Zizek’s opening statement - April 19, 2019 - Zizek v Peterson debate.

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 marginalised by the official academic community. I
am 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+ ideology, and I’m sure that if the leading figures were to be asked if I were 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 twentieth century left was defined by its opposition
to the truth 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, totalitarian state, state-wide capitalist dynamics. And – it’s important to
note – they do it on behalf of the majority of people. They don’t mention communism to legitimise
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 in
the full suite 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’s 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 / her / there 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 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 spiritualise it, or in the effort to
actualise 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 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 post-modern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No
– his conservatism is a post-modern 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 post-
modern president. If we compare with Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is a post-modern
politician at its purist while Sanders is rather an old fashion moralist. Conservative thinkers claim
that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent divinity. If we are left to
ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us
from indulging 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 that religion makes
some otherwise bad people do good things. From today’s experience, we should rather speak to
Steven Weinberg’s claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good
things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. More than a
century ago in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral
nihilism – if god doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted. The French philosophy André
Glucksmann applied Dostoyevsky’s critique of godless nihilism to September 11 and the title of his
book, ‘Dostoyevsky in Manhattan’ suggests that 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
from godless, Stalinest Communists – they are the ultimate proof of it. Everyhing was permitted to
them as they perceived themselves as direct instrument of their divinity – of historical necessity, as
progress towards communism. That’s the big of ideologies – how to make good, decent people do
horrible things.

Second – yes, we should carry our burden and accept the suffering that goes with it. But, a danger
lurks here, that of a subtly reversal: don’t fall in love – that’s my position – with your suffering.
Never presume that your suffering is in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure
can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself. For example, an example not from neo-
conservatives. White, left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and claim euro-centrism for our
evils. But, it is instantly clear how this self-denigration brings a profit of its own. Through this
renouncing of their particular roots, multi-cultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal
position: gracefully soliciting others to assert their particular identify. White, multi-culturalist 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 his wife – that she sleeps with other men – is all true, his jealously is nonetheless
pathological. The pathological element is the husbands need for jealousy as the only way for him to
sustain his identity. Along the same lines, one could same that if most of the Nazi claims about Jews
– they exploit German’s, the seduce German girls – 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
Nazi’s needed anti-Semitism. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonic
collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms. The same
true for how today in Europe the anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees. The cause of
problems which are, I claim, immanent to today’s global capitalism, is projected onto an external
intruder. Again, even if there if the reported incidents with the refugees – there are great problems, I
admit it – even if all these reports are true, the popularist story about them is a 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’re mostly stupid – is ‘An enemy is just a story whose story you have not heard’.
Really? 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 that phenomenon they criticise as the attack of the cultural
Marxist plot – moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism, and so on – are the
outcomes 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 the new afterword, Bell offers a bracing perspective of contemporary Western
societies, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines we face as the 21st century is here. The turn
towards culture as a key component of capitalist reproduction and concurrent to it the
commodification of cultural life itself are I think crucial moments of capitalism expanded
reproduction. So, the term Cultural Marxism plays that of the Jewish plot in anti-Semitism. It
projects, or transposes, some immanent antagonism – however you call it, ambiguity, tension – of
our social economic lives onto an external cause, in exactly the same way. Now, let me give you a
more problematic example – in exactly the same way, liberal critics of Trump and alt-right never
seriously ask 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 with 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 saw, 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 imponent reaction that masks the reality of a defeat. My hero is here a
black lady, Tarana Burke, who created the MeToo 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. MeToo 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 today’s capitalism that equalizers us too much and causes the loss of many talents.
So, what about the balance 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 care, free education, and so on – are
continually diminished. Look at Bernie Sanders program. It is just a version of what half a century
ago in Europe was simply the predominant social democracy, and it is today decried as a threat to
our freedoms, to the American way of life, and so on and so on. I can see no threat to free creativity
in this program – on the contrary, I saw health care and education and so on as enabling me to focus
my life on important creative issues. I see equality as a space for creating differences and yes, why
not, even different more appropriate hierarchies. Furtherwmore, I find it very hard to ground todays
inequalities as they are documented for example by Piketty in his book to ground todays 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 regulatory of the
social recognition of competencies.

Let me now briefly deal with 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 talk. Of course, we are also natural beings, and our DNA as we all know overlaps – I
may be wrong - around 98% with 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 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 realised that this failure can be resold as success. They were making 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. Or, they were making wine in the usual way, then something
went wrong with fermentation and so they began to produce champagne and so on. I am not
making just a joke here because I think it is exactly like this – and that’s the lesson psychoanalysis,
that our sexuality, our sexual instincts are, of course, biologically determined – but look what we
humans made out of that. 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 preserves the biologically rhythm, 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 use this term – transfunctionalised, it becomes a moment
of a different cultural 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 of quote. What does this mean? Let me
mention the change enacted by Christianity. It’s not just that in spite of all our natural and cultural
differences the same divine sparks dwells in everyone. But this divine spark enables us to create what
Christian’s call ‘holy ghost’ or ‘holy spirit’ – a community which hierarchic 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’. A democracy 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, because precisely Communists
in power who, legitimise this rule, by posing as fake experts. And, incidentally I’m far from believing
in ordinary people’s wisdom. We often need a master figure to push us out 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 awake in us to our freedom. We are
spontaneously really free. Furthermore, 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, mine and everybody’s favourite
theologist, 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 here applies 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’. If there is no such
authority in nature, lobster’s may have hierarchy, undoubtedly, but the main guy among them does
not have 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 they had to be kept apart, which is why the popular way was even combined with lottery often.

So where does Communism, just to conclude, where does Communism enter here? Why do I still
cling to this cursed name when I know and fully admit that 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 that prevent its indefinite reproduction. I think there are such
antagonisms. The threat of ecological catastrophe, the consequence of new techno-scientific
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 all, the commons
of external nature, threatened by pollution, global warming and so on. Now, let me be precise here –
I’m well aware uncertain analysis and projections are in this domain. It will be certain only 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 with obsession with the dying of
forests with predictions that in a couple of decades Europe would be without forests. But, according
to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in Europe than one hundred years or fifty years
ago. But there is nonetheless the prospect of a catastrophe here. Scientific data seems, 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 reasons that its
managers - not because of their evil nature, but that’s the logic of capitalism – care to extend self-
reproduction and environmental consequences are simply not part of the game. This is again not a
moral reproach. Incidentally, so that you will not think that I do not know what I am 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 with their
comprehension is no distorted by corporate interests. What qualifies them to pass a judgement in
such a delicate matter? Plus, the radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves
trigger new catastrophes. Let me mention just the idea that 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
functions and in what unpredictable ways geo-engineering 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 – Marx’s famous thesis, in our new century we should say that maybe in the last
century we tried all too fast to try the world. The time has come to step back and interpret it.

The second threat, the commons of internal nature. With no biogenetic technologies, the creation of
a new man, in the literal sense of changing human nature, becomes a realistic 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 changed. The digitalisation of our
brains opens up unheard of new possibilities of control. Directly sharing your experience with our
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
predominate reaction is the one of protected self-enclosure – ‘The world out there is in a mess, let’s
protect ourselves by all sorts of walls’. It seems that our countries are run relatively well, but is the
mess the so-called rogue 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 coaltan 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 peaceful co-existence of civilisations, but in what way does it function? Forced marriages
and homophobia is ok, just as long as they are limited to another country which is otherwise fully
included in the world market. This is how refugees are created. The second reaction is global
capitalism with a human face – think about socially responsible corporate figures like Bill Gates and
George Soros. They passionately support LGBT, they advocate charities and so on. But even it 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 completely in this. 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 fears I claim – ecology, digital control, unity of the world – a 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 – just think about in what way the market already functions
today. I always thought that neoliberalism is a fake term. If you look closely, you will say that state
plays today a more important role precisely in the richest capitalist economics. 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, ‘in spite of all these
problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel’, my instant reply is, ‘Yes, and it’s another train
coming towards us’.

Thank you very much.