists, but millions of ordinary people felt that there was something wrong in that big spectacle of inauguration: "the old order is back." No, that a new order is needed. Just with his presence, presence there, sitting alone, as if he wanted to say, "Sorry guys, I'm not part of that show," he gave body to an alternative. People want, people want this, and you Kurds, you belong to this line. So, this brings me to my topic: what's the fate in all of this of democracy? What kind of democratization can help not only Kurds but all of us? It's certainly not just the expansion of the standard Western multi-party democracy. A tension which is immanent to the very idea of parliamentary democracy is gaining visibility today. Democracy means two things: the power of the people, in the sense that the substantial will of the majority should express itself; and the trust in electoral mechanism. Democracy means, yes, there may be manipulations and so on, but once the votes are counted, all sides accept the result. Of course, we leftists and even some rightists claim this parliamentary mechanism is not neutral. And this is true, because—and this is the crazy thing today—it's no longer that less developed countries, so-called third-world countries, are the countries where democracy doesn't function and then we look to the West. No, the standard democracy, multi-party representative democracy, is in crisis in the so-called developed West itself. If you follow a little bit the news, you may have noticed some very strange phenomena like in years ago, I was in United Kingdom and the Labour Party with Tony Blair won the election. But two weeks before the election, there was a big opinion poll: "Who is the most hated person in the United Kingdom?" The same person: Tony Blair. And this is a very tragic phenomenon which should worry us. We have a certain dissatisfaction, protest, which somehow escapes the regular voting mechanism of multi-party democracy. You have a dissatisfaction which cannot be expressed through the regular parliamentary democratic channels. There is another example of this. Do you remember in France, I think it was some three years ago or when, these protests of so-called yellow vests? It's not protests of people who are deprived of democracy; it's a much more mysterious protest. It's a protest of people who are dissatisfied precisely by parliamentary democracy with all its freedoms and so on and so on. And what was so tragic was that, okay then, Macron, president, the government, tried to play a polite role. He said, "Okay, come to me, we will debate," and it was a terrible experience. They talked different languages in some sense. It became clear that we have here a gap, that what people who were protesting demanded simply in some sense couldn't be translated into the usual language of parliamentary manipulations and so on and so forth. It was, if you remember it, the same in Spain, some ten, even more I think years ago, it was the same popular explosion with Podemos, the movement, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets and so on. And then, what happened then? Then, finally, Podemos constituted itself as a party, and now it's part of a government. It's just an ordinary, let's call it social-democratic political party, no big difference from socialists. Where did that energy go? What is the problem here? The crisis of liberal democracy lasts for decades. The COVID epidemic only made it explode beyond a certain level. The basic premise of a functioning democracy is today more and more undermined—namely, the trust on which democracy relies. This trust was best expressed by Abraham Lincoln's famous saying: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people you can fool all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." But I think the latest experiences tell us that things are even a little bit darker, like you can fool most of the people most of the time, definitely. It's in very rare moments that collectively people can live in truth. And I will return to this later. Another thing you must abandon here is the too simple paranoiac theory that there are evil manipulators who manipulate, who make the people blind. No, manipulators who fool the people are always themselves fooled. For example, in the United States, you shouldn't think that Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on and lied to the people. No, he was also definitely lying to himself. So, here comes my pessimist, if you want, pessimistic insight. What really did strike me is that leftists advocate all the time some kind of immediate direct democracy where the people is given, people are given voice directly. But what shocked me is that I remember from Donald Trump's inauguration speech in how he used the same term. Let me remind you, I quote Donald Trump: "Today's ceremony has a very special meaning because today we are not only transferring power from one administration to another, from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and we are giving it back to you, the people." Until now, elites were ruling, but this all changes now. Starting right here and now, because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. So isn't it a paradox that Donald Trump in his populism uses the terminology which is usually the terminology of the radical leftist critics? And let me go even to the end here. We all watched in the beginning of January of this year how the mob, the crowd of Trump protesters, invaded, broke into the Capitol. And what made me sad is the reaction of my leftist friends who said, "This is a wonderful, wonderful thing happening, people directly breaking into the seat of power, trying to take over, just it's that they are not the right people, we should be doing this, not they." I don't accept this. I think that with a few big courageous exceptions like you Kurds, maybe some others up to a point in Bolivia and so on, today "this people," "the people" into whom democracy tells us to trust, this people is more and more divided, no longer exists. Now I will do, I think, something strange. It may sound totalitarian but it's meant in a radical democratic way. I think that we are all so caught in our divisions, the whole world is today in some kind of ideological civil war, that "the people"—the task of a revolution is not only to represent adequately people, but in the same way to make people, if you want to construct the people, to make people aware, sorry, of what they want. People don't simply know, "I want this," and then you go into politics like on a market, "Oh, this politician is telling what me what I want, that other is telling even better, I will vote for him," and so on and so forth. No, people need leaders or at least a leading organization because I will now do something very strange. I will quote, you know, the old car maker from United States who invented serially produced car making, Henry Ford. He said that he didn't follow what people wanted. He said that if he were to ask people, "What do you want?", people would have answered, "I want a better and stronger horse to pull our carriage." And he didn't give them a better, stronger horse; he gave them cars. And something like this is happening today. We shouldn't just ask for a better horse, for better functioning of what is here. We should ask for something that was, more than years ago, like a horse—we should want, we should demand or try to invent through leaders a better world. And to avoid a misunderstanding, a leader for me is not the one who tells you what you want, who gives you orders and so on. A true—you know, don't mystify the people. They are confused today. They are all caught in ideology, in their egotist problems, dreams. Ideology is, we can talk about more about this later, I just want to tell you now that ideology is not some abstract system of values and so on. Ideology is inscribed into your everyday experiences, like for me the best example of ideology is everyday racism. It's usually not even put in ideological terms. When you walk in the street and see a foreigner from some so-called third-world country and you are disturbed by him or her. You tell yourself, "Okay, I am not a racist, but I don't want to be too close to him," and so on and so forth. That's everyday life ideology. How we eat, how we marry, how we make love and so on. All this is ideology. And the message of a good leader is not, "No, I know better than you what you want," but it's, "I give you hope." It's like Bernie Sanders just sitting there: "I give you hope you can move beyond this, out of this." And another thing for what I think a good leader is needed is to make tough decisions. Because, as much as I like these emphatic moments of popular unity, half a million of people demonstrating and so on, I more and more think that the system can and was always able, the system of power, to accommodate with these outbursts. You wait a little bit in the shadows, then the enthusiasm fades away and you, things return to the old order. No, the problem is to translate this popular discontent into a new form of political organization. You have to make tough decisions. In this sense, only in this sense because this is a very dangerous metaphor, in this sense politics is like medicine, healthcare. You have to make tough decision or military command. You have to say, "Sorry, now we have to risk that thousands will die in that unit." Or we cannot take care of all the patients, some will die, who will die, and so on. These are horrible decisions. The best definition of leader—because I am an ordinary low guy, I also watch ordinary TV series, I warn you—I watched that American medical doctor series *New Amsterdam*, where an administrator says, tells an old doctor: "Leaders make choices that keep them awake at night. If you sleep well, you are not one of them, you are not a leader." This is for me a good leader. So it's not simply direct people's democracy. You need inspirational figures. We need force to organize it because again, it's not just political alienation and so on. It's also the other side which is in crisis today. We no longer can simply say "the people." Which people? People are divided and so on. What do they mean by this? For Marxists, people usually meant working class. But did you notice how, if you know a little bit of history, how in every epoch a specific group of workers functioned as a symbol of "they are the true proletarians"? For example, years ago in Europe, it was usually miners or steel workers who were like the real working class. Who is this today? There are many candidates and we have to accept this plurality. There are of course workers, exploited workers, especially in the third world. Then there are in the third world those who are not exploited in the usual sense—being hired, paid a wage and the capitalist or the state keeps the profit—but they are exploited in the sense that the cycle of capitalist production ruins their conditions of existence. For example, I read in the North of Canada, they are now doing, producing oil through that process, fracking and so on. And they are doing it, a lot of it in the land where only few, whatever you call them, Native Americans, the first people, live. They are not exploited directly; they even get some state support. But their condition because the land that is left after fracking is done is a destroyed land, polluted with chemicals and so on and so forth. So they are definitely also exploited. Then we have students with no chance of employment. We have precarious workers, living in great uncertainty. We have women who are doing work which is not caught in the capitalist process of valorization. They are doing unpaid work. And as intelligent analysis have shown, without this unpaid work of women and other family members, the ordinary capitalist exploitation cannot work. We, all these other forms have to be here. If today, that was the big lesson of my good friend the ex-Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera, that in these conditions it's madness to focus on the old working class. In many countries, working class is a little bit privileged with regard to unemployed, women and so on. They can do things that those truly exploited cannot even dream of doing, like—maybe this can interest you—in my country Slovenia, I must admit, I often opposed workers' strikes. Why? Not because I don't agree with the idea of workers striking, but because I learned that in Slovenia only those privileged workers, those with a firm job employed by the state—doctors, policemen, judges, professors—they can afford to strike. Ordinary workers in small companies cannot afford to strike. So, paradoxically, being a classical proletarian with a stable job is almost already a privilege today. And I think that this leftist dream that somehow we should all come together—women, students, workers, immigrants and so on—is very difficult to achieve. My friend Alain Badiou, whom you, I think, already kindly mentioned, he is even a pessimist here, I would not go as far as he does, but he even thinks that in Western Europe, in United States, workers are already as a group part of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy, privileged, totally corrupted, we cannot count on them. Then Badiou proposes as an *ersatz*, another emancipatory agent, what he calls nomadic proletarians—those the homeless people who emigrate to Europe and so on and so on. But even there I think things are not so simple because I read a very good analysis: Who comes to Europe as an emigrant? Mostly it's not the truly desperate from those countries like, I don't know, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. Those who come are—okay, there are also children, women—but most of them are very able young people, even with some financial stability because you know, to come from Afghanistan to Europe, you need thousands of dollars to do the, to bribe all the customers and so on and so forth. So I think that, and that's the sad strength of today's global capitalism, it's almost impossible to build a united front against him. What does this mean for democracy? I will now quote from somebody with whom I absolutely don't agree, but here he made a good point: the bestseller author Yuval Harari. He wrote that, I quote: "People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict." End of quote. So this I think is happening today. I think this is maybe the root, one of the roots of the crisis of liberal democracy. People like to say democracy implies differences and so on. Yes, but differences against the background of a basic pact. Like with you, the Kurds: you cannot say the solution is big democratic elections in all of Syria and Turkey. Yes, it would be nice, but I can well imagine—I don't know, this is pure hypothesis—in Turkey, Erdoğan mobilizing the crowd against you and presenting you as intruders and so on and so forth. Again, elections work when a certain solidarity is already here. We may oppose each other but we accept basic rules. And this is I think what is happening with the crisis of democracy today. In United States, we have now an almost, almost a war, an ideological civil war. We have half of the people, maybe a little bit more, who still remain liberal democrats with all the limitations, and then we have almost half of the people Trump followers, populists. And what is so interesting is that how this opposition, and they don't speak the same language, the country is falling apart. The crisis in the United States, you cannot resolve it by simple big democratic elections. You get, you get, you get two countries. The situation is totally mystified because Trump populists manipulated by many billionaires nonetheless act as representatives of the people, while democrats who also want to represent minorities and so on and so forth also often play a very strange game with ordinary people and so on and so forth. But what I want to emphasize is this. I think that liberal democracy which presupposes something that I'm tempted to call a basic social pact—by this I mean something very specific. As my favorite philosopher Hegel, the German idealist, pointed out, what keeps a society together really and incidentally, if I will ever be lucky to visit your part of the world, this is what would have interested me. You know, people say there are rules. Yes, there are rules that keep every society together. But then not all rules are explicit. There are rules that are not explicitly stated, there are unwritten rules, customs and so on. And that is today falling apart. This is I think the crisis of COVID that was triggered by the pandemic. You know, we had our everyday lives, you walk around, meet friends, socialize and so on and so forth. These everyday customs are threatened. And then authorities are of course giving orders, keep distance and so on and so on, but we are somehow deprived of this substance of our lives. Ethical substance, the unwritten rules, not the explicit written rules. Because you know, again, it's not enough to know the rules. You have also to know which rules you are allowed secretly to disobey. For example, a comical example: when I was young, it was the official morality was: "Don't have sex when you are not married," conservative. But then everybody expected you to engage in sexual life. You know, you were considered very weird if you didn't broke the explicit rules. Or the opposite paradox, my favorite: you are solicited, you are given a certain freedom on condition that you don't use that freedom. You know, this so society is a very complex example, and I think that Trump played a certain positive role in the sense that he ruined this ideological hegemony, the order of unwritten rules. And not only Trump did this in United States; this is happening all around the world, in Germany, in England and so on and so forth. But and so again, for example, United States, I don't see a solution. What should you do? People claim we should step all together, we are one nation. No, in some sense they are not one nation. They have less and less of ideological common ground. But here, I'm ready to go even a step further. We cannot simply say, "Yes, Trump is bad so we should get rid of Trump, Joe Biden and liberal democrats should win." No, we should never forget that Trump is what in psychiatry we call a symptom, a sign of something that was wrong in liberal democracy itself. Trump didn't fall from the moon. Now let me, so that I will not talk too long, just a couple of pages, let me make a step further here. And this is maybe the saddest thing of what is going on today, and I'm sure from what I've learned that in your part of the world things are more civilized, in spite of all the horrible suffering that you have there. We Europeans and Americans are, I'm afraid, the true barbarians today. Namely, the ethical catastrophe of Trump and new right-wing populists is this incredible degradation of public social life. You are able to make dirty jokes, to say obscenities—decency is disappearing. And here something very strange is happening today. I hope some of you know a wonderful book by Angela Nagle, an Irish lady living in the United States, *Kill All Normies*, where she describes how, I remember when I was young, late '60s, '70s, those in power spoke the official language of dignity, bombastic, patriotic, while we leftist protesters, you know, we made signs like this, used dirty words. We consider this subversive. But did you notice that now, this new so-called alt-right, alternative right, especially in the United States, they use dirty language, sexual obscenities, incredible vulgarity and so on? And this is a tragedy. The left is—at least the official liberal-democratic left—is retreating to old moralism, but even police brutality. Now the left wants to censor public space and so on and so forth. It's a total mess so that then the new right appears more and more as a partisan of human freedoms: you can talk dirty and so on, whatever you want, and the left as partisan of law and order, they want more police interventions and so on and so forth. Another element in this crisis, I'm approaching the end, don't be afraid, is this big motif that we find in, bombarded with by the media: that we live in a post-truth era. But here, I think things are a little bit more, a little bit more ambiguous. The idea is this one: with the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalism, rational argumentation no longer works, as we see also today with some reactions to the pandemic: the explosion of conspiracy theories and so on and so forth. Then the idea is that also with the digital media, there is no longer one public space, it's a dispersion, and also in theory you get so-called postmodern historicist who say there is no objective truth, we just have different subjective perspectives and so on and so forth. Now my position here is that: Of course this is true, every approach to society is already in some sense interested, engaged. I don't believe in objective truth. But this does not mean that all truths are equal. I'm not a relativist. Let me give you an example which will please the Jews. Look, when Nazis were saying, when they were taking power in Germany, that Jewish influence is too strong, and when they gave you some statistics like: more than half of the doctors in Berlin are Jewish, of the lawyers are Jewish and so on—probably they were telling something true. But nonetheless this factual truth was in the service of the anti-Semitic lie. What I want to tell you this is to repeat an old joke of mine that I like, not even a joke, a clinical observation by Jacques Lacan, my teacher in psychoanalysis, who said: when a husband is pathologically jealous of his wife, that she sleeps together with other men—even if his wife really sleeps with other men, his jealousy is still pathological. Because the problem is not: "Does his wife really sleep with other men or not?" The problem is: Why does he need jealousy to maintain his psychic stability and order and so on and so forth. So again, and the same goes for today's Israel. To talk about anti-Semitism today in Israel, you must talk also about what Israel itself is doing, for example, to the Palestinians on the West Bank. I think that our answer to oppression of Palestinians should not be, "Yes, they are justified, let's tolerate a little bit of anti-Semitism." No, the struggle against anti-Semitism in Europe and so on, and the struggle for Palestinian rights are two sides of the same struggle. We should not, we should to the end resist this crazy logic that there is a basic truth, but then small entities should be sacrificed to this truth. I don't know if I already mentioned this but here comes my big sympathy with you Kurds. I remember, you remember when Americans abandoned you to the interplay of Erdoğan Turkey and Russia and Syria and so on. Many of my friends agreed with Trump: "It's good that he did that," and they even reproached you that you were protected by Americans. And I told them, "Okay, it was a geopolitical mess, what should you have done? Should you have said, 'Yeah, I know America the greatest imperialist power supports us, so we should sacrifice ourselves for the anti-imperialist world struggle and so on and so forth'?" No, this is the basic lie that today in the politics embodied in you—not in you, in you as the sign place where this lie appears—as if, you know, a fundamental truth means that everybody has to sacrifice himself, his identity, to it. As even the guy who criticized me a lot, Noam Chomsky, if you remember, said: "Yes, I am against American intervention, but there, when they protected you as long as they did against Turkey and so on, Americans—I'm for them, I'm for them." Don't think in this mechanical terms. Politics are paradoxes, especially today in the new multi-centric world. You know, for example, take Myanmar. Some of my friends said that they support the *coup d'état* because those who were democratically elected were too close to the West and so on and so forth. This logic is horrible and you were its victims. But the last point I want to make is that you know those who talk about relativization of truth and so on and so forth, where I don't agree with them is when they say that we are now in the era of death of truth, post-truth. Wait a minute, as if there was a time when we lived in the era of truth. Take the Cold War: both sides were lying, maybe communist Soviet Union more, but both sides were totally lying. The point is just that each of the opposed sides—Western democracy, Soviet socialism—controlled its public space. Now this public space is exploding. And our task today is is what? Our task today is precisely not to dwell in this historicist relativism. You Kurds have your own vision, I don't know Turks have their own vision, others Afghanistans their own vision—we should all coexist. No, I claim that's the paradox, the basic lesson of Marxism that you embody: that truth is not neutral. In a country where there is oppression, you can formulate a truth about that country only from a position of those who are most radical fighters for freedom in that country. Truth is not an objective category. No, what you discover with an objective analyst is just how best to exploit people, how to manipulate them and so on and so forth. Truth is an engaged category. So that's my first lesson: we have to build a new universalism. You the Kurds are my model, not because you are interesting small guys who somehow found your, reasserted your identity. No, you interest me because you are a miracle, because not your fault, but because of crazy geopolitical games you are like salami sliced into, you know, Turkish part, Greek part and so on and so forth, and you embody the lie. And nobody is allowed to dismiss you as "Oh, that particular problem, let's not think about that." No, the world will live in a freer world where what is happening to you could no longer happen. That's important. Second thing, as for the truth and so on, what the case that I mentioned, how people accuse you of "But nonetheless you are supported by Americans, then you cannot be so good," and so on. No, you know what's the problem? The problem is that ideology today is not problematic when it lies, but when it lies with elements of truth. For example, let's take even Trump. He was basically a populist lie, but some things he said were partially true, like when he said how American big capital cooperates with China to outsource production to exploit, to keep the wages lower of American workers and so on and so forth. You know, ideology is most dangerous where when it lies with the truth. And nobody has to force you to abandon your truth because of some higher ideological interest, like let us say that in some crazy future constellation Russia would take over totally Syria, made a pact with Erdoğan against United States and Israel—I'm dreaming. And then people would say that's a big anti-imperialist achievement, so you Kurds you are off now. No, never, never, this should never, never happen. The measure of truth in politics is that you have a global vision in which nobody is sacrificed in this sense. But really to conclude, one page, I'm not lying, sorry that I was so long, really to conclude: so yes, democracy is still of some use, but it will have to be radically invented. You know what is typical thing today? Look Ukraine or even Belarus and so on. Okay, you have a bad dictator, it's easy to mobilize people to fight against him and "Eh, we want democracy." But then when you get democracy, you see that you have the same problems sometimes in an even worse form. For example, remember a great man: Nelson Mandela. They wanted end of apartheid and democracy. They got it, but now dissatisfaction of the black majority—there is even according to some sources more poverty, certainly more corruption and violence than under apartheid. So you know, democracy has to be reinvented. The dialectic of political process is not just that you pursue a certain goal. You try to do something, then in the process you discover that you have to redefine the goal itself. We have to rethink what we mean by democracy today. And here I will not teach you, we should all learn from you. So to end with an old joke that I often use in my books: there is the legendary Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn. He was a relatively progressive good guy, but he was well known for many of his nonsenses, but which were intelligent nonsenses. So once he got from his studio a report that press is complaining that in the scenarios of his films, dialogues, there are too many old clichés used. So he wrote a memo to people who wrote scenarios for his film telling them: "We urgently need more new clichés." That's what we need today in politics. We don't need big original things. We need clichés, clichés by this I mean customs, manners, how to organize in these crazy times a new mode of everyday life. That's the big problem for us, in developed countries maybe even more than with you. You know, we have health problem with the pandemic, we have economic problem, but I fear, and it's becoming more and more clear, that the biggest problem will be mental health. Violence is exploding because this everyday rituals, customs of people are broken. We are in a terrible situation of literally building new clichés, new customs. We have to construct new everyday life. And here, I'm not bluffing, we will all learn from you. We, Europe and United States, are ethically a catastrophe. We are lost today. So thank you very much, it was an honor for me.
Thank you very much. I am very honored to be here with you and I will try, usually I make this mistake, not to talk too fast and I will keep to minutes as I was ordered, maybe a minute or two more. And when I say I like to be with you and so on and so forth, these are not the usual empty phrases how people begin talks politely. I mean it very seriously. Why? Because, as the gentleman who introduced me already pointed out, the fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of today's geopolitical games. Spread along the borderline of four neighboring states—Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran—their full autonomy is in nobody's interest. But the true miracle resides somewhere else: in the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life. This ability was tested in an almost experimental way. The moment you Kurds were given a space to breathe freely, a little bit freely outside the conflicts of the states around you, you surprised the world. You quickly built a society that one cannot but designate as an actually existing utopia with a thriving intellectual community. So you are more than a symbol of resistance. You are a symbol of how not only to resist but then to install, experiment with, build a new order. This is what is needed today. We get again and again the same boring picture—remember in Istanbul, in Athens, in Madrid, blah blah—we get big demonstrations, million people cry, shout together, and then, and then the enthusiasm is lost and more or less nothing remains. You remember what happened in Egypt? Almost million people in Cairo on the main square, then you got your freedom, free elections, and you get Muslim Brotherhood and you are glad that the army makes *coup d'état*. What you tried to do is—it's not me giving you a historical talk—I am addressing you as one of the few examples in the world how you have, you've demonstrated, proven that—this is my formula—that a new order can be built. People want this new order. Let me give you a simple example, we all watched it probably on the screens. You remember the inauguration of a new president Joe Biden. This was, I think, for me, a pretty disgusting ideological event: all happy together, we got rid of Donald Trump, things will return to normality. But then, you know who was the star of the event? A lone old man sitting there, and everybody talked about him: Bernie Sanders, of course. The fact that millions talked about him—I don't want to talk about Sanders, but about the importance of the fact that he attracted all the attentions, millions downloaded those images and so on—meant that it's not just a couple of us crazy radical leftists, but millions of ordinary people felt that there was something wrong in that big spectacle of inauguration: "the old order is back." No, that a new order is needed. Just with his presence, presence there, sitting alone, as if he wanted to say, "Sorry guys, I'm not part of that show," he gave body to an alternative. People want, people want this, and you Kurds, you belong to this line. So, this brings me to my topic: what's the fate in all of this of democracy? What kind of democratization can help not only Kurds but all of us? It's certainly not just the expansion of the standard Western multi-party democracy. A tension which is immanent to the very idea of parliamentary democracy is gaining visibility today. Democracy means two things: the power of the people, in the sense that the substantial will of the majority should express itself; and the trust in electoral mechanism. Democracy means, yes, there may be manipulations and so on, but once the votes are counted, all sides accept the result. Of course, we leftists and even some rightists claim this parliamentary mechanism is not neutral. And this is true, because—and this is the crazy thing today—it's no longer that less developed countries, so-called third-world countries, are the countries where democracy doesn't function and then we look to the West. No, the standard democracy, multi-party representative democracy, is in crisis in the so-called developed West itself. If you follow a little bit the news, you may have noticed some very strange phenomena like in years ago, I was in United Kingdom and the Labour Party with Tony Blair won the election. But two weeks before the election, there was a big opinion poll: "Who is the most hated person in the United Kingdom?" The same person: Tony Blair. And this is a very tragic phenomenon which should worry us. We have a certain dissatisfaction, protest, which somehow escapes the regular voting mechanism of multi-party democracy. You have a dissatisfaction which cannot be expressed through the regular parliamentary democratic channels. There is another example of this. Do you remember in France, I think it was some three years ago or when, these protests of so-called yellow vests? It's not protests of people who are deprived of democracy; it's a much more mysterious protest. It's a protest of people who are dissatisfied precisely by parliamentary democracy with all its freedoms and so on and so on. And what was so tragic was that, okay then, Macron, president, the government, tried to play a polite role. He said, "Okay, come to me, we will debate," and it was a terrible experience. They talked different languages in some sense. It became clear that we have here a gap, that what people who were protesting demanded simply in some sense couldn't be translated into the usual language of parliamentary manipulations and so on and so forth. It was, if you remember it, the same in Spain, some ten, even more I think years ago, it was the same popular explosion with Podemos, the movement, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets and so on. And then, what happened then? Then, finally, Podemos constituted itself as a party, and now it's part of a government. It's just an ordinary, let's call it social-democratic political party, no big difference from socialists. Where did that energy go? What is the problem here? The crisis of liberal democracy lasts for decades. The COVID epidemic only made it explode beyond a certain level. The basic premise of a functioning democracy is today more and more undermined—namely, the trust on which democracy relies. This trust was best expressed by Abraham Lincoln's famous saying: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people you can fool all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." But I think the latest experiences tell us that things are even a little bit darker, like you can fool most of the people most of the time, definitely. It's in very rare moments that collectively people can live in truth. And I will return to this later. Another thing you must abandon here is the too simple paranoiac theory that there are evil manipulators who manipulate, who make the people blind. No, manipulators who fool the people are always themselves fooled. For example, in the United States, you shouldn't think that Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on and lied to the people. No, he was also definitely lying to himself. So, here comes my pessimist, if you want, pessimistic insight. What really did strike me is that leftists advocate all the time some kind of immediate direct democracy where the people is given, people are given voice directly. But what shocked me is that I remember from Donald Trump's inauguration speech in how he used the same term. Let me remind you, I quote Donald Trump: "Today's ceremony has a very special meaning because today we are not only transferring power from one administration to another, from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and we are giving it back to you, the people." Until now, elites were ruling, but this all changes now. Starting right here and now, because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. So isn't it a paradox that Donald Trump in his populism uses the terminology which is usually the terminology of the radical leftist critics? And let me go even to the end here. We all watched in the beginning of January of this year how the mob, the crowd of Trump protesters, invaded, broke into the Capitol. And what made me sad is the reaction of my leftist friends who said, "This is a wonderful, wonderful thing happening, people directly breaking into the seat of power, trying to take over, just it's that they are not the right people, we should be doing this, not they." I don't accept this. I think that with a few big courageous exceptions like you Kurds, maybe some others up to a point in Bolivia and so on, today "this people," "the people" into whom democracy tells us to trust, this people is more and more divided, no longer exists. Now I will do, I think, something strange. It may sound totalitarian but it's meant in a radical democratic way. I think that we are all so caught in our divisions, the whole world is today in some kind of ideological civil war, that "the people"—the task of a revolution is not only to represent adequately people, but in the same way to make people, if you want to construct the people, to make people aware, sorry, of what they want. People don't simply know, "I want this," and then you go into politics like on a market, "Oh, this politician is telling what me what I want, that other is telling even better, I will vote for him," and so on and so forth. No, people need leaders or at least a leading organization because I will now do something very strange. I will quote, you know, the old car maker from United States who invented serially produced car making, Henry Ford. He said that he didn't follow what people wanted. He said that if he were to ask people, "What do you want?", people would have answered, "I want a better and stronger horse to pull our carriage." And he didn't give them a better, stronger horse; he gave them cars. And something like this is happening today. We shouldn't just ask for a better horse, for better functioning of what is here. We should ask for something that was, more than years ago, like a horse—we should want, we should demand or try to invent through leaders a better world. And to avoid a misunderstanding, a leader for me is not the one who tells you what you want, who gives you orders and so on. A true—you know, don't mystify the people. They are confused today. They are all caught in ideology, in their egotist problems, dreams. Ideology is, we can talk about more about this later, I just want to tell you now that ideology is not some abstract system of values and so on. Ideology is inscribed into your everyday experiences, like for me the best example of ideology is everyday racism. It's usually not even put in ideological terms. When you walk in the street and see a foreigner from some so-called third-world country and you are disturbed by him or her. You tell yourself, "Okay, I am not a racist, but I don't want to be too close to him," and so on and so forth. That's everyday life ideology. How we eat, how we marry, how we make love and so on. All this is ideology. And the message of a good leader is not, "No, I know better than you what you want," but it's, "I give you hope." It's like Bernie Sanders just sitting there: "I give you hope you can move beyond this, out of this." And another thing for what I think a good leader is needed is to make tough decisions. Because, as much as I like these emphatic moments of popular unity, half a million of people demonstrating and so on, I more and more think that the system can and was always able, the system of power, to accommodate with these outbursts. You wait a little bit in the shadows, then the enthusiasm fades away and you, things return to the old order. No, the problem is to translate this popular discontent into a new form of political organization. You have to make tough decisions. In this sense, only in this sense because this is a very dangerous metaphor, in this sense politics is like medicine, healthcare. You have to make tough decision or military command. You have to say, "Sorry, now we have to risk that thousands will die in that unit." Or we cannot take care of all the patients, some will die, who will die, and so on. These are horrible decisions. The best definition of leader—because I am an ordinary low guy, I also watch ordinary TV series, I warn you—I watched that American medical doctor series *New Amsterdam*, where an administrator says, tells an old doctor: "Leaders make choices that keep them awake at night. If you sleep well, you are not one of them, you are not a leader." This is for me a good leader. So it's not simply direct people's democracy. You need inspirational figures. We need force to organize it because again, it's not just political alienation and so on. It's also the other side which is in crisis today. We no longer can simply say "the people." Which people? People are divided and so on. What do they mean by this? For Marxists, people usually meant working class. But did you notice how, if you know a little bit of history, how in every epoch a specific group of workers functioned as a symbol of "they are the true proletarians"? For example, years ago in Europe, it was usually miners or steel workers who were like the real working class. Who is this today? There are many candidates and we have to accept this plurality. There are of course workers, exploited workers, especially in the third world. Then there are in the third world those who are not exploited in the usual sense—being hired, paid a wage and the capitalist or the state keeps the profit—but they are exploited in the sense that the cycle of capitalist production ruins their conditions of existence. For example, I read in the North of Canada, they are now doing, producing oil through that process, fracking and so on. And they are doing it, a lot of it in the land where only few, whatever you call them, Native Americans, the first people, live. They are not exploited directly; they even get some state support. But their condition because the land that is left after fracking is done is a destroyed land, polluted with chemicals and so on and so forth. So they are definitely also exploited. Then we have students with no chance of employment. We have precarious workers, living in great uncertainty. We have women who are doing work which is not caught in the capitalist process of valorization. They are doing unpaid work. And as intelligent analysis have shown, without this unpaid work of women and other family members, the ordinary capitalist exploitation cannot work. We, all these other forms have to be here. If today, that was the big lesson of my good friend the ex-Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera, that in these conditions it's madness to focus on the old working class. In many countries, working class is a little bit privileged with regard to unemployed, women and so on. They can do things that those truly exploited cannot even dream of doing, like—maybe this can interest you—in my country Slovenia, I must admit, I often opposed workers' strikes. Why? Not because I don't agree with the idea of workers striking, but because I learned that in Slovenia only those privileged workers, those with a firm job employed by the state—doctors, policemen, judges, professors—they can afford to strike. Ordinary workers in small companies cannot afford to strike. So, paradoxically, being a classical proletarian with a stable job is almost already a privilege today. And I think that this leftist dream that somehow we should all come together—women, students, workers, immigrants and so on—is very difficult to achieve. My friend Alain Badiou, whom you, I think, already kindly mentioned, he is even a pessimist here, I would not go as far as he does, but he even thinks that in Western Europe, in United States, workers are already as a group part of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy, privileged, totally corrupted, we cannot count on them. Then Badiou proposes as an *ersatz*, another emancipatory agent, what he calls nomadic proletarians—those the homeless people who emigrate to Europe and so on and so on. But even there I think things are not so simple because I read a very good analysis: Who comes to Europe as an emigrant? Mostly it's not the truly desperate from those countries like, I don't know, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. Those who come are—okay, there are also children, women—but most of them are very able young people, even with some financial stability because you know, to come from Afghanistan to Europe, you need thousands of dollars to do the, to bribe all the customers and so on and so forth. So I think that, and that's the sad strength of today's global capitalism, it's almost impossible to build a united front against him. What does this mean for democracy? I will now quote from somebody with whom I absolutely don't agree, but here he made a good point: the bestseller author Yuval Harari. He wrote that, I quote: "People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict." End of quote. So this I think is happening today. I think this is maybe the root, one of the roots of the crisis of liberal democracy. People like to say democracy implies differences and so on. Yes, but differences against the background of a basic pact. Like with you, the Kurds: you cannot say the solution is big democratic elections in all of Syria and Turkey. Yes, it would be nice, but I can well imagine—I don't know, this is pure hypothesis—in Turkey, Erdoğan mobilizing the crowd against you and presenting you as intruders and so on and so forth. Again, elections work when a certain solidarity is already here. We may oppose each other but we accept basic rules. And this is I think what is happening with the crisis of democracy today. In United States, we have now an almost, almost a war, an ideological civil war. We have half of the people, maybe a little bit more, who still remain liberal democrats with all the limitations, and then we have almost half of the people Trump followers, populists. And what is so interesting is that how this opposition, and they don't speak the same language, the country is falling apart. The crisis in the United States, you cannot resolve it by simple big democratic elections. You get, you get, you get two countries. The situation is totally mystified because Trump populists manipulated by many billionaires nonetheless act as representatives of the people, while democrats who also want to represent minorities and so on and so forth also often play a very strange game with ordinary people and so on and so forth. But what I want to emphasize is this. I think that liberal democracy which presupposes something that I'm tempted to call a basic social pact—by this I mean something very specific. As my favorite philosopher Hegel, the German idealist, pointed out, what keeps a society together really and incidentally, if I will ever be lucky to visit your part of the world, this is what would have interested me. You know, people say there are rules. Yes, there are rules that keep every society together. But then not all rules are explicit. There are rules that are not explicitly stated, there are unwritten rules, customs and so on. And that is today falling apart. This is I think the crisis of COVID that was triggered by the pandemic. You know, we had our everyday lives, you walk around, meet friends, socialize and so on and so forth. These everyday customs are threatened. And then authorities are of course giving orders, keep distance and so on and so on, but we are somehow deprived of this substance of our lives. Ethical substance, the unwritten rules, not the explicit written rules. Because you know, again, it's not enough to know the rules. You have also to know which rules you are allowed secretly to disobey. For example, a comical example: when I was young, it was the official morality was: "Don't have sex when you are not married," conservative. But then everybody expected you to engage in sexual life. You know, you were considered very weird if you didn't broke the explicit rules. Or the opposite paradox, my favorite: you are solicited, you are given a certain freedom on condition that you don't use that freedom. You know, this so society is a very complex example, and I think that Trump played a certain positive role in the sense that he ruined this ideological hegemony, the order of unwritten rules. And not only Trump did this in United States; this is happening all around the world, in Germany, in England and so on and so forth. But and so again, for example, United States, I don't see a solution. What should you do? People claim we should step all together, we are one nation. No, in some sense they are not one nation. They have less and less of ideological common ground. But here, I'm ready to go even a step further. We cannot simply say, "Yes, Trump is bad so we should get rid of Trump, Joe Biden and liberal democrats should win." No, we should never forget that Trump is what in psychiatry we call a symptom, a sign of something that was wrong in liberal democracy itself. Trump didn't fall from the moon. Now let me, so that I will not talk too long, just a couple of pages, let me make a step further here. And this is maybe the saddest thing of what is going on today, and I'm sure from what I've learned that in your part of the world things are more civilized, in spite of all the horrible suffering that you have there. We Europeans and Americans are, I'm afraid, the true barbarians today. Namely, the ethical catastrophe of Trump and new right-wing populists is this incredible degradation of public social life. You are able to make dirty jokes, to say obscenities—decency is disappearing. And here something very strange is happening today. I hope some of you know a wonderful book by Angela Nagle, an Irish lady living in the United States, *Kill All Normies*, where she describes how, I remember when I was young, late '60s, '70s, those in power spoke the official language of dignity, bombastic, patriotic, while we leftist protesters, you know, we made signs like this, used dirty words. We consider this subversive. But did you notice that now, this new so-called alt-right, alternative right, especially in the United States, they use dirty language, sexual obscenities, incredible vulgarity and so on? And this is a tragedy. The left is—at least the official liberal-democratic left—is retreating to old moralism, but even police brutality. Now the left wants to censor public space and so on and so forth. It's a total mess so that then the new right appears more and more as a partisan of human freedoms: you can talk dirty and so on, whatever you want, and the left as partisan of law and order, they want more police interventions and so on and so forth. Another element in this crisis, I'm approaching the end, don't be afraid, is this big motif that we find in, bombarded with by the media: that we live in a post-truth era. But here, I think things are a little bit more, a little bit more ambiguous. The idea is this one: with the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalism, rational argumentation no longer works, as we see also today with some reactions to the pandemic: the explosion of conspiracy theories and so on and so forth. Then the idea is that also with the digital media, there is no longer one public space, it's a dispersion, and also in theory you get so-called postmodern historicist who say there is no objective truth, we just have different subjective perspectives and so on and so forth. Now my position here is that: Of course this is true, every approach to society is already in some sense interested, engaged. I don't believe in objective truth. But this does not mean that all truths are equal. I'm not a relativist. Let me give you an example which will please the Jews. Look, when Nazis were saying, when they were taking power in Germany, that Jewish influence is too strong, and when they gave you some statistics like: more than half of the doctors in Berlin are Jewish, of the lawyers are Jewish and so on—probably they were telling something true. But nonetheless this factual truth was in the service of the anti-Semitic lie. What I want to tell you this is to repeat an old joke of mine that I like, not even a joke, a clinical observation by Jacques Lacan, my teacher in psychoanalysis, who said: when a husband is pathologically jealous of his wife, that she sleeps together with other men—even if his wife really sleeps with other men, his jealousy is still pathological. Because the problem is not: "Does his wife really sleep with other men or not?" The problem is: Why does he need jealousy to maintain his psychic stability and order and so on and so forth. So again, and the same goes for today's Israel. To talk about anti-Semitism today in Israel, you must talk also about what Israel itself is doing, for example, to the Palestinians on the West Bank. I think that our answer to oppression of Palestinians should not be, "Yes, they are justified, let's tolerate a little bit of anti-Semitism." No, the struggle against anti-Semitism in Europe and so on, and the struggle for Palestinian rights are two sides of the same struggle. We should not, we should to the end resist this crazy logic that there is a basic truth, but then small entities should be sacrificed to this truth. I don't know if I already mentioned this but here comes my big sympathy with you Kurds. I remember, you remember when Americans abandoned you to the interplay of Erdoğan Turkey and Russia and Syria and so on. Many of my friends agreed with Trump: "It's good that he did that," and they even reproached you that you were protected by Americans. And I told them, "Okay, it was a geopolitical mess, what should you have done? Should you have said, 'Yeah, I know America the greatest imperialist power supports us, so we should sacrifice ourselves for the anti-imperialist world struggle and so on and so forth'?" No, this is the basic lie that today in the politics embodied in you—not in you, in you as the sign place where this lie appears—as if, you know, a fundamental truth means that everybody has to sacrifice himself, his identity, to it. As even the guy who criticized me a lot, Noam Chomsky, if you remember, said: "Yes, I am against American intervention, but there, when they protected you as long as they did against Turkey and so on, Americans—I'm for them, I'm for them." Don't think in this mechanical terms. Politics are paradoxes, especially today in the new multi-centric world. You know, for example, take Myanmar. Some of my friends said that they support the *coup d'état* because those who were democratically elected were too close to the West and so on and so forth. This logic is horrible and you were its victims. But the last point I want to make is that you know those who talk about relativization of truth and so on and so forth, where I don't agree with them is when they say that we are now in the era of death of truth, post-truth. Wait a minute, as if there was a time when we lived in the era of truth. Take the Cold War: both sides were lying, maybe communist Soviet Union more, but both sides were totally lying. The point is just that each of the opposed sides—Western democracy, Soviet socialism—controlled its public space. Now this public space is exploding. And our task today is is what? Our task today is precisely not to dwell in this historicist relativism. You Kurds have your own vision, I don't know Turks have their own vision, others Afghanistans their own vision—we should all coexist. No, I claim that's the paradox, the basic lesson of Marxism that you embody: that truth is not neutral. In a country where there is oppression, you can formulate a truth about that country only from a position of those who are most radical fighters for freedom in that country. Truth is not an objective category. No, what you discover with an objective analyst is just how best to exploit people, how to manipulate them and so on and so forth. Truth is an engaged category. So that's my first lesson: we have to build a new universalism. You the Kurds are my model, not because you are interesting small guys who somehow found your, reasserted your identity. No, you interest me because you are a miracle, because not your fault, but because of crazy geopolitical games you are like salami sliced into, you know, Turkish part, Greek part and so on and so forth, and you embody the lie. And nobody is allowed to dismiss you as "Oh, that particular problem, let's not think about that." No, the world will live in a freer world where what is happening to you could no longer happen. That's important. Second thing, as for the truth and so on, what the case that I mentioned, how people accuse you of "But nonetheless you are supported by Americans, then you cannot be so good," and so on. No, you know what's the problem? The problem is that ideology today is not problematic when it lies, but when it lies with elements of truth. For example, let's take even Trump. He was basically a populist lie, but some things he said were partially true, like when he said how American big capital cooperates with China to outsource production to exploit, to keep the wages lower of American workers and so on and so forth. You know, ideology is most dangerous where when it lies with the truth. And nobody has to force you to abandon your truth because of some higher ideological interest, like let us say that in some crazy future constellation Russia would take over totally Syria, made a pact with Erdoğan against United States and Israel—I'm dreaming. And then people would say that's a big anti-imperialist achievement, so you Kurds you are off now. No, never, never, this should never, never happen. The measure of truth in politics is that you have a global vision in which nobody is sacrificed in this sense. But really to conclude, one page, I'm not lying, sorry that I was so long, really to conclude: so yes, democracy is still of some use, but it will have to be radically invented. You know what is typical thing today? Look Ukraine or even Belarus and so on. Okay, you have a bad dictator, it's easy to mobilize people to fight against him and "Eh, we want democracy." But then when you get democracy, you see that you have the same problems sometimes in an even worse form. For example, remember a great man: Nelson Mandela. They wanted end of apartheid and democracy. They got it, but now dissatisfaction of the black majority—there is even according to some sources more poverty, certainly more corruption and violence than under apartheid. So you know, democracy has to be reinvented. The dialectic of political process is not just that you pursue a certain goal. You try to do something, then in the process you discover that you have to redefine the goal itself. We have to rethink what we mean by democracy today. And here I will not teach you, we should all learn from you. So to end with an old joke that I often use in my books: there is the legendary Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn. He was a relatively progressive good guy, but he was well known for many of his nonsenses, but which were intelligent nonsenses. So once he got from his studio a report that press is complaining that in the scenarios of his films, dialogues, there are too many old clichés used. So he wrote a memo to people who wrote scenarios for his film telling them: "We urgently need more new clichés." That's what we need today in politics. We don't need big original things. We need clichés, clichés by this I mean customs, manners, how to organize in these crazy times a new mode of everyday life. That's the big problem for us, in developed countries maybe even more than with you. You know, we have health problem with the pandemic, we have economic problem, but I fear, and it's becoming more and more clear, that the biggest problem will be mental health. Violence is exploding because this everyday rituals, customs of people are broken. We are in a terrible situation of literally building new clichés, new customs. We have to construct new everyday life. And here, I'm not bluffing, we will all learn from you. We, Europe and United States, are ethically a catastrophe. We are lost today. So thank you very much, it was an honor for me.