Reconstructing Communism: Part 4 SYSTEM—Disorder, in Heaven
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-06-13 · 1:09:11 · 8,643 words
ideologypsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnesssexuality-genderreligion-theologycapitalismdemocracytechnology-ai-cyberspaceeveryday-lifegeopolitics-warcinema-art-culturerace-antisemitismhegel-dialecticsfascism-populism
Žižek opens with the Julian Assange case as an example of political brutality, then develops an extended argument about happiness as a dangerous ideological category. He contends that genuine happiness requires structural incompleteness, reminders of lack, a figure to blame, a paradise at proper distance, and that desire by definition disrupts happiness. The talk moves through Cambridge Analytica/positive psychology, Bhutanese 'Gross National Happiness,' Czechoslovakia under normalization, LGBT+ ideology, The Handmaid's Tale, and Donald Trump as a liberal fetish, concluding with a critique of identity politics and a call for a struggle over universality rather than particular identities.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “unwritten rules / background habits”
Žižek argues Trump's innovation is violating not explicit laws but the unwritten conventions that govern how laws are applied, thereby exposing and weaponising this hidden dimension.
Implicit in Žižek's discussion of ideology as self-manipulation rather than external imposition, following Marx's point that ideology is not fabricated by priests but reproduced by subjects themselves.
Žižek expands Marx's formula to two contemporary forms: literal drugs/pharmaceuticals (Xanax, crack) and populism ('the people'), arguing both serve an ideological tranquilising function.
as “happiness ideology / manipulations with happiness”
Žižek's thesis that 'maybe the most dangerous form of ideology today' is the use of happiness as justification for censorship, social control, and political manipulation.
Martin Seligman's movement, invoked to show that studying 'authentic happiness' is internally linked to military/intelligence nudging of populations, not merely externally abused.
as “cognitive military complex”
Žižek's phrase for the convergence of behavioral science, tech platforms, and defense/intelligence interests that produces population control through nudging rather than overt coercion.
Bhutan's official index replacing GNP, used by Žižek to show how happiness-measurement leads to ethnic cleansing of whoever disturbs the harmony.
One of Žižek's three structural conditions for happiness: a utopian elsewhere (West Germany for Czechoslovaks) that is close enough to motivate but not so close as to reveal its ordinariness.
Cited as the Freudian lesson that humans, unlike other animals, systematically destroy happiness when it comes too close.
as “desire (Lacanian ethics)”
Following Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis ('do not give way on your desire'), Žižek uses desire as the force that necessarily disrupts happiness by compelling one to move beyond settled equilibrium.
Žižek argues happiness always requires a figure of the Big Other, whether Communist Party, God, or the state, onto whom one can displace blame and sustain enjoyment.
Following Chesterton, Žižek argues Christianity does not suppress pleasure but paradoxically enables it: the rigid outer guard of prohibition makes inner enjoyment possible and even more intense.
as “the name of the father”
Žižek notes (citing Lacan) that even transgender transition narratives require a good functioning paternal figure, showing the persistence of the symbolic father in supposedly post-patriarchal ideologies.
as “authentic free choice as experienced necessity”
Drawing on Kant and Schelling, Žižek argues that the most radical free choices (love, gender identity) are always experienced as already-decided, hence as necessity from the standpoint of the conscious ego.
Žižek's resolution of the social-constructionism/essentialism tension in gender identity: the free choice is experienced as already-accomplished necessity, drawing on Kant and Schelling.
Fredric Jameson's concept, applied to The Handmaid's Tale: depicting a dystopian near-future to make the audience feel grateful for the present rather than questioning it.
as “fetishism (political)”
Trump is described as a liberal fetish, the last thing the liberal eye fixes on before having to see class struggle, exactly as the Freudian fetish screens the threatening perception.
Žižek's specific claim that liberal fascination with Trump functions as a fetish that blocks recognition of class struggle as the underlying antagonism.
Žižek defines fascism as identity politics transposed onto class relations ('every class in its proper place') and argues liberal identity politics conceals a secret claim to white universality.
as “struggle of universalities”
Žižek's alternative to identity politics: oppressed groups should not fight for their particular identity but contest and redefine the dominant universality itself.
Stories he reaches for 6
Aquinas in the Summa Theologica addresses whether blessed souls can see hell, and argues they feel satisfaction at 'divine justice' rather than sadistic pleasure. Žižek proposes a counter-reading: paradise is boring, the real orgy is in hell, and the damned periodically perform suffering for the heavenly audience's benefit, exactly as Western consumers need TV images of Third World suffering to enjoy their own comfortable lives.
“Once a week, let us say, Devil's administration comes: 'Sorry guys, now for a quarter of an hour we will be observed from heaven, so pretend that you suffer.'”
You live a pleasant life, drinking with friends, one-night stands, stable work, then fall passionately in love: jealousy, loss of concentration, total disruption. Žižek uses the phenomenology of falling in love to illustrate that desire necessarily disturbs happiness.
“All of a sudden you fall passionately in love. Can you imagine a worse catastrophe? All the balance of your life is disturbed.”
Žižek argues the Soviet 1968 intervention paradoxically saved the Prague Spring: without it, the reform communism would have had to either capitulate to the West or limit democratization, and failed. The crushing preserved it as an ideal, making people happier than success would have.
“I claim that the Soviet intervention in '68 which crushed the so-called Prague Spring, saved the Prague Spring.”
Labour members told Žižek there was a 'great sigh of relief' in Corbyn's circle that they didn't actually win, they could say they almost made it without having to implement austerity themselves. Mirrors the Tsipras referendum story.
“In the circle around Corbyn, it was a great sigh of relief, you know, that we didn't have to do it.”
A conservative American TV ad with countryside imagery and beef: 'Beef. Real food for real people.' Žižek cites it as a perfect emblem of populist anti-tech rhetoric that masks its own reliance on technological sophistication.
“"Beef. Real food for real people."”
An Italian friend told Žižek that Italian Catholic girls pray to the Virgin Mary: 'Oh thou who has conceived without making love, allow me to make love without conceiving.' The joke captures how Christian prohibition enables enjoyment rather than blocking it.
“"Oh thou who has conceived without making love, allow me to make love without conceiving," you know. Always—and it works!”
Works invoked 6
Žižek admits he enjoyed watching the series, but applies the same ideological critique as to the novel.
Orthodoxy book
G.K. Chesterton's book; quoted at length on Christianity as 'the only frame for pagan freedom'; Žižek uses it to argue that Christian prohibition paradoxically enables rather than negates pleasure.
Summa Theologica book
Aquinas's masterwork; Žižek uses the passage on whether blessed souls observe the damned to set up his own 'hell is the real party' counter-reading.
Girl film
2018 Belgian film by Lukas Dhont about a trans teen ballerina; Žižek defends it against LGBT activist attacks for depicting suffering, calling the attacks an instance of the happiness ideology suppressing honest witness.
Orwell's preface; quoted for the line 'If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,' which Žižek invokes to defend graphic description of disturbing cases.
Divina Commedia book
Žižek notes that Inferno is by far the most interesting part and that even in Dante one senses 'fuck paradise'; used to support his argument that paradise is boring and the interesting action is in hell.
People invoked 29
Jeremiah Glick positive
Black philosopher and friend of Žižek; wrote on Haiti revolution and Toussaint Louverture; praised as 'simply a very good philosopher'; held up as a model for confronting identity politics honestly.
Dante Alighieri positive
The Divina Commedia is used to illustrate that Inferno is far more interesting than Paradiso, supporting Žižek's argument that 'paradise is a pretty boring place.'
Marquis de Sade positive
Cited to argue that uninhibited pleasure (Sade's world) is 'pure mechanic production' with nothing to do with intense sexual enjoyment, pleasure requires the obstacle of prohibition.
Briefly mentioned as having used the synagogue ('who does he think he is to say he is nothing') joke somewhere.
Steve Bannon negative
Described as 'vulgar' and internally inconsistent: cites Heidegger against Silicon Valley manipulation while himself deploying the most sophisticated digital manipulation via Cambridge Analytica.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the ethics of psychoanalysis ('do not give way on your desire'), for the name of the father's role in sexual relations, and as the source of the framework for analysing desire vs. happiness.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Cited as an example of the happiness gospel ('all living beings strive toward happiness'); Žižek says 'here I have problems with him' and immediately refutes the claim.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my favorite Christian theologian'; quoted at length from Orthodoxy on Christianity as 'the only frame for pagan freedom', Žižek uses this to argue prohibition enables rather than negates pleasure.
Margaret Atwood negative
Žižek says 'I don't like the lady' but admits The Handmaid's Tale is 'very readable' and that he enjoyed both the book and TV series; he uses it as 'ideology at its purest', nostalgia for the present that prevents questioning how liberalism produced its own monsters.
Toussaint Louverture positive
Referenced as the subject of Jeremiah Glikes's work on echoes of the Haiti revolution in art.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek says he uses Butler's performativity concept 'viciously' to show that cheap LGBT+ ideology could more consistently tell trans people to performatively reconstruct their identity rather than undergo painful transition, but doesn't, because it covertly relies on essentialism.
Donald Trump positive
Žižek calls Trump the 'ultimate liberal fetish' and a 'monster' produced by liberal society, but argues the Left can and should learn from his technique of violating unwritten background habits rather than explicit laws.
Used as an example of the happiness/desire structure in politics: his circle was reportedly relieved not to have won the election, as this preserved the near-miss dream.
Rumored to have called the 2015 Greek referendum hoping to lose so as to avoid having to implement austerity himself, parallel to the Corbyn case.
Martin Seligman negative
Founder of Positive Psychology; described as 'that evil guy' whose program to 'nudge' people toward well-being is intrinsically linked to military/intelligence manipulation, not externally corrupted by it.
George Orwell positive
Žižek says 'I don't always like him' but quotes with approval his preface to Animal Farm: 'If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'
Fredric Jameson positive
Referred to as 'our friend'; his concept 'nostalgia for the present' is directly applied to The Handmaid's Tale.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek expresses sympathy and admiration: met him shortly before the embassy expulsion, says he 'knew everything' and was 'a successful spy' in the sense of receiving voluntary leaks from disgusted intelligence officials; calls the brutality of his treatment a deliberate political message.
Mentioned only in the context of Bannon citing him; Žižek does not engage with Heidegger's own ideas here.
Cited by Jeremiah Glikes as an example of black fundamentalism / 'black sins'; Žižek uses the example to show that honest anti-racism requires acknowledging all sides' particularities.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower; Žižek calls him 'one of the heroes of our time' and uses his story to introduce the convergence of happiness research and political manipulation.
Lukas Dhont positive
Director of The Girl (2018); Žižek defends the film against attacks by LGBT activists, arguing it honestly depicts suffering rather than selling a happiness narrative.
Mao Zedong positive
Cites Mao's formula 'there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent' as his guiding framework for the talk; presents it as genuine dialectical optimism, not false cheerfulness.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited alongside Kant as the German Idealist source for the thesis that authentic free choice is always experienced as necessity.
Briefly mentioned in passing: the Gillette ad quote came from Toronto, and Žižek notes 'maybe this is some reason why Toronto gave birth to Jordan Peterson,' declining to develop the point.
Karl Marx positive
Cites the 'opium of the people' formula, carefully corrects it ('not opium FOR the people') to emphasize that ideology is self-manipulation not external imposition; extends it to the two new opiums.
Sigmund Freud positive
The death drive and the concept of unconscious choice are the key Freudian references; Žižek calls it 'the Freudian lesson' that humans systematically destroy happiness.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited as one of the German Idealists (along with Schelling) whose insight that authentic free choice is experienced as necessity resolves the constructionism/essentialism debate.
Thomas Aquinas positive
Cited from the Summa Theologica on whether blessed souls observe hell; Žižek admires the intellectual honesty of the problem while replacing Aquinas's 'sophist pseudo-solution' with his own darkly comic answer.
What it argues
happiness as ideological weapon and ambiguous categorydesire as the necessary disturbance of happinessthe manipulation of populations through positive psychology and data analyticsChristianity as the frame that makes pagan enjoyment possibleLGBT+ ideology and the tension between social constructionism and essentialismidentity politics as fake universalityTrump as liberal fetish concealing class struggle
Dialectical moves 9
“The Soviet intervention saved the Prague Spring—precisely because it was crushed, it remained as a dream; had it succeeded, it would have been a fiasco.”
Failure preserves desire by preventing the disillusionment that actualisation would bring; the crushed utopia is more potent than the realised one.
“Trump is not the enemy of liberal democracy from outside but its own fetish from within—the last thing a liberal sees before seeing class struggle.”
The object of liberal horror is simultaneously what shields liberals from confronting the class antagonism their own politics ignores.
“Christianity is not the negation of pagan pleasure but its best frame—the outer guard of prohibition is what makes inner enjoyment possible.”
The apparent opposite of pleasure (religious prohibition) turns out to be its enabling condition.
“Happiness is not when you get what you want but when you almost get it and miss it—and can blame someone else for missing it.”
The structure of happiness is the structure of failed desire: full satisfaction would destroy the equilibrium happiness depends on.
“Authentic free choice at its most radical is always experienced as necessity—you discover you already are in love, you did not decide.”
The deepest freedom is indistinguishable from determinism at the level of conscious experience; the choice was made at an unconscious level.
“The positive psychologists who sincerely studied happiness already implied the military manipulation—it is not an external abuse but an immanent consequence of their orientation.”
What appears as a corruption of innocent science is already present in the science's own inner logic.
“The most radical self-critical white liberals are the ones who most secretly maintain the position of universality—their humility is the highest form of white supremacy.”
Performative self-abasement is the mechanism by which a group retains the power to judge and define universality for others.
“Bhutan achieved Gross National Happiness by ethnically cleansing the minority that disturbed it—happiness as a state goal becomes the justification for eliminating whatever disturbs it.”
The drive to measure and maximise collective happiness necessarily produces exclusion and violence against those deemed incompatible with the happy norm.
“Mainstream LGBT+ ideology says gender is a social construct for cisgender subjects but suddenly becomes essentialist ('your true self') for trans subjects.”
The discourse claims anti-essentialism but covertly relies on essentialism at the very moment it matters most, revealing an internal contradiction.
Claims 20
asserts
The most dangerous form of ideology today is the manipulation of happiness: everything—censorship, surveillance, social control—can be justified as a means to protect people from unhappiness.happiness as ideology
asserts
Cambridge Analytica's origin in happiness research is not an external abuse of that research by bad actors; the link to military/intelligence nudging is implied by positive psychology's own internal orientation.positive psychology and political manipulation
rejects
Happiness is not the natural state of humans: the death drive ensures that when happiness comes too close, we destroy it.the claim that all living beings strive toward happiness
asserts
Happiness requires three structural conditions: basic material satisfaction with occasional reminders of lack, a figure of authority to blame, and a utopian elsewhere at proper distance.the structure of happiness
asserts
Desire and happiness are fundamentally incompatible: happiness is achieved when you almost get what you desire but miss it, and can blame someone else for the failure.the relationship between desire and happiness
asserts
The Soviet intervention in 1968 saved the Prague Spring by preserving it as an unrealised dream rather than letting it fail as a real political project.the Prague Spring and the structure of political desire
asserts
Christianity does not negate pagan pleasure but is its best frame: the outer prohibition makes inner enjoyment more vivid and available.Christianity and pleasure
rejects
The dominant LGBT+ happiness ideology falls into the trap of claiming we would be happy if only external patriarchal constraints were removed, thereby avoiding the constitutive antagonism in human sexuality.happiness-based LGBT+ ideology
asserts
Authentic transgender experience reveals a distortion and antagonism inscribed in human sexuality as such—they are 'sex at its purest'—not a pathology to be normalized into happiness.the philosophical significance of transgender experience
asserts
The gender-identity debate contains a hidden contradiction: when it comes to cisgender subjects, gender is a contingent social construct; but for trans subjects, all of a sudden there is an authentic inner self—a covert essentialism.inconsistency in mainstream gender-identity discourse
reframes
This contradiction is resolved by German Idealism: authentic free choice is always experienced as necessity, making the constructionism/essentialism opposition false.the social constructionism vs. essentialism debate in gender theory
asserts
The Handmaid's Tale functions as ideological nostalgia for the present, making viewers feel grateful for liberal society rather than questioning how Trump and Alt-Right emerged from within it.The Handmaid's Tale as ideology
asserts
Donald Trump is the liberal fetish: the object that liberal gaze fixes on in order not to see class struggle as the underlying antagonism.Trump and liberal ideology
asserts
Fascism is best defined as identity politics transposed onto class relations—every class should stay in its proper place rather than struggle.fascism and identity politics
asserts
White liberal self-flagellation ('we are guilty Europeans') secretly reserves universality for white liberals, who retain the position of judge over minority identity performances.white liberal identity politics and covert universalism
asserts
The true fight against racism is not a coexistence of particular identities but a struggle over universality: oppressed groups should contest the dominant universality, not just assert their own particularity.anti-racism and universality
asserts
WikiLeaks, whatever one says about it, was never accused of spreading false news—distinguishing it from the fake-news mainstream.WikiLeaks and media credibility
asserts
Trump's real innovation is not breaking laws but violating the unwritten background habits that govern how laws are applied, and the Left should learn to do the same.Trump's political technique and what the Left can learn from it
asserts
Horror movies and Third World disaster news on TV function as a controlled temporary glimpse into 'hell' that reconciles Western viewers with their own alienated but comfortable existence.ideology and media
asserts
The right to tell people what they do not want to hear is the core of genuine liberty and effective criticism, and shocking detail is necessary to break ideological complacency.free speech and the ethics of disturbing communication
Quotes 15
“If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”George Orwell · free speech and the ethics of disturbing communication
“The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations… But inside that inhuman guard, you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men. For Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as the enabling frame for enjoyment
“The biggest achievement of the new cognitive military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary. Individuals are much better controlled and nudged in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents.”Slavoj Žižek · cognitive military complex and post-coercive control
“Maybe all living beings, but definitely not humans. If something characterizes us humans is: whenever happiness comes too close, you find a way to destroy it.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive and the human incapacity for happiness
“Happiness is a pagan category… happiness is a way to avoid your desire.”Slavoj Žižek · happiness vs. desire
“Stand by your desire, do not compromise your desire.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian ethics of desire
“The best definition that I can imagine of fascism is that fascism is identity politics transposed onto relations within classes.”Slavoj Žižek · fascism as identity politics of class
“Donald Trump is the ultimate fetish… the last thing that a liberal sees before he sees class struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as liberal fetish screening class struggle
“The real fight against racism is not a coexistence of particular identities. It's a struggle of universalities.”Slavoj Žižek · universality vs. identity politics in anti-racism
“We should not fight for our particular identity; we should fight to redefine your universality.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-racist strategy as contestation of universality
“The more you humiliate yourself—'We are guilty Europeans'—the more you reserve, maintain for yourself the position of universality.”Slavoj Žižek · white liberal self-abasement as covert universalism
“Authentic free choice at its most radical is always experienced as necessity.”Slavoj Žižek · free choice as experienced necessity (Kant/Schelling)
“There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent.”Slavoj Žižek · Maoist dialectical optimism in crisis
“Trump does something that you cannot say is directly against the law, but it's obvious that, to use the standard expression, this is not how it was meant to be used.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump violating unwritten rules rather than explicit laws
“LGBT are ethical heroes, my God. But not in the predominant ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic vs. ideological LGBT+ heroism
Transcript 3 turns
Slavoj Žižek
You know, what is happening now with Julian Assange is really horrible and sad. I don’t know if you noticed in the media two things from the last weeks. First, you know, when they dragged him to prison from the Ecuadorian embassy, all his stuff was there—computers, books, manuscripts. He wrote with his hand, I heard. The manuscript is there for two books and so on and so on. And you know what happened with that? Ecuador invited, not even the British, American authorities to take possession of that. I mean, it’s pretty shameful. And second thing, this is a nice pressure, it happened today, it was in the news at eleven, that some Arab name—without any bad taste racist point, I don’t know how to pronounce it—British Home Secretary, Minister of Interior, already signed the order for his extradition to the United States. I mean, okay. My only reaction is, just bear in mind, remember how even a couple of months ago, Assange was mocked, you know, "Ooh, paranoiac, who wants him, what a tradition, he is a coward, if he just surrenders himself, he will be for one month in a jail, then he will be free," and so on. Now we know what is happening. And at least with all this fake news madness, I hope you noticed something. Whatever people say about WikiLeaks, not even once were they accused of spreading false news. And even I didn't quite believe him, but when I met him the last time, I made the jump to London like a couple of weeks before they threw him out of the embassy. He knew everything. I mean, he was really—now I’m not joking—a successful spy. You know that? And it’s a beautiful espionage because many people in British and American CIA secret services simply were disgusted by what these two powers are doing and they voluntarily informed him about it. So he knew everything. Which is why, do you remember, two weeks before he was dragged out of the embassy, WikiLeaks did raise hell? And again, media laughed again and so on and so on. Just I think that, you know what really hurts me? The Americans could have done it in a little bit more appropriate, polite way, but I claim that's the message: the brutality of it, how it is done. Enough. Let me first explain my title: Disorder Under Heaven. As you, I hope, all know, this is a reference to my favorite Mao Zedong's formula: "There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent." And I think precisely today, when there is obviously disorder under heaven—political disorder, potentially economic, ecological, and so on—that we should follow this Mao statement, not in the sense of false optimism, but don't lose nerves, that we should try to see the new opening here. Like, precisely in such confused situations, we get a chance. One way that I always, when people wonder why I am saying this, one example would be—now Avital will be mad again—let's learn from Trump. You know what Trump is really doing? Mostly, he doesn't directly break the law, but in any civilized society, you have explicit laws, but then you have, of course—that's the life in a community—there are complex unwritten rules, habits, and so on, about how to apply the law. And Trump does, breaks not the law, breaks these unwritten habits. He does something that you cannot say is directly against the law, but it's obvious that, to use the standard expression, this is not how it was meant to be used. For example, do you remember when, it's already two, three months ago, when he declared—how was it called?—state of emergency, national emergency, because of the immigrant threat? Some conservatives were shocked by it, and they were right. They said, "Wait a minute, this—" because, you know, proclaiming state of emergency was meant not if people from Honduras approach Mexican border. It was meant when there is a mega natural catastrophe, nuclear war, or whatever. But some conservatives got into a panic. You know why? Because they said, "Wait a minute, what if the next Democratic president will proclaim—will proclaim state of emergency for global warming?" Yes, exactly here we should learn from Trump. You know, he taught us how to not even break the rules, but break the, violate the unwritten background. Okay, but let's go on. So, I will focus today not on the general outline of the situation we are in—we know we are in some kind of apocalyptic times, we are approaching some zero point in ecology, it's clear; in new developments in digital technology, controlling us and so on; and in with question of immigration, moving, people moving around, borders, and so on and so on. But that we all know. I want just to focus on how we experience these confused times in our ideology. First, I will repeat, maybe you don't know it, just an old formula of mine that I like. You know, Marx's famous formula of religion as the opium of the people. First, be careful. Marx doesn't say "opium for the people" because this would have meant this primitive idea that there is some evil secret society of priests or whatever which fabricates ideology. No, Marx's basic rule is ideology is not simple external manipulation. You manipulate yourself. People, even the Stalinists, even cynics, secretly believe in some kind of ideology. But I think today we should expand or rephrase Marx's formula. Today we have two new modes of the opium of the people. And you can guess which are the two: opium and the people, literally. First, it's opium in the broad sense of the term, from these daily pills that we are taking—Xanax or whatever—up to psychic pills to calm you down, more serious, up to serious drugs—crack, opium, and so on and so on. And I think it's already our daily bread. I read some analysis that in United States, in a typical campus, to percent of people there are already on some kind of drugs. Now, this tells a lot: that even our normal psychic reproduction is no longer possible without support in chemistry. The second opium are the people: populism. But this is well known. Now I approach to my topic. I claim that maybe the most dangerous form of ideology today are the manipulations with happiness. Everything can be justified as an instrument—maybe sometimes painful instrument—to make people happy. This is in China, but not only in China; in the West also. The main justification of the control of public space, of internet, and so on, that it will disturb the people, it will make the people unhappy. So, censorship is justified as a mode of protecting individuals from traumatic experiences which threaten to disturb their happiness. Let me tell you, I'm sorry if some of you know it, I use this example in one of my books, how I got into trouble because of this. I read a report in Canadian media, I think it was some two, three years—yes, three years ago, It was a quite terrifying case when a white guy—his, disgusting guy, his name is Bradley Barton—was accused of killing an indigenous sex worker, as they say today. Incidentally, I don't like; I prefer "prostitute." You know why? You see, this is another of these protecting us from traumatic news. Of course, I know why they say "sex worker." It's not so offensive, the word "prostitute" has certain connotation. But the bad thing is that it normalizes the situation. "Oh, what's the problem? Selling your body is just like selling your—" you know, it normalizes the thing. So, okay. He killed her while they were making love. And it was disgusting because there was no denial; he didn't deny anything. His lawyers, this Bradley—this guy's lawyers—instructed him to confess anything but just to claim that it was—that the rough sex was consensual and that the woman aroused him so much that he couldn't control himself. He wasn't responsible for anything. And now comes for me the truly traumatic part. What he did is, while they were making love, he—to be extremely vulgar—pulled his penis out and inserted another thing into her vagina, a big knife, and then slowly cut her up. It's disgusting. But now comes—if you think this is horrible, disgusting, wait, how did they say, you ain't heard nothing yet. You know what? It's breathtaking, I couldn't believe it. You know what his defenders did, and the court allowed it? To prove, by a detailed analysis of cuts around the deceased woman's vagina, to prove it that it was done not as a conscious act but in a trance—I warn you, this is hard, but listen to this guy—by, they brought her torso, real body, into the court, set it like let's say you are the jurors, set it on the table, and the defense lawyers—you see this cut, you see that cut, and so on and so on. First, there is here a clear anti-feminist and racism. Can you even imagine if the victim were to be an upper-class white lady, that they would have done this? Okay, it's disgusting. And yeah, incidentally, just so that you don't worry, the guy walked out of the courtroom free. It's really disgusting, I mean. But now I come to my point. When I, and I even I have certain limits, I mean, that is to say, even if there were to be pictures available, that's too much even for me, I would never have used them. But I just did what I did to you now: I described even more vaguely the situation. And a couple of times, I was once even interrupted, attacked, by this pseudo-deep argument that by describing what happened, I was—I have shown solidarity with the brutal act, that in a pornographic way, I was repeating the crime. I don't buy this. You know why? And the matter is more serious because I think that when disgusting things like this one happen, the only way to really hit the people is, up to a certain degree—I'm not saying you should show the torso there and so on—you have to shock them. I don't believe in this soft downplaying, that you just give a soft description and so on and so on, without hurting anyone. You neutralize it in some way. Or here I like to quote George Orwell—I don't always like him, but he has a wonderful sentence in the forward to his Animal Farm, where he wrote that, quote Orwell, "If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." And you know, because again, I don't think criticism, when you try to arouse somebody, works without this at least a little bit of this shocking moment. I think I told to the students already in my class another example. For example, when we talk about Holocaust, Auschwitz, and so on. I can tell you what triggered me. One thing is, told in gas chambers, blah, blah, blah, all that, okay. But you know what was the detail, I read it in some history of German concentration camps, that shocked me? That the Germans produced serially—serially, I mean, as an instrument in factories—you know the nut-cracking instrument? Like, round and then two handles to crack nuts. Okay, they produced testicle crackers. Sorry, but this was the detail for me which shocks you. And I think that, you see, this is why I think that I don't care if I ruin your happiness. You have to be, at least in a certain way and so on and so on, you have to be shocked. I don't mean—your happiness has to be disturbed. Now, let me go a little bit more theoretically even into this. Now comes a more substantial line, because I will try to problematize the very notion of happiness. If there is a figure which stands out, I think, as one of the heroes of our time, it is Christopher Wylie. I hope I pronounce it correctly. A gay Canadian vegan who, at twenty-four, came up with an idea that led to the foundation of, you know what they did, Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain's EU membership, and before it, it was crucial in Donald Trump's election campaign, and so on and so on. Wylie's plan was to break into Facebook, harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the United States, and then to use this information to create sophisticated profiles of millions of people and then target them with political ads and so on and so on. At a certain point, Wylie was genuinely freaked out. He said, I quote: "It's insane. The company has created psychological profiles of million Americans. And now they want to work with Pentagon. It's like Nixon on steroids," end of quote. Now, okay, we know this. But what makes this story so fascinating is first, that it combines elements which we usually perceive as opposites. You know, if you listen to Steve Bannon, how he presents Alt-Right. It's always this anti-technological—now I have the lowest blow against you that you can imagine—he presents himself as this anti-digital exploitation. His point is that if guys from Silicon Valley win, our democracy is over, ordinary people will be totally manipulated, and so on and so on. Then comes the—you know to which philosopher he was referring? Heidegger. Steve Bannon is positively referring to Heidegger. He said we have to learn from Heidegger of the dangers of technology and so on and so on. He has shown to a journalist, who—German journalist, to fascinate him—some two-volume A Life of Heidegger, and says, "Read this guy and you will see why Silicon Valley is dangerous." I apologize, it's vulgar, of course. But what interests me is this, this open inconsistency. On the one hand, so the Alt-Right idea is that what is behind the liberals are these new corporate guys like Facebook, Zuckerberg, whatever you want, who all manipulate us and we should allow ordinary people to create the space where they can resist all these manipulations and so on and so on. And like—along in this populist vein—this is maybe my favorite conservative publicity for beef meat, eating beef, that I saw years ago on American TV. I loved it. It's like countryside picnic, countryside music, they roast beef, blah, blah, just—and then just inscription: "Beef. Real food for real people." Kind of like that. What, but you see the first big inconsistency, and this you should always bear in mind. Precisely the people who justify themselves as the voice of the ordinary people against technological manipulations and so on, now we learned from Cambridge Analytica and so on, they used the most sophisticated technological manipulations and so on and so on to win. Now, second thing that I find even more shocking is the bizarre intersection of research on topics like love and kindness with defense and intelligence interests. Why does a research into happiness draw so much interest from British and American intelligence agencies like DARPA, US Government Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and so on and so on? The researcher who personifies this intersection is Martin Seligman. In '98, he founded the Positive Psychology movement dedicated to the study of psychological traits and habits that foster authentic happiness and well-being, spawning an enormous industry of popular self-help books. At the same time, his work attracted interest and funding from the military as a central part of its soldier resilience initiative. So even Cambridge Analytica, originally it was a group investigating human happiness. What makes human happy and so on and so on. And this intersection, I claim—now comes my more problematic radical thesis—this intersection, guys who want to manipulate us and so on technologically for political purposes are guys who began with researching happiness, is not externally imposed on the behavioral sciences by bad political manipulators. It's not, "Oh, first the guys wanted sincerely to study happiness, then bad military secret intelligence manipulators came and abused it." It is implied by their immanent orientation. Another programmatic quote from that evil guy Seligman: "The aim of these programs is not simply to analyze our subjective states of mind, but to discover means by which we can be nudged in this direction of our true in the direction of our true well-being as positive psychologists understand it, which includes attributes like resilience and optimism," end of quote. So after the outbreak of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, all these events and tendencies were, of course, extensively covered by the liberal media. And the overall image emerging from it, combined with what we also know about the link between the latest developments in biogenetics, provides a terrifying image of new forms of social control which make the good old 20th-century totalitarianism a rather primitive and clumsy machine of control. The biggest achievement of the new cognitive military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary. Individuals are much better controlled and nudged in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents. Now, what are the implications of this? As is often the case, a developing Third World country spelled out the sociopolitical consequences of this notion of happiness. It's quite a sad story. It's the Kingdom of Bhutan, you know, not Nepal but the smaller one, north of India. Two—two decades ago, the Kingdom of Bhutan decided to focus on no longer on Gross National Product, GNP, but Gross National Happiness, GNH. The idea was again the brainchild of their ex-king, who sought to steer Bhutan into the modern world while preserving its unique identity. With the pressure of globalization and materialism mounting, the popular king ordered a state agency to calculate how happy the kingdom's people were. Officials said they had already conducted a survey of around a thousand people and draw up a list of parameters from being—for being happy, similar to the development index which is tracked by the United Nations. But already here we have—now you will say, what's so bad about it? There was already here a very ominous twist. Then they discovered two years later that the main disturbance to their harmonious social being is some ethnic minority. And they did, of course, a nice ethnic cleansing, just on behalf of—on behalf of raising Gross National Happiness and so on and so on. But it's not enough again to say that this is the political exploitation of happiness. I want to go a step further and claim that the notion of happiness itself is very ambiguous in its implications. Let me give you a couple—maybe you know some of them, I apologize in advance—examples. I was—maybe I even used this story here ten years ago. I was some years ago, I think it was Lithuania, Vilnius, their capital, and we debated: when are people happy? And we came to a nice unequivocal result. Czechoslovakia, in those darkest Husák years, you know, in '68 they had almost this democratic socialism, it was crushed by the Soviet intervention, and then they had those years of so-called re-normalization. Why were people, one can seriously claim, happy there? Three conditions, I claim, established then. First, for happiness, your material needs should be basically satisfied. Basically satisfied, but not too satisfied. If you get, for example, coffee all the time in the supermarkets, you get used to it, no? It must be like that once a month you don't get coffee, because this makes you aware all the other days how lucky you are to have it. And this was exactly the situation there. People lived a safe life, it was a kind of a modest welfare society with limitations which precisely reminded you how happy you are. We in developed West don't have these limitations, so we are not so happy. Second thing, second extremely important feature. We all agreed on this. For people to be happy, you shouldn't have democracy which is taken seriously. Because if democracy really works—okay, even it doesn't really—if it works in the sense that ordinary people themselves experience themselves as the one who ultimately really decide their fate, that's not good, you worry too much. You have to have some figure of other political authority on whom you could put the blame for everything. And that was, in those dark years, the role of the Communist Party. As a friend from Czechoslovakia told me, even if the weather is like here and I blame him, two-three years, two-three days ago, all that storm and so on, "Oh, Communists are guilty," you know, fuck it. Like, Communists were blamed for everything. This makes—and I remember from my own country, it was a little bit of this—this makes life very easy, you know. Like, you know whom to blame, you don't feel responsible. This is second. And third condition of happiness: you must have an image of paradise, of place where things are really good, and this paradise has to be at the proper distance. Not too close, not easily accessible, because if it is, then you see it's basically the same shit as where we are. But also not too distant, because then it's just a vague dream. They had it; it was West Germany, of course. You know, because Communist authorities in the 80s at least tolerated watching Western TV and so on and so on. I seriously think that all these three features constituted a kind of perfect happiness. I—because at the same time, you know, it was no longer the old totalitarianism. You were allowed your private life, your niche. If you didn't mess with politics, it was relatively comfortable to live there. In this sense, to make a place further, I think that what disturbs happiness? Desire. By desire, I mean the force which compels you to move beyond, to disturb this fragile but nonetheless stability of happiness. To give an example that I use all the time: let's say you live a relatively happy life, not being in love—love is a catastrophe. You know, like, you drink with friends in the evening, maybe you have here and there one-night stands and so on, life is nice. In your job goes good. Then all of a sudden you fall passionately in love. Can you imagine a worse catastrophe? All the balance of your life is disturbed, you worry only about this, you are either jealous or nervous or whatever, you lose concentration for other things and so on and so on. Happiness is thus in itself confused, indeterminate, very ambiguous notion. I like this German anecdote: a German immigrant to the United States is asked, "Are you happy?" You know what's his answer? "Yeah, yeah, I'm happy here, *aber glücklich bin ich nicht*." Like, it's not the same. So I think that—now I will become a Christian—happiness is a pagan category. For pagans, the goal of life is life is to live a happy life. The idea to live happily ever after, I think, is a Christianized version of paganism. And religious experience and political activity themselves are considered the highest form of happiness. No wonder that Dalai Lama itself, and here I have problems with him, begins almost all his popular books with some kind of a gospel of happiness. He usually begins with "All living beings strive towards happening," sorry, "towards happiness." My instant answer is: maybe all living beings, but definitely not humans. If there is, and that's Freudian lesson of death drive, if something characterizes us humans is: whenever happiness comes too close, you find a way to—you find a way to destroy it. Why? Because—now I will try to be a little bit more precise. You know when we are happy, I claim? Let's say you have an official goal, you strive for something. But secretly we all know that getting what you dream about is by definition always a nightmare. So I think happiness is when you almost get it but miss it. And it's crucial that A: you can blame somebody else for missing it, but then you are happy for almost getting it but nonetheless even more happy for not getting it. This is, I think, the bad conformist—happiness is a way to avoid your desire. Let me give you here some—some political examples here, to provoke my Czech friends. I claim that the Soviet intervention in '68 which crushed the so-called Prague Spring, saved the Prague Spring. You know why? Because imagine Soviet Union not intervening. Sooner or later, it would have been a fiasco. Either the Commie—the liberal Communists of Czechoslovakia would have to simply capitulate to the West, or they would have to set some limits. "Sorry guys, that's the limit of democratization," and so on and so on. I—I claim that for reasons of social analysis that I can't develop it now, that a dream of a different social democratic socialism that would successfully compete with the West was not a serious option there. But precisely because it was crushed, it remained as a dream. And I think it—it was the same with the last elections in United Kingdom. I spoke with some Labour Party members who told me that this is the best thing that could have happened to the Labour Party. Corbyn almost won, but he didn't win. You know, and they can say, "You see, we almost make it, we make a chance," and so on and so on. I was told that in the circle around Corbyn, it was a great sigh of relief, you know, that we didn't have—that we didn't have to do it. And we have a Greek lady here, I want to ask her, the rumor I heard from people immediately around Tsipras is that Tsipras called that referendum with the hope that he will lose it. That it was a shock for them that they got it. They wanted just barely to miss it so that then they could say, "You see, we—we were forced to surrender to Europe, why didn't you leave us in power?" You know what they would have avoided by losing the referendum? The horrible fact that *they* had to do the austerity then, you know. So I claim that this is the structure of happiness. In other words, first, truth and happiness don't go together and desire and happiness don't go together. By desire, I don't mean just desiring something, I mean what Lacan formulates as the ethics of psychoanalysis: "Stand by your desire, do not compromise your desire." Maybe the only serious thing that we can learn when you are in psychoanalytic treatment is to stand by your desire, not to desire something but then to organize a failure so that then you can say, "Oh, we just missed it," and so on and so on. You have to be heroic enough to stand by your—to stand by your desire. So, sorry, I think that—I think that upon a closer look, you can see that happiness, even in its most terrestrial version, always has to rely on some figure of the Big Other. I don't have time to prove this now. This is why I think Christianity works. That's not the Christianity I like, that's the perverted Christianity. It works how? My favorite Christian theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it quite openly. He said, I quote from his book Orthodoxy: "The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests. But inside that inhuman guard, you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men. For Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom." He says something very simple and deeply true here. Pagans openly asserted pleasures. That's why they necessarily—the pagan view ends in melancholy. *Carpe diem*, enjoy the day, because you know that tomorrow, or if not tomorrow at the end, it will be shit. But if you have heaven, Jesus Christ, and so on, the function of it is not to spoil your pleasures but to render them palpable and easily available. And that's what intelligent Catholic preachers know. I read a very intelligent defense of this slightly oppressive Catholic morality where they claimed that's the only way to save sexual pleasure. If it's simply allowed, you end up with Marquis de Sade. And if you read Marquis de Sade, you will learn that it's pure mechanic production of pleasure which has nothing to do with sexual, intense sexual enjoyment and so on and so on. So the idea is this one—this is even how I think in a subtle perverted way Christianity sells you the Christ sacrifice in its perverted version. I hope there is another reading. The message is this one: in pagan universe, you enjoy but you have to pay the price—old age, death, and so on. In Christianity, we are lucky to have a guy, Jesus Christ, who already paid the price. So we can just enjoy. We have to pretend that we follow Christ, but it meant when we are called to for our desires we can say, "Yes, we sinned, but sorry guys, that guy already paid the price." We don't have to pay it. And that's why my—you know what's the core of Christianity? It’s a wonderful—an Italian friend taught it to me. That what is Italian Catholic girls praying to the Virgin Mary: "Oh thou who has conceived without making love, allow me to make love without conceiving," you know. Always—and it works! It works, this how, you know, happiness, as Chesterton said, even sexual pleasure, can be enjoyed only in this sense, can only be enjoyed at a distance. Now let's make a step further here. Unfortunately, I claim even LGBT+ whose basic goals I fully support. Sometimes the way—the way transgender movement effectively functions, it falls into this trap of happiness. I think that the great thing of authentic transgender heroes is that, my God, it's an authentic heroism. I read recently an interview with a transgender guy who is not selling us this cheap pseudo-liberal stuff: "Now that I change my sex, I’m happy, I can really enjoy." No, he says—now now it's she—she says, "Can you imagine how horrible it was for me to live in a body that I hate," and so on. And the process is extremely painful. For me, LGBT are ethical heroes, my God. But not in the predominant ideology. You know where we witness this ideology? There is a movie made last year, a Belgian movie with a simple title, *The Girl*, directed by Lukas Dhont. It’s a film about a fifteen-year-old girl—he was born as a boy and he/she was dreaming to become a ballerina. This film was brutally attacked as hard as—transgender pornography, satisfying the basest male instincts, male sadist instincts. You know why? Because it focuses on the suffering. The story is this one: the girl suffers a lot, it's a painful process of changing from boy to girl. But that's the unpleasant thing. You cannot blame the surroundings, you know. Her father fully supports her. Her ballet teacher fully supports her. And nonetheless, things go wrong. Of course, many official feminists and LGBT attacked it as, "Oh, it's a subtle propaganda against," and so on and so on. And then even you know even what didn't help? That this girl—because the movie is based on a—is closely follows a real-life story—this girl exploded and wrote a letter to the public media saying, saying "Sorry, this is exact reproduction of how I felt it my life." Nonetheless, the attacks went on. It's again, they wanted to save happiness. And that's what I don't like in LGBT+ ideology. This, to—I simplify it, I know, but the basic idea is: we in ourselves, we would have been happy if it were not for the external imposition of patriarchy, binary logic, constraining us to two gender identities and so on and so on. If we get rid of this, we will be happy. We will have a fully satisfied sexual life. I think that the true heroism of LGBT+ I think—no, it's—they see much more than it may appear. I spoke with many of them. They are—their message is not "We are crazy, we want to suffer" or what, but that in them, in their experience, a distortion, perversion, suffering, which is inscribed into human sexuality as such, comes out. They are, as it were, sex at its purest. Sex at its most antagonistic. That’s why I really hate—I'm back at LGBT+—a happiness version of the transgender transition, brutally presented by a couple of weeks ago now, Gillette company made another of these politically correct ads. Oh, everybody likes it. It's incidentally another example of a perfect cohabitation—cohabitation between transgender ideology of happiness and the biggest corporate interests. And the story—the story is: they make an ad where a real-life transgender guy—but here the change went into the other direction, a girl who became a boy—is taught by his (before her) father how to shave himself. He is proud. "Now I am a man enough, I need to shave myself," and the father teaches him to do it. Of course, it's Gillette and so on and so on. But here is the—the citation which—because yeah, this guy to whom this really happened acts in the commercial. Here is a quote, and incidentally this quote was made in Toronto. So maybe this is some reason why Toronto gave birth to Jordan Peterson, but that's another story. I will not go into that. A quote: "I always knew I was different. I didn't know there was a term for the type of person that I was. I went into my transition just wanting to be happy. I’m glad I’m at the point where I’m able to shave. I’m at the point in my manhood where I’m actually happy. I showed this ad for Gillette and wanted to include my father, who has been one of the greatest supporters throughout my transition, encouraging me to be confident and live authentically as my best self." End of quote. One has to listen carefully to these words used here. All of a sudden, you know, that's another—now I will be really evil—there is another contradiction in the superficial version of LGBT ideology. On the one hand, if you are a man—boy, I mean—who simply identifies as man, or vice-versa a girl who identifies as girl, woman, you are constantly bombarded by the social constructionist message, you know. "Remember, gender identity is not biological, genetic, it's a contingent social construct," and so on and so on. But—it's a subtle difference—if you are in the position of that girl from Dhont's film, for example, a man or a—a subject who cannot identify with what at least appears to him or her as his/her their whatever natural sex, then they never say, "Oh, what's the problem? Sex is a contingent social construct, let's reconstruct you." Because from the cheap standpoint of happiness, the solution would have been: so sex is a discursive construct, so you will be much more happy and avoiding your—you will avoid all the painful experience of transition if we simply performatively—I'm here viciously using Judith Butler's terms—if we performatively reconstruct, refashion you into what you already are biologically. You know, a subtle difference is at work here, that in this case they all of a sudden become—I refer here to a word which in today's jargon is the worst thing you can say—they become essentialists. You see, the guy says here, "live authentically as my best self." All of a sudden, the presupposition is: forget about social construction and so on, look deep into yourself, each of us has a true self. And the point is—and of course they know, that's the whole point—this true self does not fit necessarily your biological sexual identity, but there still is, there still is a true self. And there is another evil observation I want to make here. Did you notice how in both these stories, it's a strange reactivation of patriarchy? Crucial for the transition is a good father. I remember here Jacques Lacan who says, maybe Alenka you know better how that the only tolerable whatever sexual relationship can occur or [unintelligible] under the guise of the name of the father. Now we learn that even, this should be the LGBT+ version, the only tolerable to make transition, transgender transition tolerable, you need a good, well-functioning name of the father and so on. Okay, I will not go, I already did it in my class, into how I'm not making fun here of LGBT. Philosophically, it's easy to resolve this tension between social constructionism and all of a sudden essentialism. Everybody who knows German Idealism knows the solution, which is, and this is again another of my critical points against—against—against LGBT+ ideology. Authentic LGBT people are well aware of this. That of course gender is symbolically constructed. It's in some sense a choice. Your gender identity is not biologically determined, otherwise we wouldn't have people who found themselves in a—this predicament of wanting to change their sex or whatever. But being a choice—don't identify too quickly choice in the most radical sense with this easy performative choosing, you know, as sometimes cheap LGBT+ propaganda claims. "Oh, it means playful identity. Today I’m gay, a year from now I will try with bisexual identity, then whatever," and so on. No. Authentic free choice is by definition—we learn this from Kant, from Schelling, and so on, great German Idealists—authentic free choice at its most radical is always experienced as necessity. Which is why, to give you a simple example, even love is such a traumatic choice. Love is a choice; of course, you cannot be forced, compelled, to fall in love. But just look into yourself what you felt if you were really passionately in love. You never decide to fall in love, like, sorry to be vulgar, let me look around, you, you, you, fuck it, I will choose you. No! All of a sudden, you discover that you *already* are in love. The choice always already happens, which means it's an unconscious choice. That's for me a very simple Freudian solution of: Is it then social constructionism or determinism? It is a free determinism. From the standpoint of your conscious ego, it's determined. But at a deeper level, you are—you are responsible for it. I'm slowly, yeah, coming back to the conclusion. So, another point of—so ah, yes, just to make something clear. This doesn't mean that I'm some kind of a masochist who doesn't want to be happy or whatever. I’m just saying that unfortunately, at a certain point, we have to make the choice between happiness or, and whatever we call this, true freedom, creativity, and so on. I’m here a pessimist. You cannot have it both ways. But, so another way to keep happiness, again, to be—that's my lesson—happiness is an inconsistent category, which means to be relatively happy, you have to, you know, it's like that Czech situation. You have to be reminded from time to time of the bad things, of not total happiness. And to conclude—I know I've told this story a lot of times but not yet here—I will give you the ultimate theological example. Thomas Aquinas, you know, the big Catholic theologian, *Summa Theologica*, and so on. He in his classic *Summa Theologica*, again, he debates a wonderful point, I love theology for this. The idea is, after you die, and if you did proper acts or were predestined, whichever theory you buy, let's say you find yourself in heaven. In heaven, according to Christian dogma, you will be not as powerful as God but almost knowing everything. Like, you will not be in our human situation of finitude, where our knowledge is limited. Your space of knowledge will be broadened incredibly. So Thomas Aquinas approaches this problem: Will you up in heaven, will you be able to see, to observe the suffering of those wretched souls in hell? And this is a problem. Aquinas is not an idiot; he is immediately aware of what the problem is. Because at the same time, the dogma is that everything that you experience makes you happy in paradise. So Aquinas immediately confronts the problem: How come that seeing terrible things going on in hell can make you happy? Are we perverts in heaven or what? He found a typically sophist pseudo-solution: that we have to distinguish two modes of—two modes of satisfaction. One is the sadistic bad satisfaction: "I hate you, I see you suffering, haha, I’m happy." But he claims our satisfaction when we observe wretched souls suffering in hell will not be of this type. It will simply be our satisfaction at the majesty of divine justice. You see how just God did it and so on and so on. I, evil as I am, I have here a different solution, which I think is much more convincing. What if—first let's take it from the standpoint of hell. All intelligent people, you have hints of this even in Dante, and we in Slovenia, we have firsthand knowledge of it because there are close to Italian border in Slovenia some subterranean caves called Skocjan Caves, very wild, and it's confirmed that Dante himself, the real one, before—just before writing the book—or was it not? I exaggerate a little bit. The idea is that he visited those caves and got the idea for the—there’s about twelve caves in the region and each one claims that Dante was here in my cave. Okay, okay, but let's say in one—let's say we Slovenia have the original—the original hell there, no, if we—if I may put it like this. Okay, so even in Dante you feel this, that fuck paradise. The third part of *Divina Commedia* is extremely boring. All interesting things happen in—happen in Inferno. Let's go—let's go on. So—let's go on. So maybe the solution is this one, that's my favorable theological dream: what if paradise is a pretty boring place, what if all the interesting action happens in hell? What if we read it wrongly? What if burning oil means permanent orgy, barbecue, you roast meat, whatever. But it's a problem: we shouldn't acknowledge it. So how do we account for that scene from Thomas Aquinas, that blessed souls in paradise observe? Sorry, but I claim this: you have there a permanent orgy, you drink, you have sex, beef barbecue, oil, and so on. And then once a week, let us say, Devil's administration comes: "Sorry guys, now for a quarter of an hour we will be observed from heaven, so pretend that you suffer." They say, "Yeah, yeah, oh, oh, oh!" Then after a quarter of an hour: "Okay, fun is back," and so on. But now I come back a little bit more seriously to why do they need this in hell? Sorry, in heaven. For the same—we—the—in the same way that in Czechoslovakia once a month there should be no coffee in the stores and so on, we are like in paradise. Western paradise—permissive, relative welfare in spite of the crisis. And to enjoy it fully, although it’s a pretty boring non-creative life, we have to be reminded from time to time that we are lucky to be here. So what in our lives is—how are we made aware of this? I think this is the function of horror movies and especially of TV news. You know, all these Third World TV news—rapes, Somalia, children slaughtered, and so on—are our reminder: "You don't like it here, you think we are in alienated consumerist society? Take a look there." It functions strictly as a temporary look into hell. Now, to slowly conclude, let me give you my final example of ideology at its worst today. I don't like the lady, although it's a very readable novel. I think it's the nastiest ideological novel that you can imagine. Although I watched the TV series and read the novel and I enjoyed it. I'm of course talking about Margaret Atwood's *Handmaid's Tale*. It’s ideology at its purest. Why? Of course it's a just cause, but I think the way it works, it's a perfect example of what Fredric Jameson, our friend, called nostalgia for the present. You know what the story about: it depicts in near future a United States where Christian fundamentalists took over and the way women are tortured, exploited, and so on and so on. I will leave aside the aspect of how much of this, the way women are oppressed there and so on, is an additional source of pleasure. I admit my responsibility: I enjoy new ways to screw women, not in the vulgar sense, but to make life—and I can claim I can secretly enjoy it because, "Oh, it's just a depiction of horrible fundamentalist rule" and so on. Most of my friends have the same reaction. But I want to ask you something else. The function, ideological, of the novel and especially TV series, is to make us feel good in our present society. It—it imagines a dystopian present so that all the time we are reminded, "My God, nonetheless, in what a wonderful, uh, still permissive and so on society we live." It never raises the question, which is for me the crucial question: but sorry guys, new religious fundamentalism or Alt-Right or Donald Trump, but they did not fall from the sky. How could it happen that *our*—this beautiful, tolerant, liberal society—gave birth to a monster like Donald Trump? Which is why, to conclude—almost, haha, not yet there—if you want to take an example of fetishism in today's politics, I think Donald Trump is the ultimate fetish. In what sense? Precisely in this almost naive Freudian sense where, you know—there is another question how to interpret this in a non-naive way, it can be done—but the basic idea is that fetish is the last thing, the object that you (in Freud's case a young boy, small boy) you see before you noticed, okay, in that case is that the woman doesn't have a penis, let's say
You know, what is happening now with Julian Assange is really horrible and sad. I don’t know if you noticed in the media two things from the last weeks. First, you know, when they dragged him to prison from the Ecuadorian embassy, all his stuff was there—computers, books, manuscripts. He wrote with his hand, I heard. The manuscript is there for two books and so on and so on. And you know what happened with that? Ecuador invited, not even the British, American authorities to take possession of that. I mean, it’s pretty shameful. And second thing, this is a nice pressure, it happened today, it was in the news at eleven, that some Arab name—without any bad taste racist point, I don’t know how to pronounce it—British Home Secretary, Minister of Interior, already signed the order for his extradition to the United States. I mean, okay. My only reaction is, just bear in mind, remember how even a couple of months ago, Assange was mocked, you know, "Ooh, paranoiac, who wants him, what a tradition, he is a coward, if he just surrenders himself, he will be for one month in a jail, then he will be free," and so on. Now we know what is happening. And at least with all this fake news madness, I hope you noticed something. Whatever people say about WikiLeaks, not even once were they accused of spreading false news. And even I didn't quite believe him, but when I met him the last time, I made the jump to London like a couple of weeks before they threw him out of the embassy. He knew everything. I mean, he was really—now I’m not joking—a successful spy. You know that? And it’s a beautiful espionage because many people in British and American CIA secret services simply were disgusted by what these two powers are doing and they voluntarily informed him about it. So he knew everything. Which is why, do you remember, two weeks before he was dragged out of the embassy, WikiLeaks did raise hell? And again, media laughed again and so on and so on. Just I think that, you know what really hurts me? The Americans could have done it in a little bit more appropriate, polite way, but I claim that's the message: the brutality of it, how it is done. Enough. Let me first explain my title: Disorder Under Heaven. As you, I hope, all know, this is a reference to my favorite Mao Zedong's formula: "There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent." And I think precisely today, when there is obviously disorder under heaven—political disorder, potentially economic, ecological, and so on—that we should follow this Mao statement, not in the sense of false optimism, but don't lose nerves, that we should try to see the new opening here. Like, precisely in such confused situations, we get a chance. One way that I always, when people wonder why I am saying this, one example would be—now Avital will be mad again—let's learn from Trump. You know what Trump is really doing? Mostly, he doesn't directly break the law, but in any civilized society, you have explicit laws, but then you have, of course—that's the life in a community—there are complex unwritten rules, habits, and so on, about how to apply the law. And Trump does, breaks not the law, breaks these unwritten habits. He does something that you cannot say is directly against the law, but it's obvious that, to use the standard expression, this is not how it was meant to be used. For example, do you remember when, it's already two, three months ago, when he declared—how was it called?—state of emergency, national emergency, because of the immigrant threat? Some conservatives were shocked by it, and they were right. They said, "Wait a minute, this—" because, you know, proclaiming state of emergency was meant not if people from Honduras approach Mexican border. It was meant when there is a mega natural catastrophe, nuclear war, or whatever. But some conservatives got into a panic. You know why? Because they said, "Wait a minute, what if the next Democratic president will proclaim—will proclaim state of emergency for global warming?" Yes, exactly here we should learn from Trump. You know, he taught us how to not even break the rules, but break the, violate the unwritten background. Okay, but let's go on. So, I will focus today not on the general outline of the situation we are in—we know we are in some kind of apocalyptic times, we are approaching some zero point in ecology, it's clear; in new developments in digital technology, controlling us and so on; and in with question of immigration, moving, people moving around, borders, and so on and so on. But that we all know. I want just to focus on how we experience these confused times in our ideology. First, I will repeat, maybe you don't know it, just an old formula of mine that I like. You know, Marx's famous formula of religion as the opium of the people. First, be careful. Marx doesn't say "opium for the people" because this would have meant this primitive idea that there is some evil secret society of priests or whatever which fabricates ideology. No, Marx's basic rule is ideology is not simple external manipulation. You manipulate yourself. People, even the Stalinists, even cynics, secretly believe in some kind of ideology. But I think today we should expand or rephrase Marx's formula. Today we have two new modes of the opium of the people. And you can guess which are the two: opium and the people, literally. First, it's opium in the broad sense of the term, from these daily pills that we are taking—Xanax or whatever—up to psychic pills to calm you down, more serious, up to serious drugs—crack, opium, and so on and so on. And I think it's already our daily bread. I read some analysis that in United States, in a typical campus, to percent of people there are already on some kind of drugs. Now, this tells a lot: that even our normal psychic reproduction is no longer possible without support in chemistry. The second opium are the people: populism. But this is well known. Now I approach to my topic. I claim that maybe the most dangerous form of ideology today are the manipulations with happiness. Everything can be justified as an instrument—maybe sometimes painful instrument—to make people happy. This is in China, but not only in China; in the West also. The main justification of the control of public space, of internet, and so on, that it will disturb the people, it will make the people unhappy. So, censorship is justified as a mode of protecting individuals from traumatic experiences which threaten to disturb their happiness. Let me tell you, I'm sorry if some of you know it, I use this example in one of my books, how I got into trouble because of this. I read a report in Canadian media, I think it was some two, three years—yes, three years ago, It was a quite terrifying case when a white guy—his, disgusting guy, his name is Bradley Barton—was accused of killing an indigenous sex worker, as they say today. Incidentally, I don't like; I prefer "prostitute." You know why? You see, this is another of these protecting us from traumatic news. Of course, I know why they say "sex worker." It's not so offensive, the word "prostitute" has certain connotation. But the bad thing is that it normalizes the situation. "Oh, what's the problem? Selling your body is just like selling your—" you know, it normalizes the thing. So, okay. He killed her while they were making love. And it was disgusting because there was no denial; he didn't deny anything. His lawyers, this Bradley—this guy's lawyers—instructed him to confess anything but just to claim that it was—that the rough sex was consensual and that the woman aroused him so much that he couldn't control himself. He wasn't responsible for anything. And now comes for me the truly traumatic part. What he did is, while they were making love, he—to be extremely vulgar—pulled his penis out and inserted another thing into her vagina, a big knife, and then slowly cut her up. It's disgusting. But now comes—if you think this is horrible, disgusting, wait, how did they say, you ain't heard nothing yet. You know what? It's breathtaking, I couldn't believe it. You know what his defenders did, and the court allowed it? To prove, by a detailed analysis of cuts around the deceased woman's vagina, to prove it that it was done not as a conscious act but in a trance—I warn you, this is hard, but listen to this guy—by, they brought her torso, real body, into the court, set it like let's say you are the jurors, set it on the table, and the defense lawyers—you see this cut, you see that cut, and so on and so on. First, there is here a clear anti-feminist and racism. Can you even imagine if the victim were to be an upper-class white lady, that they would have done this? Okay, it's disgusting. And yeah, incidentally, just so that you don't worry, the guy walked out of the courtroom free. It's really disgusting, I mean. But now I come to my point. When I, and I even I have certain limits, I mean, that is to say, even if there were to be pictures available, that's too much even for me, I would never have used them. But I just did what I did to you now: I described even more vaguely the situation. And a couple of times, I was once even interrupted, attacked, by this pseudo-deep argument that by describing what happened, I was—I have shown solidarity with the brutal act, that in a pornographic way, I was repeating the crime. I don't buy this. You know why? And the matter is more serious because I think that when disgusting things like this one happen, the only way to really hit the people is, up to a certain degree—I'm not saying you should show the torso there and so on—you have to shock them. I don't believe in this soft downplaying, that you just give a soft description and so on and so on, without hurting anyone. You neutralize it in some way. Or here I like to quote George Orwell—I don't always like him, but he has a wonderful sentence in the forward to his Animal Farm, where he wrote that, quote Orwell, "If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." And you know, because again, I don't think criticism, when you try to arouse somebody, works without this at least a little bit of this shocking moment. I think I told to the students already in my class another example. For example, when we talk about Holocaust, Auschwitz, and so on. I can tell you what triggered me. One thing is, told in gas chambers, blah, blah, blah, all that, okay. But you know what was the detail, I read it in some history of German concentration camps, that shocked me? That the Germans produced serially—serially, I mean, as an instrument in factories—you know the nut-cracking instrument? Like, round and then two handles to crack nuts. Okay, they produced testicle crackers. Sorry, but this was the detail for me which shocks you. And I think that, you see, this is why I think that I don't care if I ruin your happiness. You have to be, at least in a certain way and so on and so on, you have to be shocked. I don't mean—your happiness has to be disturbed. Now, let me go a little bit more theoretically even into this. Now comes a more substantial line, because I will try to problematize the very notion of happiness. If there is a figure which stands out, I think, as one of the heroes of our time, it is Christopher Wylie. I hope I pronounce it correctly. A gay Canadian vegan who, at twenty-four, came up with an idea that led to the foundation of, you know what they did, Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain's EU membership, and before it, it was crucial in Donald Trump's election campaign, and so on and so on. Wylie's plan was to break into Facebook, harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the United States, and then to use this information to create sophisticated profiles of millions of people and then target them with political ads and so on and so on. At a certain point, Wylie was genuinely freaked out. He said, I quote: "It's insane. The company has created psychological profiles of million Americans. And now they want to work with Pentagon. It's like Nixon on steroids," end of quote. Now, okay, we know this. But what makes this story so fascinating is first, that it combines elements which we usually perceive as opposites. You know, if you listen to Steve Bannon, how he presents Alt-Right. It's always this anti-technological—now I have the lowest blow against you that you can imagine—he presents himself as this anti-digital exploitation. His point is that if guys from Silicon Valley win, our democracy is over, ordinary people will be totally manipulated, and so on and so on. Then comes the—you know to which philosopher he was referring? Heidegger. Steve Bannon is positively referring to Heidegger. He said we have to learn from Heidegger of the dangers of technology and so on and so on. He has shown to a journalist, who—German journalist, to fascinate him—some two-volume A Life of Heidegger, and says, "Read this guy and you will see why Silicon Valley is dangerous." I apologize, it's vulgar, of course. But what interests me is this, this open inconsistency. On the one hand, so the Alt-Right idea is that what is behind the liberals are these new corporate guys like Facebook, Zuckerberg, whatever you want, who all manipulate us and we should allow ordinary people to create the space where they can resist all these manipulations and so on and so on. And like—along in this populist vein—this is maybe my favorite conservative publicity for beef meat, eating beef, that I saw years ago on American TV. I loved it. It's like countryside picnic, countryside music, they roast beef, blah, blah, just—and then just inscription: "Beef. Real food for real people." Kind of like that. What, but you see the first big inconsistency, and this you should always bear in mind. Precisely the people who justify themselves as the voice of the ordinary people against technological manipulations and so on, now we learned from Cambridge Analytica and so on, they used the most sophisticated technological manipulations and so on and so on to win. Now, second thing that I find even more shocking is the bizarre intersection of research on topics like love and kindness with defense and intelligence interests. Why does a research into happiness draw so much interest from British and American intelligence agencies like DARPA, US Government Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and so on and so on? The researcher who personifies this intersection is Martin Seligman. In '98, he founded the Positive Psychology movement dedicated to the study of psychological traits and habits that foster authentic happiness and well-being, spawning an enormous industry of popular self-help books. At the same time, his work attracted interest and funding from the military as a central part of its soldier resilience initiative. So even Cambridge Analytica, originally it was a group investigating human happiness. What makes human happy and so on and so on. And this intersection, I claim—now comes my more problematic radical thesis—this intersection, guys who want to manipulate us and so on technologically for political purposes are guys who began with researching happiness, is not externally imposed on the behavioral sciences by bad political manipulators. It's not, "Oh, first the guys wanted sincerely to study happiness, then bad military secret intelligence manipulators came and abused it." It is implied by their immanent orientation. Another programmatic quote from that evil guy Seligman: "The aim of these programs is not simply to analyze our subjective states of mind, but to discover means by which we can be nudged in this direction of our true in the direction of our true well-being as positive psychologists understand it, which includes attributes like resilience and optimism," end of quote. So after the outbreak of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, all these events and tendencies were, of course, extensively covered by the liberal media. And the overall image emerging from it, combined with what we also know about the link between the latest developments in biogenetics, provides a terrifying image of new forms of social control which make the good old 20th-century totalitarianism a rather primitive and clumsy machine of control. The biggest achievement of the new cognitive military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary. Individuals are much better controlled and nudged in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents. Now, what are the implications of this? As is often the case, a developing Third World country spelled out the sociopolitical consequences of this notion of happiness. It's quite a sad story. It's the Kingdom of Bhutan, you know, not Nepal but the smaller one, north of India. Two—two decades ago, the Kingdom of Bhutan decided to focus on no longer on Gross National Product, GNP, but Gross National Happiness, GNH. The idea was again the brainchild of their ex-king, who sought to steer Bhutan into the modern world while preserving its unique identity. With the pressure of globalization and materialism mounting, the popular king ordered a state agency to calculate how happy the kingdom's people were. Officials said they had already conducted a survey of around a thousand people and draw up a list of parameters from being—for being happy, similar to the development index which is tracked by the United Nations. But already here we have—now you will say, what's so bad about it? There was already here a very ominous twist. Then they discovered two years later that the main disturbance to their harmonious social being is some ethnic minority. And they did, of course, a nice ethnic cleansing, just on behalf of—on behalf of raising Gross National Happiness and so on and so on. But it's not enough again to say that this is the political exploitation of happiness. I want to go a step further and claim that the notion of happiness itself is very ambiguous in its implications. Let me give you a couple—maybe you know some of them, I apologize in advance—examples. I was—maybe I even used this story here ten years ago. I was some years ago, I think it was Lithuania, Vilnius, their capital, and we debated: when are people happy? And we came to a nice unequivocal result. Czechoslovakia, in those darkest Husák years, you know, in '68 they had almost this democratic socialism, it was crushed by the Soviet intervention, and then they had those years of so-called re-normalization. Why were people, one can seriously claim, happy there? Three conditions, I claim, established then. First, for happiness, your material needs should be basically satisfied. Basically satisfied, but not too satisfied. If you get, for example, coffee all the time in the supermarkets, you get used to it, no? It must be like that once a month you don't get coffee, because this makes you aware all the other days how lucky you are to have it. And this was exactly the situation there. People lived a safe life, it was a kind of a modest welfare society with limitations which precisely reminded you how happy you are. We in developed West don't have these limitations, so we are not so happy. Second thing, second extremely important feature. We all agreed on this. For people to be happy, you shouldn't have democracy which is taken seriously. Because if democracy really works—okay, even it doesn't really—if it works in the sense that ordinary people themselves experience themselves as the one who ultimately really decide their fate, that's not good, you worry too much. You have to have some figure of other political authority on whom you could put the blame for everything. And that was, in those dark years, the role of the Communist Party. As a friend from Czechoslovakia told me, even if the weather is like here and I blame him, two-three years, two-three days ago, all that storm and so on, "Oh, Communists are guilty," you know, fuck it. Like, Communists were blamed for everything. This makes—and I remember from my own country, it was a little bit of this—this makes life very easy, you know. Like, you know whom to blame, you don't feel responsible. This is second. And third condition of happiness: you must have an image of paradise, of place where things are really good, and this paradise has to be at the proper distance. Not too close, not easily accessible, because if it is, then you see it's basically the same shit as where we are. But also not too distant, because then it's just a vague dream. They had it; it was West Germany, of course. You know, because Communist authorities in the 80s at least tolerated watching Western TV and so on and so on. I seriously think that all these three features constituted a kind of perfect happiness. I—because at the same time, you know, it was no longer the old totalitarianism. You were allowed your private life, your niche. If you didn't mess with politics, it was relatively comfortable to live there. In this sense, to make a place further, I think that what disturbs happiness? Desire. By desire, I mean the force which compels you to move beyond, to disturb this fragile but nonetheless stability of happiness. To give an example that I use all the time: let's say you live a relatively happy life, not being in love—love is a catastrophe. You know, like, you drink with friends in the evening, maybe you have here and there one-night stands and so on, life is nice. In your job goes good. Then all of a sudden you fall passionately in love. Can you imagine a worse catastrophe? All the balance of your life is disturbed, you worry only about this, you are either jealous or nervous or whatever, you lose concentration for other things and so on and so on. Happiness is thus in itself confused, indeterminate, very ambiguous notion. I like this German anecdote: a German immigrant to the United States is asked, "Are you happy?" You know what's his answer? "Yeah, yeah, I'm happy here, *aber glücklich bin ich nicht*." Like, it's not the same. So I think that—now I will become a Christian—happiness is a pagan category. For pagans, the goal of life is life is to live a happy life. The idea to live happily ever after, I think, is a Christianized version of paganism. And religious experience and political activity themselves are considered the highest form of happiness. No wonder that Dalai Lama itself, and here I have problems with him, begins almost all his popular books with some kind of a gospel of happiness. He usually begins with "All living beings strive towards happening," sorry, "towards happiness." My instant answer is: maybe all living beings, but definitely not humans. If there is, and that's Freudian lesson of death drive, if something characterizes us humans is: whenever happiness comes too close, you find a way to—you find a way to destroy it. Why? Because—now I will try to be a little bit more precise. You know when we are happy, I claim? Let's say you have an official goal, you strive for something. But secretly we all know that getting what you dream about is by definition always a nightmare. So I think happiness is when you almost get it but miss it. And it's crucial that A: you can blame somebody else for missing it, but then you are happy for almost getting it but nonetheless even more happy for not getting it. This is, I think, the bad conformist—happiness is a way to avoid your desire. Let me give you here some—some political examples here, to provoke my Czech friends. I claim that the Soviet intervention in '68 which crushed the so-called Prague Spring, saved the Prague Spring. You know why? Because imagine Soviet Union not intervening. Sooner or later, it would have been a fiasco. Either the Commie—the liberal Communists of Czechoslovakia would have to simply capitulate to the West, or they would have to set some limits. "Sorry guys, that's the limit of democratization," and so on and so on. I—I claim that for reasons of social analysis that I can't develop it now, that a dream of a different social democratic socialism that would successfully compete with the West was not a serious option there. But precisely because it was crushed, it remained as a dream. And I think it—it was the same with the last elections in United Kingdom. I spoke with some Labour Party members who told me that this is the best thing that could have happened to the Labour Party. Corbyn almost won, but he didn't win. You know, and they can say, "You see, we almost make it, we make a chance," and so on and so on. I was told that in the circle around Corbyn, it was a great sigh of relief, you know, that we didn't have—that we didn't have to do it. And we have a Greek lady here, I want to ask her, the rumor I heard from people immediately around Tsipras is that Tsipras called that referendum with the hope that he will lose it. That it was a shock for them that they got it. They wanted just barely to miss it so that then they could say, "You see, we—we were forced to surrender to Europe, why didn't you leave us in power?" You know what they would have avoided by losing the referendum? The horrible fact that *they* had to do the austerity then, you know. So I claim that this is the structure of happiness. In other words, first, truth and happiness don't go together and desire and happiness don't go together. By desire, I don't mean just desiring something, I mean what Lacan formulates as the ethics of psychoanalysis: "Stand by your desire, do not compromise your desire." Maybe the only serious thing that we can learn when you are in psychoanalytic treatment is to stand by your desire, not to desire something but then to organize a failure so that then you can say, "Oh, we just missed it," and so on and so on. You have to be heroic enough to stand by your—to stand by your desire. So, sorry, I think that—I think that upon a closer look, you can see that happiness, even in its most terrestrial version, always has to rely on some figure of the Big Other. I don't have time to prove this now. This is why I think Christianity works. That's not the Christianity I like, that's the perverted Christianity. It works how? My favorite Christian theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it quite openly. He said, I quote from his book Orthodoxy: "The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests. But inside that inhuman guard, you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men. For Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom." He says something very simple and deeply true here. Pagans openly asserted pleasures. That's why they necessarily—the pagan view ends in melancholy. *Carpe diem*, enjoy the day, because you know that tomorrow, or if not tomorrow at the end, it will be shit. But if you have heaven, Jesus Christ, and so on, the function of it is not to spoil your pleasures but to render them palpable and easily available. And that's what intelligent Catholic preachers know. I read a very intelligent defense of this slightly oppressive Catholic morality where they claimed that's the only way to save sexual pleasure. If it's simply allowed, you end up with Marquis de Sade. And if you read Marquis de Sade, you will learn that it's pure mechanic production of pleasure which has nothing to do with sexual, intense sexual enjoyment and so on and so on. So the idea is this one—this is even how I think in a subtle perverted way Christianity sells you the Christ sacrifice in its perverted version. I hope there is another reading. The message is this one: in pagan universe, you enjoy but you have to pay the price—old age, death, and so on. In Christianity, we are lucky to have a guy, Jesus Christ, who already paid the price. So we can just enjoy. We have to pretend that we follow Christ, but it meant when we are called to for our desires we can say, "Yes, we sinned, but sorry guys, that guy already paid the price." We don't have to pay it. And that's why my—you know what's the core of Christianity? It’s a wonderful—an Italian friend taught it to me. That what is Italian Catholic girls praying to the Virgin Mary: "Oh thou who has conceived without making love, allow me to make love without conceiving," you know. Always—and it works! It works, this how, you know, happiness, as Chesterton said, even sexual pleasure, can be enjoyed only in this sense, can only be enjoyed at a distance. Now let's make a step further here. Unfortunately, I claim even LGBT+ whose basic goals I fully support. Sometimes the way—the way transgender movement effectively functions, it falls into this trap of happiness. I think that the great thing of authentic transgender heroes is that, my God, it's an authentic heroism. I read recently an interview with a transgender guy who is not selling us this cheap pseudo-liberal stuff: "Now that I change my sex, I’m happy, I can really enjoy." No, he says—now now it's she—she says, "Can you imagine how horrible it was for me to live in a body that I hate," and so on. And the process is extremely painful. For me, LGBT are ethical heroes, my God. But not in the predominant ideology. You know where we witness this ideology? There is a movie made last year, a Belgian movie with a simple title, *The Girl*, directed by Lukas Dhont. It’s a film about a fifteen-year-old girl—he was born as a boy and he/she was dreaming to become a ballerina. This film was brutally attacked as hard as—transgender pornography, satisfying the basest male instincts, male sadist instincts. You know why? Because it focuses on the suffering. The story is this one: the girl suffers a lot, it's a painful process of changing from boy to girl. But that's the unpleasant thing. You cannot blame the surroundings, you know. Her father fully supports her. Her ballet teacher fully supports her. And nonetheless, things go wrong. Of course, many official feminists and LGBT attacked it as, "Oh, it's a subtle propaganda against," and so on and so on. And then even you know even what didn't help? That this girl—because the movie is based on a—is closely follows a real-life story—this girl exploded and wrote a letter to the public media saying, saying "Sorry, this is exact reproduction of how I felt it my life." Nonetheless, the attacks went on. It's again, they wanted to save happiness. And that's what I don't like in LGBT+ ideology. This, to—I simplify it, I know, but the basic idea is: we in ourselves, we would have been happy if it were not for the external imposition of patriarchy, binary logic, constraining us to two gender identities and so on and so on. If we get rid of this, we will be happy. We will have a fully satisfied sexual life. I think that the true heroism of LGBT+ I think—no, it's—they see much more than it may appear. I spoke with many of them. They are—their message is not "We are crazy, we want to suffer" or what, but that in them, in their experience, a distortion, perversion, suffering, which is inscribed into human sexuality as such, comes out. They are, as it were, sex at its purest. Sex at its most antagonistic. That’s why I really hate—I'm back at LGBT+—a happiness version of the transgender transition, brutally presented by a couple of weeks ago now, Gillette company made another of these politically correct ads. Oh, everybody likes it. It's incidentally another example of a perfect cohabitation—cohabitation between transgender ideology of happiness and the biggest corporate interests. And the story—the story is: they make an ad where a real-life transgender guy—but here the change went into the other direction, a girl who became a boy—is taught by his (before her) father how to shave himself. He is proud. "Now I am a man enough, I need to shave myself," and the father teaches him to do it. Of course, it's Gillette and so on and so on. But here is the—the citation which—because yeah, this guy to whom this really happened acts in the commercial. Here is a quote, and incidentally this quote was made in Toronto. So maybe this is some reason why Toronto gave birth to Jordan Peterson, but that's another story. I will not go into that. A quote: "I always knew I was different. I didn't know there was a term for the type of person that I was. I went into my transition just wanting to be happy. I’m glad I’m at the point where I’m able to shave. I’m at the point in my manhood where I’m actually happy. I showed this ad for Gillette and wanted to include my father, who has been one of the greatest supporters throughout my transition, encouraging me to be confident and live authentically as my best self." End of quote. One has to listen carefully to these words used here. All of a sudden, you know, that's another—now I will be really evil—there is another contradiction in the superficial version of LGBT ideology. On the one hand, if you are a man—boy, I mean—who simply identifies as man, or vice-versa a girl who identifies as girl, woman, you are constantly bombarded by the social constructionist message, you know. "Remember, gender identity is not biological, genetic, it's a contingent social construct," and so on and so on. But—it's a subtle difference—if you are in the position of that girl from Dhont's film, for example, a man or a—a subject who cannot identify with what at least appears to him or her as his/her their whatever natural sex, then they never say, "Oh, what's the problem? Sex is a contingent social construct, let's reconstruct you." Because from the cheap standpoint of happiness, the solution would have been: so sex is a discursive construct, so you will be much more happy and avoiding your—you will avoid all the painful experience of transition if we simply performatively—I'm here viciously using Judith Butler's terms—if we performatively reconstruct, refashion you into what you already are biologically. You know, a subtle difference is at work here, that in this case they all of a sudden become—I refer here to a word which in today's jargon is the worst thing you can say—they become essentialists. You see, the guy says here, "live authentically as my best self." All of a sudden, the presupposition is: forget about social construction and so on, look deep into yourself, each of us has a true self. And the point is—and of course they know, that's the whole point—this true self does not fit necessarily your biological sexual identity, but there still is, there still is a true self. And there is another evil observation I want to make here. Did you notice how in both these stories, it's a strange reactivation of patriarchy? Crucial for the transition is a good father. I remember here Jacques Lacan who says, maybe Alenka you know better how that the only tolerable whatever sexual relationship can occur or [unintelligible] under the guise of the name of the father. Now we learn that even, this should be the LGBT+ version, the only tolerable to make transition, transgender transition tolerable, you need a good, well-functioning name of the father and so on. Okay, I will not go, I already did it in my class, into how I'm not making fun here of LGBT. Philosophically, it's easy to resolve this tension between social constructionism and all of a sudden essentialism. Everybody who knows German Idealism knows the solution, which is, and this is again another of my critical points against—against—against LGBT+ ideology. Authentic LGBT people are well aware of this. That of course gender is symbolically constructed. It's in some sense a choice. Your gender identity is not biologically determined, otherwise we wouldn't have people who found themselves in a—this predicament of wanting to change their sex or whatever. But being a choice—don't identify too quickly choice in the most radical sense with this easy performative choosing, you know, as sometimes cheap LGBT+ propaganda claims. "Oh, it means playful identity. Today I’m gay, a year from now I will try with bisexual identity, then whatever," and so on. No. Authentic free choice is by definition—we learn this from Kant, from Schelling, and so on, great German Idealists—authentic free choice at its most radical is always experienced as necessity. Which is why, to give you a simple example, even love is such a traumatic choice. Love is a choice; of course, you cannot be forced, compelled, to fall in love. But just look into yourself what you felt if you were really passionately in love. You never decide to fall in love, like, sorry to be vulgar, let me look around, you, you, you, fuck it, I will choose you. No! All of a sudden, you discover that you *already* are in love. The choice always already happens, which means it's an unconscious choice. That's for me a very simple Freudian solution of: Is it then social constructionism or determinism? It is a free determinism. From the standpoint of your conscious ego, it's determined. But at a deeper level, you are—you are responsible for it. I'm slowly, yeah, coming back to the conclusion. So, another point of—so ah, yes, just to make something clear. This doesn't mean that I'm some kind of a masochist who doesn't want to be happy or whatever. I’m just saying that unfortunately, at a certain point, we have to make the choice between happiness or, and whatever we call this, true freedom, creativity, and so on. I’m here a pessimist. You cannot have it both ways. But, so another way to keep happiness, again, to be—that's my lesson—happiness is an inconsistent category, which means to be relatively happy, you have to, you know, it's like that Czech situation. You have to be reminded from time to time of the bad things, of not total happiness. And to conclude—I know I've told this story a lot of times but not yet here—I will give you the ultimate theological example. Thomas Aquinas, you know, the big Catholic theologian, *Summa Theologica*, and so on. He in his classic *Summa Theologica*, again, he debates a wonderful point, I love theology for this. The idea is, after you die, and if you did proper acts or were predestined, whichever theory you buy, let's say you find yourself in heaven. In heaven, according to Christian dogma, you will be not as powerful as God but almost knowing everything. Like, you will not be in our human situation of finitude, where our knowledge is limited. Your space of knowledge will be broadened incredibly. So Thomas Aquinas approaches this problem: Will you up in heaven, will you be able to see, to observe the suffering of those wretched souls in hell? And this is a problem. Aquinas is not an idiot; he is immediately aware of what the problem is. Because at the same time, the dogma is that everything that you experience makes you happy in paradise. So Aquinas immediately confronts the problem: How come that seeing terrible things going on in hell can make you happy? Are we perverts in heaven or what? He found a typically sophist pseudo-solution: that we have to distinguish two modes of—two modes of satisfaction. One is the sadistic bad satisfaction: "I hate you, I see you suffering, haha, I’m happy." But he claims our satisfaction when we observe wretched souls suffering in hell will not be of this type. It will simply be our satisfaction at the majesty of divine justice. You see how just God did it and so on and so on. I, evil as I am, I have here a different solution, which I think is much more convincing. What if—first let's take it from the standpoint of hell. All intelligent people, you have hints of this even in Dante, and we in Slovenia, we have firsthand knowledge of it because there are close to Italian border in Slovenia some subterranean caves called Skocjan Caves, very wild, and it's confirmed that Dante himself, the real one, before—just before writing the book—or was it not? I exaggerate a little bit. The idea is that he visited those caves and got the idea for the—there’s about twelve caves in the region and each one claims that Dante was here in my cave. Okay, okay, but let's say in one—let's say we Slovenia have the original—the original hell there, no, if we—if I may put it like this. Okay, so even in Dante you feel this, that fuck paradise. The third part of *Divina Commedia* is extremely boring. All interesting things happen in—happen in Inferno. Let's go—let's go on. So—let's go on. So maybe the solution is this one, that's my favorable theological dream: what if paradise is a pretty boring place, what if all the interesting action happens in hell? What if we read it wrongly? What if burning oil means permanent orgy, barbecue, you roast meat, whatever. But it's a problem: we shouldn't acknowledge it. So how do we account for that scene from Thomas Aquinas, that blessed souls in paradise observe? Sorry, but I claim this: you have there a permanent orgy, you drink, you have sex, beef barbecue, oil, and so on. And then once a week, let us say, Devil's administration comes: "Sorry guys, now for a quarter of an hour we will be observed from heaven, so pretend that you suffer." They say, "Yeah, yeah, oh, oh, oh!" Then after a quarter of an hour: "Okay, fun is back," and so on. But now I come back a little bit more seriously to why do they need this in hell? Sorry, in heaven. For the same—we—the—in the same way that in Czechoslovakia once a month there should be no coffee in the stores and so on, we are like in paradise. Western paradise—permissive, relative welfare in spite of the crisis. And to enjoy it fully, although it’s a pretty boring non-creative life, we have to be reminded from time to time that we are lucky to be here. So what in our lives is—how are we made aware of this? I think this is the function of horror movies and especially of TV news. You know, all these Third World TV news—rapes, Somalia, children slaughtered, and so on—are our reminder: "You don't like it here, you think we are in alienated consumerist society? Take a look there." It functions strictly as a temporary look into hell. Now, to slowly conclude, let me give you my final example of ideology at its worst today. I don't like the lady, although it's a very readable novel. I think it's the nastiest ideological novel that you can imagine. Although I watched the TV series and read the novel and I enjoyed it. I'm of course talking about Margaret Atwood's *Handmaid's Tale*. It’s ideology at its purest. Why? Of course it's a just cause, but I think the way it works, it's a perfect example of what Fredric Jameson, our friend, called nostalgia for the present. You know what the story about: it depicts in near future a United States where Christian fundamentalists took over and the way women are tortured, exploited, and so on and so on. I will leave aside the aspect of how much of this, the way women are oppressed there and so on, is an additional source of pleasure. I admit my responsibility: I enjoy new ways to screw women, not in the vulgar sense, but to make life—and I can claim I can secretly enjoy it because, "Oh, it's just a depiction of horrible fundamentalist rule" and so on. Most of my friends have the same reaction. But I want to ask you something else. The function, ideological, of the novel and especially TV series, is to make us feel good in our present society. It—it imagines a dystopian present so that all the time we are reminded, "My God, nonetheless, in what a wonderful, uh, still permissive and so on society we live." It never raises the question, which is for me the crucial question: but sorry guys, new religious fundamentalism or Alt-Right or Donald Trump, but they did not fall from the sky. How could it happen that *our*—this beautiful, tolerant, liberal society—gave birth to a monster like Donald Trump? Which is why, to conclude—almost, haha, not yet there—if you want to take an example of fetishism in today's politics, I think Donald Trump is the ultimate fetish. In what sense? Precisely in this almost naive Freudian sense where, you know—there is another question how to interpret this in a non-naive way, it can be done—but the basic idea is that fetish is the last thing, the object that you (in Freud's case a young boy, small boy) you see before you noticed, okay, in that case is that the woman doesn't have a penis, let's say
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before you noticed a crack,
before you noticed a crack,
Slavoj Žižek
an antagonism, and so on. And I claim in this precise sense Trump is a liberal fetish. This absolute fascination by Trump exists because Trump, Donald Trump, the horror of Trump, is the last thing that a liberal sees before he sees class struggle. And that's why Trump won. He mobilized for the Right the class struggle dimension which precisely liberal—liberal Left was ignoring. So, if you leave me just another two-three minutes, I want to repeat another old joke, but to give a different twist to it. Just a hint into what should we do to get out of this. The big enemy of me here is identity politics. And if you think I’m crazy, I will tell you that the best definition that I can imagine of fascism is that fascism is identity politics transposed onto relations within classes. It's "classes shouldn't struggle, every social class should be acknowledged in its own proper place," you know. But I will conclude, of course, in my style with a joke, which I already think I used here years ago, but I will give to it here a different twist. There is a well-known joke about Jews meeting on Saturday in a synagogue, which I think even Derrida uses it somewhere. You know the one about where they—okay, the joke is this one: they all publicly declare their limitations and so on in front of others. And first, a rich Jewish merchant says, "Oh God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of your attention, I am nothing." Then the Rabbi, mighty Rabbi, also reaches, "Oh God, I am also worthy of nothing, I am nothing," blah, blah. And then a poor ordinary Jew says, in a little bit scared way, "Dear God, but I am also a nothing," and one of the two rich guys kicks the other and says, "But who this guy think that he is, that he can also say that he is nothing," you know? That’s political correctness, what is wrong with it. Literally! I experienced the same situation in United States when I was already years ago at a meeting which was this the worst of anti-Eurocentric political correctness. One speaker after the other, all of them white affluent liberals, were confessing, "Oh, we are the worst white people, we are—we are responsible for everything: colonialism, racism," and so on and so on. One exceeding the other: "We killed Native Americans, blacks, we ruined Latin America, we are it." And then a good friend of mine, I love him, his name is Jeremiah Glikes. He is one of the bright black new philosophers, where I even don't want to use the term "black." He is simply a very good philosopher. He wrote an excellent book on—on echoes in art of Haiti revolution, Toussaint Louverture, and so on. Okay, he stood up and said there, "But wait a minute, we blacks also have our own sins, you know. What about Louis Farrakhan, black fundamentalism," and so on? And it was consternation among—like, who does he think—like, exactly like the rich Rabbi. Who does he think that he is, that he can also say that they are nothing? No, sorry, we whites have a monopoly on being nobody. And you know what's the racist trick here? The racist trick here is that the white people's respect for blacks is, they love the black or Inuit or Native Americans, whatever, to assert their particular identity. "Yes, your dances, your noble traditions," and so on. But secretly, the more you humiliate yourself—"We are guilty Europeans"—the more you reserve, maintain for yourself the position of universality. Which is why regularly I experience: those white liberals who are most critical of white racism are always again absolutely supportive of—of—of identity politics of those down there. But you know where secret claim to universality comes up, reasserts itself? That they are like in the case that I quoted: they are always the ones who keep for themselves this slightly subordinated position of judging the other. "You should develop your particular identity, but we will be the judges if you really are doing it or if you are still caught in colonialism," and so on and so on. You know, this radical self-criticism is a fake. And what's my solution here? Precisely what my friend was doing at that meeting. Blacks or other races do not need their identity politics. I find this repellent when white liberals visit some Native American tribe and say, "Oh my God, you live a poorer life, but it's much more authentic. I’m disgusted by our consumerism," and so on. Somebody told me that he was part of this group, that a Native American gave him a perfect answer: "Okay, let's change places. Give me your villa in Los Angeles and move to my stinking small cabin there," and so on, you know? That the real fight against racism is not a coexistence of particular identities. It's a struggle of universalities. The black people should say, "No, it’s not your particular mode of existence which disturbs us; it’s the universality that comes with it. We should not fight for our particular identity; we should fight to redefine your universality."
an antagonism, and so on. And I claim in this precise sense Trump is a liberal fetish. This absolute fascination by Trump exists because Trump, Donald Trump, the horror of Trump, is the last thing that a liberal sees before he sees class struggle. And that's why Trump won. He mobilized for the Right the class struggle dimension which precisely liberal—liberal Left was ignoring. So, if you leave me just another two-three minutes, I want to repeat another old joke, but to give a different twist to it. Just a hint into what should we do to get out of this. The big enemy of me here is identity politics. And if you think I’m crazy, I will tell you that the best definition that I can imagine of fascism is that fascism is identity politics transposed onto relations within classes. It's "classes shouldn't struggle, every social class should be acknowledged in its own proper place," you know. But I will conclude, of course, in my style with a joke, which I already think I used here years ago, but I will give to it here a different twist. There is a well-known joke about Jews meeting on Saturday in a synagogue, which I think even Derrida uses it somewhere. You know the one about where they—okay, the joke is this one: they all publicly declare their limitations and so on in front of others. And first, a rich Jewish merchant says, "Oh God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of your attention, I am nothing." Then the Rabbi, mighty Rabbi, also reaches, "Oh God, I am also worthy of nothing, I am nothing," blah, blah. And then a poor ordinary Jew says, in a little bit scared way, "Dear God, but I am also a nothing," and one of the two rich guys kicks the other and says, "But who this guy think that he is, that he can also say that he is nothing," you know? That’s political correctness, what is wrong with it. Literally! I experienced the same situation in United States when I was already years ago at a meeting which was this the worst of anti-Eurocentric political correctness. One speaker after the other, all of them white affluent liberals, were confessing, "Oh, we are the worst white people, we are—we are responsible for everything: colonialism, racism," and so on and so on. One exceeding the other: "We killed Native Americans, blacks, we ruined Latin America, we are it." And then a good friend of mine, I love him, his name is Jeremiah Glikes. He is one of the bright black new philosophers, where I even don't want to use the term "black." He is simply a very good philosopher. He wrote an excellent book on—on echoes in art of Haiti revolution, Toussaint Louverture, and so on. Okay, he stood up and said there, "But wait a minute, we blacks also have our own sins, you know. What about Louis Farrakhan, black fundamentalism," and so on? And it was consternation among—like, who does he think—like, exactly like the rich Rabbi. Who does he think that he is, that he can also say that they are nothing? No, sorry, we whites have a monopoly on being nobody. And you know what's the racist trick here? The racist trick here is that the white people's respect for blacks is, they love the black or Inuit or Native Americans, whatever, to assert their particular identity. "Yes, your dances, your noble traditions," and so on. But secretly, the more you humiliate yourself—"We are guilty Europeans"—the more you reserve, maintain for yourself the position of universality. Which is why regularly I experience: those white liberals who are most critical of white racism are always again absolutely supportive of—of—of identity politics of those down there. But you know where secret claim to universality comes up, reasserts itself? That they are like in the case that I quoted: they are always the ones who keep for themselves this slightly subordinated position of judging the other. "You should develop your particular identity, but we will be the judges if you really are doing it or if you are still caught in colonialism," and so on and so on. You know, this radical self-criticism is a fake. And what's my solution here? Precisely what my friend was doing at that meeting. Blacks or other races do not need their identity politics. I find this repellent when white liberals visit some Native American tribe and say, "Oh my God, you live a poorer life, but it's much more authentic. I’m disgusted by our consumerism," and so on. Somebody told me that he was part of this group, that a Native American gave him a perfect answer: "Okay, let's change places. Give me your villa in Los Angeles and move to my stinking small cabin there," and so on, you know? That the real fight against racism is not a coexistence of particular identities. It's a struggle of universalities. The black people should say, "No, it’s not your particular mode of existence which disturbs us; it’s the universality that comes with it. We should not fight for our particular identity; we should fight to redefine your universality."