人類擅於破壞自己的幸福 - Zizek VS Peterson 世紀辯論《快樂、資本、共產主義》 [Zizek引言]
Debate · 我是東尼 ·
2019 · 0:34:33 · 4,207 words
capitalismideologypsychoanalysisreligion-theologyfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracyecology-climatetechnology-ai-cyberspacegeopolitics-warcommunism-socialism
Žižek argues that modern happiness is a confused notion that masks our inability to confront desire, using China as an example of a state that prioritizes harmonious survival over political legitimacy. He critiques both postmodern conservatism (Trump) and old-fashioned moralism (Sanders), asserting that ideology functions as a lie we tell ourselves to account for social antagonisms, projecting internal capitalist contradictions onto external enemies like Jews, immigrants, or 'Cultural Marxists.' He concludes by analyzing the threats to the 'commons', ecology, biogenetics, and global inequality, arguing that capitalism’s logic of expanded reproduction inevitably endangers these shared substances, necessitating a renewed, regulated form of communism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 10
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Happiness is defined not as a positive state but as a defensive mechanism that relies on the subject's refusal to fully confront the consequences of their desire.
as “postmodern performance”
A form of conservatism that mixes references to traditional values with open obscenities, lacking any substantial belief in the values it invokes (exemplified by Trump).
The subtle reversal where the act of denying pleasure or suffering becomes itself a source of enjoyment, allowing liberals to profit from self-denigration.
as “pathological jealousy/anti-semitism”
The idea that even if the content of a paranoid claim (infidelity, Jewish conspiracy) were true, the phenomenon remains pathological because it serves a structural need to sustain identity or explain social division.
as “ideology as a lie”
Ideology is not false consciousness but a fundamental lie we tell ourselves to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives; the truth lies outside in what we do.
The inherent logic of capitalism (and historically communism) to expand self-reproduction, which inevitably ignores or endangers environmental and social consequences.
as “fetish of Trump”
The image of Trump serves as a fetish for liberals, allowing them to ignore the internal failures of liberal society that created the space for his populism.
as “transfunctionalized sexuality”
Sexual instincts are biologically conditioned but become 'transfunctionalized' through culture, developing into metaphysical passions (like courtly love or perversions) that perturb biological rhythms.
Political power/authority is distinct from technical competence; true authority (like the Father or Christ) is not grounded in being a 'good guy' or expert, but in a symbolic position that awakens freedom.
The shared substance of social being, including external nature, internal nature (biogenetics/brains), and the common space of humanity, which capitalism threatens through its logic of expanded reproduction.
Stories he reaches for 3
While religion might make bad people do good things, Weinberg claims it makes good people do bad things, illustrated by mob killings in the name of religion.
“Only something like religion can make good people do bad things.”
André Glucksmann applied Dostoevsky's warning about godless nihilism to 9/11, but Žižek argues the lesson is inverted: if there is a God, everything, including terrorism, is permitted.
“If there is a god, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted.”
French dishes like cheese and champagne originated from mistakes or 'rotten' failures that were resold as successes, illustrating how nature/culture works through improvisation rather than stable hierarchy.
“They were making cheese in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected... they said, oh my god, look, we have our own original french cheese.”
Works invoked 5
Cited for Dostoevsky's warning against godless moral nihilism.
Daniel Bell's 1976 work arguing that capitalism undermines Protestant ethics and commodifies culture.
Glucksmann's book applying Dostoevsky's critique to 9/11; Žižek argues the title suggests the opposite of the actual lesson.
Me Too Campaign other
Created by Tarana Burke; Žižek respects the origin but critiques its current manifestation as filtered through resentment.
Refers to Piketty's work documenting inequalities.
People invoked 16
Tarana Burke positive
Described as Žižek's 'hero'; creator of Me Too, who observed the movement has become a protest filtered through resentment.
Daniel Bell positive
Cited for 'Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism' (1976), arguing that capitalism undermines Protestant ethics and commodifies culture.
George Soros negative
Grouped with Gates as a figure whose support for open borders is symptomatic treatment, not a solution to the root causes of immigration.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the paradoxical claim about pathological jealousy sustaining identity.
Steven Weinberg positive
Cited for the claim that religion makes good people do bad things.
Donald Trump negative
Described as the 'ultimate postmodern president,' a 'gigantic ego trip,' and a 'fetish' for liberals that masks the failures of liberal society.
Adolf Hitler negative
Described as one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century who provided a 'Jewish plot' to explain the confused mess of post-WWI Germany.
Bernie Sanders positive
Contrasted with Trump as an 'old-fashioned moralist'; his program of universal health and education is seen as enabling creative focus rather than threatening freedom.
André Glucksmann negative
Critiqued for applying Dostoevsky's critique of nihilism to 9/11 in 'Dostoevsky in Manhattan'; Žižek calls the title 'wrong'.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited as 'the great conservative' for his view that the past is altered by the present.
Bill Gates negative
Described as a 'socially responsible corporate figure' whose charity is merely 'symptomatic treatment' for the systemic issues creating refugees.
Co-participant in a 'duel of the century'; Žižek notes they are both marginalized by the official academic community.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Described as 'my and everybody's favorite theologian'; cited for the argument that authority is not grounded in competence.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the concept of 'the commons' and Thesis 11 (interpreting the world vs. changing it).
Thomas Piketty positive
Cited for documenting inequalities that cannot be grounded in different competencies.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Cited for warning against godless moral nihilism in The Brothers Karamazov.
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
dr. žižek. thank you. oh. uh. okay. first, a brief introductory remark. i cannot but notice the irony of how peterson and i, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community. i'm supposed to defend here the left liberal line against neo-conservatives. really, most of the attacks on me are now precisely from left liberals. just remember the outcry against my critique of lgbt plus ideology. and i'm sure that if the leading figures in this field were to be asked if i am fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even if they are still alive. so let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title, happiness, communism, capitalism. in one exemplary case, china today. china in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle-class existence. how did china achieve it. the 20th century left was defined by its opposition to the two fundamental tendencies of modernity. the reign of capital with its aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. today's china combines these two features in its extreme form. strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics. and it's important to note they do it on behalf of happiness of the majority of people. they don't mention communism to legitimize their rule. they prefer the old confucian notion of a harmonious society. but! are the chinese any happier for all that. although even the dalai lama justifies tibetan buddhism in western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very problematic notion. if we learned anything from psychoanalysis, it is that we humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness. happiness is a confused notion. basically, it relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his or their desire. in our daily lives, we pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we officially desire. so i agree that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness, no matter how much we spiritualize it, or in the effort to actualize our inner potentials. we have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival. however, i would like to add here a couple of uh. qualifications. first, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us. modernity means that yes, we should carry the burden. but the main burden is freedom itself. we are responsible for our burdens. not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse. we are never just instruments of some higher cause. once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it. all such returns are today a postmodern fake. does donald trump stand for traditional values? no, his conservatism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. in this sense, of playing with traditional values, of mixing references to them with open obscenities, trump is the ultimate postmodern president. if we compare trump with bernie sanders, trump is the postmodern politician at its purest, while sanders is rather an old-fashioned moralist. conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent divinity or higher value. if we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us to indulge in our lowest tendencies. but is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? it is often claimed that true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things. from today's experience, i think we should rather stick to steve weinberg's claim that while without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things. only something like religion can make good people do bad things. more than a century ago, in his brother karamazov, dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism. if god doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. the french philosopher andré glucksmann applied. dostoevsky's critique of godless! nihilism to september 11th. and the title of his book, dostoevsky in manhattan, suggests, as this title suggests, he couldn't have been more wrong. the lesson of today's terrorism is that if there is a god, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of god. the same goes also for godless stalinist communists. they are the ultimate proof of it. everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instrument of their divinity, of the historical necessity of progress towards communism. that's the big problem of ideologies. how to make good, decent people do horrible things. second, yes, we should carry... our burden, accept the suffering that goes with it. but a danger lurks here, that of a subtle reversal. don't fall in love, that's my position, with your suffering. never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity. renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into pleasure of renunciation itself. for example, an example not from neoconservatives. white left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and blame eurocentrism for our evils. but it is instantly clear how this self-denigration brings a profit of its own. through this renunciation link. of their particular roots, multicultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal position, graciously soliciting others to assert their particular identity. white multiculturalist liberals embody the lie of identity politics. next point. jacques lacan wrote something paradoxical but deeply true that even if what a jealous husband claims about his about his wife, that she sleeps with other men is all true. his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. the pathological element is the husband's need for jealousy. it's the only way for him to sustain his identity. along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the nazi claims about jew. they exploit germans, they seduce german girls and so on, were true, which. they were not, of course. their anti-semitism would still be a pathological phenomenon because it ignored the true reason why the nazis needed anti-semitism. in the nazi vision, their society. is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms. the same holds for how today, in europe at least, the anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees. the cause of problems which are, i claim, imminent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. again, even if the reported incident with the refugees, there are great problems. i admit it. even all these reports are true. the populist story about them is the lie. with anti-semitism, we are approaching the topic of telling stories. hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. in the 1920s, many germans experienced their situation as a confused mess. they didn't understand what is happening to them with military defeat, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral decay and so on. hitler provided a story, a plot, which was precisely that of a jewish plot. we are in this mess because of the jews. that's what i would like to insist on. we are telling ourselves stories about ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives. however, this is not enough. one of the most stupid wisdoms, and they are mostly stupid, is... an enemy is someone whose story you have not hurt. really the is is. are you also ready to affirm that hitler was our enemy because his story was not heard? the experience that we have of our lives from within. the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is, and this is what i call ideology, fundamentally a lie. the truth lies outside in what we do. in a similar way, the alt-right obsession with cultural marxism expresses the rejection to confront the fact that the phenomena they criticize is the effect of the cultural marxist plot, moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism, and so on, are the outcome of the immanent dynamic of... capitalist societies. i would like to refer to a classic. daniel bell, cultural contradictions of capitalism, written back in 1976, where the author argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original protestant ethics. and in a new after, bell offers a bracing perspective on contemporary western societies, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines. we fake. is the 21st century. is here. the turn towards culture is the key component of capitalist reproduction and concomitant to it, the commodification of cultural life itself are, i think, crucial moments of capitalist expanded reproduction. so the term cultural marxism, i think, plays the same role as that of the jewish plot in anti-semitism. it projects or transposes it. some im. antagonism, however you call it, ambiguity, tension. of our socio-economic life onto an external cause. in exactly the same way, now let me tell you a different, give you a different more problematic example, in exactly the same way. liberal critics of trump and alt-right never seriously asked how our liberal society could give birth to trump. in this sense, the image of donald trump is also a fetish. the last thing a liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions. hegel's motto, evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere, fully applies here. the very liberal gaze which demonizes trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for trump's type of patriotic populism. next point. one should stop blaming hedonist egotism for our woes. the true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism. a concern for the common good, but envy, resentment, which makes me act against my own interests. this is why as many perspicuous philosophers clearly so, evil is profoundly spiritual, in some sense more spiritual than goodness. this is why. egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value it can well secretly invert the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others egalitarianism often de facto means i am ready to renounce something. so that others will also not have it. this is, i think, now comes the problematic part for some of you maybe the problem with political correctness. what appears as its excesses, its regulatory zeal, is, i think, an impotent reaction that masks the reality of a defeat. my hero is, a black lady, tarana burke. who created the me too campaign more than a decade ago? she observed in a recent critical note that in the years since the movement began, it deployed an unwavering obsession with the perpetrators. me too is all too often a genuine protest filtered through resentment. should we then drop egalitarianism? no. equality can also mean, and that's the equality i advocate, creating the space for as many as possible individuals to develop their different potentials. it is, that's my paradoxical claim. it is today's capitalism that equalizes us too much and causes the loss of many talents. so what about the balance between equality and hierarchy? did we really move too much in the direction of equality? is there in today's united states really too much equality? i think a simple overview of the situation points in the opposite direction. far from pushing us too far, the left is gradually losing its ground already for decades. its trademarks, universal health, free education and so on, are continuously diminished. look at bernie sanders, and i don't idealize him, program. it is just... a version of what? half a century ago in europe was simply the predominant social democracy and it's today decried as a threat to our freedoms, to the american way of life and so on and so on. i see no threat to free creativity in this program. on the contrary, i see healthcare and education and so on as enabling me to focus my life on more important creative issues. i see equality, this basic equality of chances, as a space for creating differences and yes, why not, even different, more appropriate hierarchies. furthermore, i find it very hard to ground today's inequalities as they are documented, for example, by piketty in his book. on to ground today's inequalities in different competencies. competencies for what? in totalitarian states, competencies are determined politically. but market success is also not innocent and neutral as a regulator of the social recognition of competencies. let me now briefly deal in a friendly way, i claim, with what became known, sorry for the irony, as the lobster topic. i'm far from a simple social constructionism here. i deeply appreciate evolutionary thought. of course, we are also natural beings. and our dna, as we all know, overlaps, i may be wrong, around 98% with that of some monkeys. this means something, but nature, i think we should never forget this, is not a stable hierarchical system but full of improvisations. it develops like french cuisine. a french guy gave me this idea that french the origin of many famous french dishes or drinks is that when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realized that this failure can be resold as success. they were making cheese in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they said, oh my god, look, we have our own original french cheese. they were making wine in the usual way, then something went wrong with fermentations and so they began to produce champagne and so on and so on. i'm not making just a joke here because i think that it is exactly like this that, and that's the lesson of psychoanalysis, that our sexuality works. sexual instincts are of course biologically determined. but look what we humans made out of them. they are not. limited to the mating season. they can develop into a permanent obsession sustained by obstacles that demand to be overcome. in short, into a properly metaphysical passion that perturbs the biological rhythm, with twists like endlessly prolonging satisfaction in courtly love, engaging in different perversions and so on and so on. so it's still, yes, biologically conditioned sexuality, but it is, if i may, i use this term transfunctionalized. it becomes a moment of different cultural, however you call it, logic. and i claim the same goes for tradition. t.s. eliot, the great conservative, wrote, quote, what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded it. the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. end quote what does this mean? let me mentioned the change enacted by christianity. it's not just that in spite of all our natural and cultural differences, the same divine spark dwells in everyone, but this divine spark enables us to create what christians call holy ghost or holy spirit, a community in which hierarchical family values are at some level at least abolished. remember paul's words from galatians. there is no longer jew or greek. there is no longer male and female in christ. democracy extends this logic to the political space. in spite of all differences in competence, the ultimate decision should stay with all of us. the wager of democracy is that we should not give all power to competent experts. it was precisely communists in power who legitimized their rule by posing as fake experts. and incidentally, i am far from believing in ordinary. people's wisdom. we often need a master figure. to. push us out of an inertia. and i'm not afraid to say. that forces us to be free. freedom and responsibility hurt, they require an effort and the highest function of an authentic master is to literally to awaken us to our freedom. we are not spontaneously really free. furthermore, think. i i think that social power and authority cannot be directly grounded in competence. in our human universe, power in the sense of exerting authority. is something much more mysterious, even irrational. kierkegaard, my and everybody's favorite theologian, wrote. if a child says, he will obey his father because his father is a competent and good guy. this is an affront to father's authority. and he applied the same. logic to christ himself. christ was justified by the fact of being god's son, not by his competencies or capacities. as kierkegaard put it, every good student of theology can put things better than christ. there is no such authority in nature. lobsters may have hierarchy, undoubtedly, but the main guy among them, i don't think he has authority in this sense. again, the wager of democracy is that. and that's the subtle thing, not against competence and so on, but that. political power and competence or expertise should be kept apart. in stalinism precisely they were not kept apart, while already in ancient greece they knew that they have to be kept apart, which is why their popular weight was even combined with lottery often. so where does communism, just to conclude, where does communism enter here? uh. why do i still cling to this cursed name when i know and fully admit the 20th century communist project in all its failure, how it failed giving birth to new forms of murderous terror. capitalism won. but today, and that's my claim, we can debate about it, the question is, does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? i think there are such antagonisms. uh. the threat of ecological catastrophe the consequence of new. technoscientific developments, especially in biogenetics and new forms of apartheid. all these antagonisms concern what marx called commons, the shared substance of our social being. first, of course, the commons of external nature. threatened by pollution, global warming and so on. now, let me be precise here. i'm well aware how uncertain analysis and projections are in this domain. it will be certain only when it will be too late. and i am well aware of the temptation to engage in precipitous extrapolations. when i was younger, to give you a critical example, there was in germany an obsession with waldsterben, the dying of forests, with predictions that in a couple of decades, europe will be without forests. but according to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in europe. than 100 years or 50 years ago. but there is nonetheless, i claim, the prospect of a catastrophe here. scientific data seem to me at least abundant enough and we should act in a large scale collective way. and i also think this may be critical to some of you, there is a problem with capitalism here for the simple reason that its managers, not because of their evil nature, but that's the logic of capitalism. care to expand self-reproduction and environmental consequences are simply not part of the game. this is again not a moral reproach. and incidentally, so that you will not think that i don't know what i'm talking about, in communist countries, those in power were obsessed with expanded reproduction. and were not under public control, so the situation was even worse. so how to act? first, by admitting we are in a deep mess. there is no simple democratic solution here. the idea that people themselves should decide. what to do about ecology sounds deep, but it begs an important question. even if their comprehension is not distorted by corporate interests. qualifies them to pass a judgment in such a delicate matter. plus! the radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves trigger new catastrophes. let me mention just the idea which is floating around of solar radiation management. the continuous massive dispersal of aerosols into our atmosphere. to reflect and absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet. can we even imagine how the fragile balance of our earth function and in what unpredictable ways geoengineering can disturb it? in such times of urgency, when we know we have to act, but don't know how to act, thinking is needed. maybe we should turn around a little bit. marxist famous thesis 11 in the. in our new century, we should say that maybe in the last century we tried all too fast to change the world. the time has come to step back and interpret it. the second threat, the commons of internal nature. with new biogenetic technologies, the creation of a new man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realist prospect. i mean primarily so-called popularly neural link the direct link between our brain. and digital machines and then brains among themselves. this, i think, is the true game changer. the digitalization of our brain opens up unheard of new possibilities of control. directly sharing your experience with your beloved may appear attractive, but what about sharing them with an agency without you even knowing it? finally, the common space of humanity itself. we live in one and the same world which is more and more interconnected. but nonetheless deeply divided. so how to react to this? the first and sadly predominant reaction is the one of protective self-inlosure. the world out there is in a mess. let's protect ourselves by all kinds of walls. it seems that our countries are relatively well, but it's the mess. the so-called rogueues countries find themselves in not connected to how. we interact with them, take what is perhaps the ultimate rogue. state, congo. warlords who rule provinces there are always dealing with western companies. selling them minerals. where would our computers be without coltan from congo? and what about foreign interventions in iraq and syria or by our proxies like saudi arabia in yemen? here refugees are created. a new world order is emerging, a world of. can i just finish the page? two minutes, literally. a world of peaceful coexistence of civilizations. but in what way does it function? forced marriages and homophobic homophobia are okay, just that they are re limited to another country which is otherwise fully included into the world market. this is how. refugees again are created. the second reaction is global capitalism with the human face. think about. socially responsible corporate figures like bill gates or george soros. they passionately support lgbt, they advocate charities and so on. but even in its extreme form. opening up our borders to the refugees, treating them like one of us. they only provide, what in medicine is called a symptomatic treatment. the solution is not for the rich western countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation which creates massive waves of immigration. and we are complicit in this. al. is such a change a utopia? no, the true utopia is that we can survive without such a change. so here i think, i know it's provocative to call this a plea for communism. i do it a little bit to provoke things. but what is needed is nonetheless in all these spheres, i claim, ecology, digital control, unity of the world. capitalist market, which does great things. i admit it. has to be somehow limited, regulated and so on. before you say it's a utopia, i will tell you, but just think about in what way global market already functions today. i always thought that neoliberal-lib is a fake term. if you look closely, you will see that state plays today more important role than ever, precisely in the richest capitalist economies. so, you know, the market is already limited, but... not in the right way to put it naively. so, a pessimist conclusion. what will happen? in spite of protests here and there, we will probably continue to slide towards some kind of apocalypse, awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us. so i don't accept any cheap optimism. when somebody tries to convince me that in spite of all the problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my instant reply is yes, and it's probably another train coming towards us. thank you very much. please don't do this because i really think that that's why i hope you, jordan, agree with it. that's why we are here, engaged in this debate. don't take it as a cheap competition. it may be that, but we are, as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems. i mean. for example, when i mentioned china china, i didn't mean to celebrate it. that worries me terribly. my god, is this our future? now. sorry, sorry for this. sorry, please, discount take away this from my 10 minutes. no problem. no problem.
dr. žižek. thank you. oh. uh. okay. first, a brief introductory remark. i cannot but notice the irony of how peterson and i, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community. i'm supposed to defend here the left liberal line against neo-conservatives. really, most of the attacks on me are now precisely from left liberals. just remember the outcry against my critique of lgbt plus ideology. and i'm sure that if the leading figures in this field were to be asked if i am fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even if they are still alive. so let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title, happiness, communism, capitalism. in one exemplary case, china today. china in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle-class existence. how did china achieve it. the 20th century left was defined by its opposition to the two fundamental tendencies of modernity. the reign of capital with its aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. today's china combines these two features in its extreme form. strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics. and it's important to note they do it on behalf of happiness of the majority of people. they don't mention communism to legitimize their rule. they prefer the old confucian notion of a harmonious society. but! are the chinese any happier for all that. although even the dalai lama justifies tibetan buddhism in western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very problematic notion. if we learned anything from psychoanalysis, it is that we humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness. happiness is a confused notion. basically, it relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his or their desire. in our daily lives, we pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we officially desire. so i agree that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness, no matter how much we spiritualize it, or in the effort to actualize our inner potentials. we have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival. however, i would like to add here a couple of uh. qualifications. first, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us. modernity means that yes, we should carry the burden. but the main burden is freedom itself. we are responsible for our burdens. not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse. we are never just instruments of some higher cause. once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it. all such returns are today a postmodern fake. does donald trump stand for traditional values? no, his conservatism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. in this sense, of playing with traditional values, of mixing references to them with open obscenities, trump is the ultimate postmodern president. if we compare trump with bernie sanders, trump is the postmodern politician at its purest, while sanders is rather an old-fashioned moralist. conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent divinity or higher value. if we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us to indulge in our lowest tendencies. but is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? it is often claimed that true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things. from today's experience, i think we should rather stick to steve weinberg's claim that while without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things. only something like religion can make good people do bad things. more than a century ago, in his brother karamazov, dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism. if god doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. the french philosopher andré glucksmann applied. dostoevsky's critique of godless! nihilism to september 11th. and the title of his book, dostoevsky in manhattan, suggests, as this title suggests, he couldn't have been more wrong. the lesson of today's terrorism is that if there is a god, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of god. the same goes also for godless stalinist communists. they are the ultimate proof of it. everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instrument of their divinity, of the historical necessity of progress towards communism. that's the big problem of ideologies. how to make good, decent people do horrible things. second, yes, we should carry... our burden, accept the suffering that goes with it. but a danger lurks here, that of a subtle reversal. don't fall in love, that's my position, with your suffering. never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity. renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into pleasure of renunciation itself. for example, an example not from neoconservatives. white left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and blame eurocentrism for our evils. but it is instantly clear how this self-denigration brings a profit of its own. through this renunciation link. of their particular roots, multicultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal position, graciously soliciting others to assert their particular identity. white multiculturalist liberals embody the lie of identity politics. next point. jacques lacan wrote something paradoxical but deeply true that even if what a jealous husband claims about his about his wife, that she sleeps with other men is all true. his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. the pathological element is the husband's need for jealousy. it's the only way for him to sustain his identity. along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the nazi claims about jew. they exploit germans, they seduce german girls and so on, were true, which. they were not, of course. their anti-semitism would still be a pathological phenomenon because it ignored the true reason why the nazis needed anti-semitism. in the nazi vision, their society. is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms. the same holds for how today, in europe at least, the anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees. the cause of problems which are, i claim, imminent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. again, even if the reported incident with the refugees, there are great problems. i admit it. even all these reports are true. the populist story about them is the lie. with anti-semitism, we are approaching the topic of telling stories. hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. in the 1920s, many germans experienced their situation as a confused mess. they didn't understand what is happening to them with military defeat, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral decay and so on. hitler provided a story, a plot, which was precisely that of a jewish plot. we are in this mess because of the jews. that's what i would like to insist on. we are telling ourselves stories about ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives. however, this is not enough. one of the most stupid wisdoms, and they are mostly stupid, is... an enemy is someone whose story you have not hurt. really the is is. are you also ready to affirm that hitler was our enemy because his story was not heard? the experience that we have of our lives from within. the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is, and this is what i call ideology, fundamentally a lie. the truth lies outside in what we do. in a similar way, the alt-right obsession with cultural marxism expresses the rejection to confront the fact that the phenomena they criticize is the effect of the cultural marxist plot, moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism, and so on, are the outcome of the immanent dynamic of... capitalist societies. i would like to refer to a classic. daniel bell, cultural contradictions of capitalism, written back in 1976, where the author argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original protestant ethics. and in a new after, bell offers a bracing perspective on contemporary western societies, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines. we fake. is the 21st century. is here. the turn towards culture is the key component of capitalist reproduction and concomitant to it, the commodification of cultural life itself are, i think, crucial moments of capitalist expanded reproduction. so the term cultural marxism, i think, plays the same role as that of the jewish plot in anti-semitism. it projects or transposes it. some im. antagonism, however you call it, ambiguity, tension. of our socio-economic life onto an external cause. in exactly the same way, now let me tell you a different, give you a different more problematic example, in exactly the same way. liberal critics of trump and alt-right never seriously asked how our liberal society could give birth to trump. in this sense, the image of donald trump is also a fetish. the last thing a liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions. hegel's motto, evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere, fully applies here. the very liberal gaze which demonizes trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for trump's type of patriotic populism. next point. one should stop blaming hedonist egotism for our woes. the true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism. a concern for the common good, but envy, resentment, which makes me act against my own interests. this is why as many perspicuous philosophers clearly so, evil is profoundly spiritual, in some sense more spiritual than goodness. this is why. egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value it can well secretly invert the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others egalitarianism often de facto means i am ready to renounce something. so that others will also not have it. this is, i think, now comes the problematic part for some of you maybe the problem with political correctness. what appears as its excesses, its regulatory zeal, is, i think, an impotent reaction that masks the reality of a defeat. my hero is, a black lady, tarana burke. who created the me too campaign more than a decade ago? she observed in a recent critical note that in the years since the movement began, it deployed an unwavering obsession with the perpetrators. me too is all too often a genuine protest filtered through resentment. should we then drop egalitarianism? no. equality can also mean, and that's the equality i advocate, creating the space for as many as possible individuals to develop their different potentials. it is, that's my paradoxical claim. it is today's capitalism that equalizes us too much and causes the loss of many talents. so what about the balance between equality and hierarchy? did we really move too much in the direction of equality? is there in today's united states really too much equality? i think a simple overview of the situation points in the opposite direction. far from pushing us too far, the left is gradually losing its ground already for decades. its trademarks, universal health, free education and so on, are continuously diminished. look at bernie sanders, and i don't idealize him, program. it is just... a version of what? half a century ago in europe was simply the predominant social democracy and it's today decried as a threat to our freedoms, to the american way of life and so on and so on. i see no threat to free creativity in this program. on the contrary, i see healthcare and education and so on as enabling me to focus my life on more important creative issues. i see equality, this basic equality of chances, as a space for creating differences and yes, why not, even different, more appropriate hierarchies. furthermore, i find it very hard to ground today's inequalities as they are documented, for example, by piketty in his book. on to ground today's inequalities in different competencies. competencies for what? in totalitarian states, competencies are determined politically. but market success is also not innocent and neutral as a regulator of the social recognition of competencies. let me now briefly deal in a friendly way, i claim, with what became known, sorry for the irony, as the lobster topic. i'm far from a simple social constructionism here. i deeply appreciate evolutionary thought. of course, we are also natural beings. and our dna, as we all know, overlaps, i may be wrong, around 98% with that of some monkeys. this means something, but nature, i think we should never forget this, is not a stable hierarchical system but full of improvisations. it develops like french cuisine. a french guy gave me this idea that french the origin of many famous french dishes or drinks is that when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realized that this failure can be resold as success. they were making cheese in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they said, oh my god, look, we have our own original french cheese. they were making wine in the usual way, then something went wrong with fermentations and so they began to produce champagne and so on and so on. i'm not making just a joke here because i think that it is exactly like this that, and that's the lesson of psychoanalysis, that our sexuality works. sexual instincts are of course biologically determined. but look what we humans made out of them. they are not. limited to the mating season. they can develop into a permanent obsession sustained by obstacles that demand to be overcome. in short, into a properly metaphysical passion that perturbs the biological rhythm, with twists like endlessly prolonging satisfaction in courtly love, engaging in different perversions and so on and so on. so it's still, yes, biologically conditioned sexuality, but it is, if i may, i use this term transfunctionalized. it becomes a moment of different cultural, however you call it, logic. and i claim the same goes for tradition. t.s. eliot, the great conservative, wrote, quote, what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded it. the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. end quote what does this mean? let me mentioned the change enacted by christianity. it's not just that in spite of all our natural and cultural differences, the same divine spark dwells in everyone, but this divine spark enables us to create what christians call holy ghost or holy spirit, a community in which hierarchical family values are at some level at least abolished. remember paul's words from galatians. there is no longer jew or greek. there is no longer male and female in christ. democracy extends this logic to the political space. in spite of all differences in competence, the ultimate decision should stay with all of us. the wager of democracy is that we should not give all power to competent experts. it was precisely communists in power who legitimized their rule by posing as fake experts. and incidentally, i am far from believing in ordinary. people's wisdom. we often need a master figure. to. push us out of an inertia. and i'm not afraid to say. that forces us to be free. freedom and responsibility hurt, they require an effort and the highest function of an authentic master is to literally to awaken us to our freedom. we are not spontaneously really free. furthermore, think. i i think that social power and authority cannot be directly grounded in competence. in our human universe, power in the sense of exerting authority. is something much more mysterious, even irrational. kierkegaard, my and everybody's favorite theologian, wrote. if a child says, he will obey his father because his father is a competent and good guy. this is an affront to father's authority. and he applied the same. logic to christ himself. christ was justified by the fact of being god's son, not by his competencies or capacities. as kierkegaard put it, every good student of theology can put things better than christ. there is no such authority in nature. lobsters may have hierarchy, undoubtedly, but the main guy among them, i don't think he has authority in this sense. again, the wager of democracy is that. and that's the subtle thing, not against competence and so on, but that. political power and competence or expertise should be kept apart. in stalinism precisely they were not kept apart, while already in ancient greece they knew that they have to be kept apart, which is why their popular weight was even combined with lottery often. so where does communism, just to conclude, where does communism enter here? uh. why do i still cling to this cursed name when i know and fully admit the 20th century communist project in all its failure, how it failed giving birth to new forms of murderous terror. capitalism won. but today, and that's my claim, we can debate about it, the question is, does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? i think there are such antagonisms. uh. the threat of ecological catastrophe the consequence of new. technoscientific developments, especially in biogenetics and new forms of apartheid. all these antagonisms concern what marx called commons, the shared substance of our social being. first, of course, the commons of external nature. threatened by pollution, global warming and so on. now, let me be precise here. i'm well aware how uncertain analysis and projections are in this domain. it will be certain only when it will be too late. and i am well aware of the temptation to engage in precipitous extrapolations. when i was younger, to give you a critical example, there was in germany an obsession with waldsterben, the dying of forests, with predictions that in a couple of decades, europe will be without forests. but according to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in europe. than 100 years or 50 years ago. but there is nonetheless, i claim, the prospect of a catastrophe here. scientific data seem to me at least abundant enough and we should act in a large scale collective way. and i also think this may be critical to some of you, there is a problem with capitalism here for the simple reason that its managers, not because of their evil nature, but that's the logic of capitalism. care to expand self-reproduction and environmental consequences are simply not part of the game. this is again not a moral reproach. and incidentally, so that you will not think that i don't know what i'm talking about, in communist countries, those in power were obsessed with expanded reproduction. and were not under public control, so the situation was even worse. so how to act? first, by admitting we are in a deep mess. there is no simple democratic solution here. the idea that people themselves should decide. what to do about ecology sounds deep, but it begs an important question. even if their comprehension is not distorted by corporate interests. qualifies them to pass a judgment in such a delicate matter. plus! the radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves trigger new catastrophes. let me mention just the idea which is floating around of solar radiation management. the continuous massive dispersal of aerosols into our atmosphere. to reflect and absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet. can we even imagine how the fragile balance of our earth function and in what unpredictable ways geoengineering can disturb it? in such times of urgency, when we know we have to act, but don't know how to act, thinking is needed. maybe we should turn around a little bit. marxist famous thesis 11 in the. in our new century, we should say that maybe in the last century we tried all too fast to change the world. the time has come to step back and interpret it. the second threat, the commons of internal nature. with new biogenetic technologies, the creation of a new man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realist prospect. i mean primarily so-called popularly neural link the direct link between our brain. and digital machines and then brains among themselves. this, i think, is the true game changer. the digitalization of our brain opens up unheard of new possibilities of control. directly sharing your experience with your beloved may appear attractive, but what about sharing them with an agency without you even knowing it? finally, the common space of humanity itself. we live in one and the same world which is more and more interconnected. but nonetheless deeply divided. so how to react to this? the first and sadly predominant reaction is the one of protective self-inlosure. the world out there is in a mess. let's protect ourselves by all kinds of walls. it seems that our countries are relatively well, but it's the mess. the so-called rogueues countries find themselves in not connected to how. we interact with them, take what is perhaps the ultimate rogue. state, congo. warlords who rule provinces there are always dealing with western companies. selling them minerals. where would our computers be without coltan from congo? and what about foreign interventions in iraq and syria or by our proxies like saudi arabia in yemen? here refugees are created. a new world order is emerging, a world of. can i just finish the page? two minutes, literally. a world of peaceful coexistence of civilizations. but in what way does it function? forced marriages and homophobic homophobia are okay, just that they are re limited to another country which is otherwise fully included into the world market. this is how. refugees again are created. the second reaction is global capitalism with the human face. think about. socially responsible corporate figures like bill gates or george soros. they passionately support lgbt, they advocate charities and so on. but even in its extreme form. opening up our borders to the refugees, treating them like one of us. they only provide, what in medicine is called a symptomatic treatment. the solution is not for the rich western countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation which creates massive waves of immigration. and we are complicit in this. al. is such a change a utopia? no, the true utopia is that we can survive without such a change. so here i think, i know it's provocative to call this a plea for communism. i do it a little bit to provoke things. but what is needed is nonetheless in all these spheres, i claim, ecology, digital control, unity of the world. capitalist market, which does great things. i admit it. has to be somehow limited, regulated and so on. before you say it's a utopia, i will tell you, but just think about in what way global market already functions today. i always thought that neoliberal-lib is a fake term. if you look closely, you will see that state plays today more important role than ever, precisely in the richest capitalist economies. so, you know, the market is already limited, but... not in the right way to put it naively. so, a pessimist conclusion. what will happen? in spite of protests here and there, we will probably continue to slide towards some kind of apocalypse, awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us. so i don't accept any cheap optimism. when somebody tries to convince me that in spite of all the problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my instant reply is yes, and it's probably another train coming towards us. thank you very much. please don't do this because i really think that that's why i hope you, jordan, agree with it. that's why we are here, engaged in this debate. don't take it as a cheap competition. it may be that, but we are, as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems. i mean. for example, when i mentioned china china, i didn't mean to celebrate it. that worries me terribly. my god, is this our future? now. sorry, sorry for this. sorry, please, discount take away this from my 10 minutes. no problem. no problem.