Episode #200 ... The Postmodern subject and "ideology without ideology" (Zizek, Byung Chul Han, Marx)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So, a clip you'll likely see of Slavos Zizek, if you're scrolling through wherever you get your videos from, is one where he says that the idea of wisdom, as it's often presented in media, is a conformist thing for people to be chasing. He even says that wisdom is the most disgusting thing you can imagine. That's an actual quote from him. But what did he mean when he said it?

Well, he continues. He says, look, if I just say some wise-sounding stuff in the right tone of voice, then all of a sudden it passes to people as wisdom. He says, watch, I'll do it. Why are we running after these miserable earthly pleasures? The only true satisfaction is in eternity. You know, I say that in a certain way, and it sounds like a totally wise thing to say. But now let's say the opposite. Why run after the specter of eternity?

Carpe diem. Seize the day. Grasp what you have right now in this moment. This also sounds wise. Now, how about the third option? Why be caught in a contrast between eternity and temporary existence? True wisdom is to seek eternity in temporary earthly pleasures. This is wise. Then I can say the fourth variation. We are forever condemned between these two things, and a wise man accepts this. Whatever I say, he says, you can sell it to people out there as a wisdom.

Isn't it interesting that wisdom itself can be used like that as sort of a tool? Having four episodes on Zizek before this one should at least make it cautious about judging what he's saying here too hastily.

He's obviously not saying that he's against developing your understanding about life and reality and then experiencing that there are different, deeper levels to that understanding. What he's against is the concept of wisdom itself as a fixed universal. The idea that there needs to be some easy-to-digest, marketable, common-sense thing that is wisdom, something that regardless of whatever circumstances you find yourself in, that this wise insight is going to be the thing that guides you to the right decision.

Because to Zizek, this whole way of thinking about reality, where we come up with common sense takes on the way the world is, is just too simple. As much as it would be great if it was, reality isn't a simple thing the more and more you look at it. You'll see parallels to other things he's had a problem with people oversimplifying that we've talked about in this series so far. Your identity as a static fixed thing. Social relations as static fixed things. Institutions like a school or the government as static fixed things. Well, so too with wisdom.

There's this obsession that some people have with nailing down a static universal definition to things, coming up with some ultimate definition that everything seems to stem out of. People will do this with wisdom, and when they do, it's disgusting to Slavage Zizek. Because think of what actually happens. We want wise people in this world. We need people that have a deep understanding of life and people and the way the world works.

But when you give someone this easy to digest marketable take on what wisdom is that fits into a YouTube short or a TikTok video, when they feel satisfied by that and go and use it in their lives, the real consequences of that is that fewer people are actually engaging with the real complexity of how the world works. You know, they think, hmm, if I can just memorize what Confucius would have said when his DoorDash took three hours to show up, you know, if I can just cosplay as Marcus Aurelius all day, then I'll have to be wise.

But again, what really happens is that this effectively cuts people off from the depth of the real problems we face as people. And they end up living at this surface level, feeling very wise, without any of the depth of experience that true wisdom requires.

People do this with morality, too. They'll say there's a common sense thing that it is to be good, for example. Never tell a lie. You know, it's not complicated. Just treat people nicely out there. It's simple as that. And then again, when they do this, it just ends up preventing people from engaging with the world at a deeper level, which is something we need people to be doing right now.

Because to Žižek, as we've seen throughout the series so far, the world to him is not just a collection of this common sense. It is an ever-changing, evolving, ideological construct that constantly needs to be reexamined and re-understood by people. So those common sense takes may feel convenient to be able to simplify complicated discussions,

But look, as we've seen time and time again all throughout human history, the common sense of one particular time period is often wielded like a gun used by whoever comes along politically during that time period. Just look around you for obvious examples of people doing this right now. It's worth asking to Zizek, if somebody was so committed to writing a book about some universal way of looking at something,

Why would somebody need that common sense, simplified take on something as complicated as morality, for example? We have to ask, how might having this universal benefit this person ideologically? More than that, we have to wonder, even if their intentions are good in writing it, how is this common sense universal going to be used by other people in potentially bad ways?

The job of a philosopher, to Zizek, is not to collect common sense or to create fixed universals about the way that things are. It's to question common sense. And if we have to create universals, to engage with them constantly. It's to acknowledge reality as that ideological construct, made of symbols, filled with contradictions and tensions, as it always falls short of describing reality in full. And then a philosopher, he says, is supposed to, quote, "...find the cracks in the symbolic edifice that grounds our social stability."

And then to live within those cracks, to point them out, shine a light on them, to question them, and to accept that a philosopher's job is never truly done. That as we fill in those cracks, we will always be constructing a new reality on top of them out of that cracked raw material of symbols or ideology. In other words, the common sense of any particular time period is never the full story to Zizek.

And it's a philosopher's job to point that out. This is why philosophy, when it's done well, almost always makes someone out there pretty uncomfortable. And it's in that spirit that the goal of the episode here today is going to be to make quite a few postmodernists out there feel at least a little uncomfortable, if that's something you think describes the way you're thinking, which seems likely. It's the dominant subjectivity of the time we're living in. Most of us listening to this are going to have strong postmodernist tendencies just because of when we were born.

But what do I mean by the postmodernist subject that I mentioned in the title?

I mean, on one hand, it's a term that almost means nothing because of how many ways the term postmodernism is thrown around by people. And we've had I don't know how many episodes of this podcast in the past talking about the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism and postmodernism and beyond that. I realize all that on one hand. But on the other hand, I'm using it here today because there's a lot of philosophers that casually call postmodernism a very broad category of a way that people think about the world that's emerged recently that is distinctly different from the ways people used to be thinking about the world.

If people used to be looking at the world in ways that were patriarchal or hierarchical or in Oedipal ways, Zizek says sometimes, and if looking at the world in that way was a problem, then the postmodern subject is going to be someone who's in part reacting to that history and thinks of themselves as, look, I'm somebody that sees through all those grand narratives of the past. I realize that the history of human thought has been filled with people that have constructed narratives and traditions that give people around them their sense of identity.

And I also realize how arbitrary all those ultimately are. I, of course, realize how these oversimplified universals have led to a lot of social problems that I don't think should continue. I mean, call me crazy, but I don't think somebody should be treated badly just by dint of birth.

And look, the good news is, as somebody alive today, the way the world's set up, quite frankly, I don't got to believe in any of that nonsense anymore. I'm not like the people in the past where I'm born into a family and from birth I'm given a social role to fill, like a peasant or an aristocrat or an artisan. In today's world, people create their own meanings, for better or worse. That's just how it is.

And the way this all maps out onto individual people and their identities is that when it comes to these universals that used to define people's identities in the past, as a postmodernist, I reject them. And then I go a step further and I put an extra emphasis on particulars and differences as the opposition to those universals.

In other words, the postmodern subject is somebody that sees identity as something more fluid than it's ever been in the past. And the job of a postmodern subject, as we go throughout our lives, is to create and recreate yourself, trying on different identities, expressing yourself in different ways, all of this as sort of a resistance against the way people lived in the past where they were given their rigid identities.

Now for Žižek, the same way that hierarchical thinking of the past went on to create certain social outcomes when it was the dominant form of subjectivity, this postmodern subject is going to have certain social outcomes as well. And what he's trying to do is not to equate these two ways of looking at the world, but again, like we talked about last time, first in an analytical way. He wants to look at how the dominant form of subjectivity of a particular time attaches itself to the institutions of that society.

And then after that he definitely wants to critique postmodernism for all the same reasons you might want to critique a friend. Because look, nobody out there is perfect. And in order for society to keep moving forward, to Žižek, we have to continue to critique ourselves, to find those cracks in the ideological ways we're making sense of reality. And finding those cracks sometimes is uncomfortable. We have to constantly engage with the assumptions we're making or else things don't move forward.

And it's worth repeating so that there's no confusion here. Yes, Zizek would say hierarchical, patriarchal, Oedipal thinking is still out there and it's something we should always be trying to identify where it does exist. But something else we should acknowledge, he says, is that that way of thinking is in many ways in full retreat because of progress we've made in engaging with it.

And as a philosopher that's doing his work in real time here, we'd be letting ourselves down and not doing the work of a philosopher if we didn't critique this newer postmodern way of thinking that's been on the rise for the last few decades, where the result of this way of thinking reliably leads to a type of identity in a person where they feel as though their existence is revolutionary when it's not, that they're more free than most of the human beings that have ever lived on this planet, and that they're morally superior to the people around them all while hiding behind a false depiction of their own humility.

That is going to be something Zizek says that we see all over the place in the modern world and all sorts of different kinds of people. It's fascinating, actually, for understanding where our world is at.

Now, quick disclaimer: what's about to follow here are a lot of different ways that Žižek thinks this postmodern subjectivity shows up in the world. And we'll see the false revolutionary spirit, the moral superiority, and the fake humility all throughout them. I just want to start this by saying that I fully realize there's a common sense take on this postmodern subject, that this is somehow a way of being that's mostly reserved for people on the left.

But my hope is, with this episode today, I can show how to zizek at least, this isn't a subjectivity where it's divided by such clear lines politically. I mean, for example, he says to him, Donald Trump is one of the biggest postmodernists he's ever seen. This postmodern attitude towards existence shows up in all sorts of places that have nothing to do with political views. Hopefully I can show that with all these examples of different kinds of people.

So on that note, maybe it's good to start by saying that we've already talked on an episode about how this postmodern identity shows up in our lives in modern neoliberal global capitalist society when we talked about the work of Byung-Chul Han. For newer listeners, we talk about it on episodes 188 and 189 of this podcast. If you haven't listened to him, I'd go back and listen to him. A lot of people liked what he had to say. Don't think it'd be a waste of your time. But either way, I'm going to proceed right now as though everybody has heard those before this one.

Remember how Han was talking about how everything that binds or connects us in the world is slowly disappearing? From shared rituals that people used to have, to community bonds, to a common pursuit of truth, from shared public spaces, there's so many things we used to have that united us together as people that living in modern neoliberal society, we just don't have at our disposal anymore.

Well, Hahn is describing a version of this postmodernist subjectivity. That when you're born into a world where you don't have a set of traditions or universals to build your sense of identity out of, what are people left to do in their lives? They have nothing external to them to focus on, so they go the only place that's left. They turn inward and focus on themselves. This is why narcissism is such a common lane that people go down in postmodern society when trying to create meaning. They exist in what Hahn calls an "achievement society."

And really, what else do they have to focus on? They don't have a religion, so they worship at the altar of themselves, it's said. It's like you're the archbishop of ramble-about-yourself-for-a-while-ism.

It's the situation we're in. People create their own identity as they go. They focus on their careers and productivity and self-improvement, constantly trying to increase their market value in the world. Their sense of identity is that they're an ongoing project that they're working on. They've actually been led to believe, Han says, that they should be feeling bad if they're not constantly being productive, achieving as much as they can. And then everything around them in their life they start to see as a resource for improving this narcissistic project they're working on, including other people.

And this leads to a distance created between them and other people where they never truly consider the opinions of the other, further locking them in that narcissism. To Byung-Chul Han, this becomes a very common way that the life of a postmodern neoliberal subject ends up playing out.

And to Žižek, when you consider this postmodern attitude that identity is something that's fluid, where it's your job throughout your life to constantly create and recreate yours, Žižek would say that this is yet another aspect of this new kind of subjectivity that more or less fits perfectly within global capitalism as a religious economic system.

Because not only does the stuff we buy allow us to express our identity in one way today, another way next week, and not only does the stuff I buy define a big part of my position in the world, and not only is that an extremely malleable thing that can be changed on a whim, but the market itself also fits perfectly into this setup. Because from the mindset of somebody who's a business person or an entrepreneur, pretty normal kind of person these days, if that's a big piece of your identity as a person,

Well, what is valuable or meaningful in the business world is something that's ultimately determined by the market. And if the market changes on a whim, then the values of your company should change, your value should change, the service you're providing should change. In other words, again, there's a fluidity or a plasticity of identity associated with global capitalism that fits in perfectly here.

But anyway, keeping in mind how this all plays out in the common career paths of people, someone could ask, what are some other examples of the way postmodernists line up with the things we see around us? What's an example of that moral superiority and false humility you were talking about before? I want to hear about it. Well, okay, calm down. The other day I was looking at a meme. It was a meditation meme. It's a picture of a guy. He's in the lotus position. He's got his fingers touching together on his knees, because apparently that's how you meditate when you've reached a whole new level of transcendental cringe.

But anyway, the meme shows the inner dialogue of this guy who's meditating. And he says, finally, finally, I've been meditating every day for two years of my life, and I've finally gotten to the place where I've transcended my own ego. I now realize how much my ego is just an illusion. And look at all these morons around me that are never going to get on my level, trapped inside of their little monkey minds over there. This is a great visual example of the kind of inner dialogue that dominates postmodern thought.

It's an extreme example for a reason. Of course, I realize this isn't what everybody's thinking when they meditate. But if you consider how popular meditation and contemplative practice has become recently, and how much it appeals to people living today,

Is it a coincidence that practices centered around the illusory nature of the ego or identity, you know, observing your own thoughts, noticing how you're ultimately not creating them? Is it a coincidence that this way of thinking has become so popular in marketplaces dominated by postmodern subjects? Žižek would say no. And look at the other side of it. At least in our example, the meme, that somebody felt was such a common experience that they would make a meme out of it. This is a person that has a front they're putting up of humility about their own ego.

but that internally has a feeling of moral superiority over others. This person often feels like they're more free than practically every human being that's ever lived because they've figured out the mind hack to escape the prison of their monkey mind and these outdated ways of seeing their moment-to-moment identity. Once again, a fluid subject, seeing themselves as defining their identity from moment to moment with a feeling of moral superiority hidden behind false humility, feeling as though they've achieved a level of freedom that's unprecedented for the average person.

Let's give another example of something that illustrates this, and also gives us a place to talk about what Zizek thinks is the mistake that's being made in this way of thinking. How about another classic postmodern cliche? How about the kind of person that slaps a coexist bumper sticker on the back of their car? Or their electric scooter? Now, on one hand, salt of the earth, this person. Saving the world, driving around modern tolerant society saying how everyone out there should just get along better. Fine individuals for sure.

But Zizek says, think of what they're actually doing there. It's a move you'll see all throughout these examples. It's a key to understanding what they're really doing. They're trying to create a universal out of the fact that supposedly there isn't any universal. In other words, the coexistence bumper sticker says that there's no culture out there that's universal. It'll have a Christian cross next to a hammer and sickle next to a Star of David next to a McDonald's logo.

And we're all supposed to look at these different ways of seeing the world that are battling against each other and think, wow, these people, they're so confused and naive. Look at them all battling it out for their culture to be the universal way of looking at things. But not me. I get it. All these people are fighting, but all of them are actually equal. They're all condemned to battle against each other in a world where I at least realize the truth that nothing is in fact universal. So I guess maybe they should all just learn to get along better.

But do you see what they just did there? They just made a universal out of their not being a universal. As Zizek says, this post-patriarchal, nihilistic type of subjectivity generally sees the world as mass chaos, mass difference. Everything about reality is ultimately absurd, is another popular one.

And again, they realize the long history of people creating what they see as false universals to try to make sense of all that chaos. But again, because they don't want to do that stuff anymore, what a postmodernist does is claim to reject all universals and focus instead on particulars, differences, individual identities. It's been called an identitarian movement before because it rejects those collective universals.

This is also why it's been theorized that identity politics is such an effective thing at controlling people's thinking on both sides politically during this particular era. We'll get into that more in a second, but just to tie together the philosophical side of this, to Zizek, the mistake of postmodernism is that in claiming to reject all universals, they end up making the struggle between differences into a universal of its own.

So an important point to realize here for Zizek is if the common sense criticism of postmodernism these days is that it's a problem because it eventually just devolves into relativism, then to Zizek, no, that's not actually what it is. The particulars and differences that they're celebrating are always meaningful against a backdrop of a universal that they've set up, where there's constant conflict between particulars against some universal. And

And this is why so many postmodernist emancipatory movements, Zizek, just end up recreating a lot of the universal thinking and setups that they feel like they want to get rid of. Which again, if you think about it, it's super clever from a winning arguments perspective, but also really unfortunate if you actually wanted to change anything about the world.

Because most of the time, unknowingly, people are putting up a front like they don't have one of these identities, like the hammer and sickle, the cross, the Star of David. They put up a front like they're denying themselves of their own identity, when in fact they're universalizing that none of these are the right answer. And behind that false humility, they claim that moral superiority where they have it figured out better than all these pathetic, boring factions out there that don't realize they're captured by a universal.

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But to Žižek, again, we have to always remain skeptical. Because if you look for it closely and you pay attention, this is so commonly the struggle people seem to be engaged in in the world, the fight for universality. Another example of this that Žižek himself personally finds pretty bad is in what he describes as the so-called deep ecologists. Deep ecologists, as Žižek describes them, are people that, at least on the surface, are highly committed to protecting the environment.

And in doing so, they end up making a similar sort of move to the one on the coexistence bumper sticker. They say, we human beings are just one species of millions on planet Earth. And who are we to be the sole things that have rights and make decisions for everything else on this planet? Maybe what we should be doing, they say, is thinking of entities in nature as having natural rights of their own. In other words, to some deep ecologists out there, a river is something that has rights. A mountain should have rights. A giant fungus would have rights.

And again, on the surface, this seems like a very humble, compassionate, outside-the-box sort of position. But the problem for Zizek is what comes next? Who guarantees these rights and fights for the river and the fungus? It's not like they've got little arms and legs to be able to do it themselves. Well, the answer obviously is that we have to, as human beings.

Well, again, do you see what they just did there to Zizek? Behind a sort of false humility, what they're really saying is that human beings should be the ambassadors for every other species on this planet. It's a glaring contradiction to him. It's presenting itself as being against the universal, but in fact just ends up creating a more covert version of universal underneath.

And here's the thing. As an outsider to any one of these little subgroups where people are making this postmodernist contradictory move, you can see these positions that people have, think of them as weird, like something feels off about saying we should have people representing rivers and mountains in the parliament of the earth. And you can start to think that maybe you're the problem. Like maybe you're just not as revolutionary as you should be. Maybe you're someone caught up in these outdated patriarchal ways of thinking, and maybe you just need to open your mind up a little bit more.

But then on the other side of that actual humility it just had, you can still find yourself feeling like, "Eh, something still feels a little off here." Well, in any one of these examples and many more, this could just be you feeling that contradiction or tension that grounds this particular worldview. Žižek has tons of great stuff he's written over the years about the social outcomes of this being the dominant way people are thinking.

One of the more interesting ones, and a key point that explains a lot of the behavior of people wherever this comes up, is that it's obvious that what the people of today often want, or what they often get, is what he calls ideology without ideology. Let's talk about what he means by that. He'd probably start by saying that if you look around you in the postmodern world of global capitalism, it is incredibly common for people to want things that in commodity form are a thing, but it's a thing that lacks the main component of what makes that thing what it originally was.

Such a clear description, I know. This is what makes you keep coming back to this podcast. Let's just give an example. The example he gives is decaf coffee. I mean, what is that? Decaf coffee. Like originally, you would want coffee as opposed to any other drink on this planet because it has caffeine in it. But now some people want the experience of coffee, he says, but they want it decaffeinated. Again, getting rid of the main thing that makes coffee, coffee.

Tons of other examples of this in our culture though. Non-alcoholic beer, lactose-free milk, gluten-free bread, vegan leather. But this extends into other things. Video games is a type of warfare without actually having to die. Watching streamers and people playing video games getting the enjoyment out of playing without having to develop the skills or having the emotional risk of playing the game.

travel shows where you feel like you get the experience of a place without having to take the risk of leaving the house. You want to throw on a safari helmet you got for Halloween and head out to the African savannah, see all the lions and elephants without having to be in any real danger. There's so many more examples of this. One of the big ones for Zizek is pornography, which in itself is designed to allow you to live out on a surface level whatever it is that it's doing for you without having to deal with the complex interpersonal dynamics that make that activity what it is.

In other words, just like wisdom, from our example at the beginning of the episode, where an easy-to-digest, surface-level, marketable understanding of wisdom replaces actual wisdom, these are examples of surface-level experiences that replace the real ones that come with risks and require a deeper understanding of the world.

The long story short here for people like Marx and Zizek is that what this really produces for the postmodern subject then is a profound sense of alienation, where big parts of your life become about consuming the raw signifiers of an experience like the taste of coffee or the surface feeling of knowing the wise thing to do, and in doing so we distance ourselves from the broader context or the implications of that activity.

And what this becomes is the default experience of the postmodern person and their experience of ideology. Because just like coffee without caffeine, it's ideology without ideology.

Think about it. The base assumptions a postmodernist makes about reality predisposes them to think of themselves as someone that's beyond grand narratives. They start from a place of feeling like they're beyond needing universals. To Zizek, in a fetishistic sort of way, they avoid these universals, which then, without them even realizing it, ends up putting them in a worse place than they'd otherwise be when it comes to blindly being immersed in ideology. Because what ideology does best is

It's obscure the fact that it's giving you a universal by excluding all the other ways of looking at things. So this whole setup, to Zizek, creates a perfect storm where the postmodern subject is particularly at risk for not seeing the limitations of their own ideology. They're not looking for the false universals in their own thinking because from their perspective, their entire way of thinking is an avoidance of universals.

And when you put these people in a world filled with the internet and common sense takes on it, when you plant them in a world with people talking about human nature all the time, and hey, let's just look at reality pragmatically for a second, what you get are people that are fully immersed in ideology, but truly think they are post-ideological. You get people thinking that what they're doing is they're just looking at the world in a pragmatic, real sort of way, not an ideological one.

And philosophers, those are just people that are overthinking everything. They're addicted to thinking about stuff and finding these overly complex rabbit holes to go down. I'm all for thinking, but not that much. And ideologues, those people are easy to spot. Because from my vantage point, their assumptions are clearly always connected to universals that I can spot a mile away. But not me. I don't have universals. Again, ideology without ideology. Another trap that's common for a postmodernist to fall into is the trap of moderation.

They can think that when it comes to any political situation that's going on, well, the problems are always in the extreme people on either side of an issue that are captured by a universal, that you can always spot when someone's way too far to the left or way too far to the right. But what I'm gonna do, as someone that's beyond these grand narratives, if I just stay somewhere in the middle, you know, seeing the merit of both sides, constantly playing the peacekeeper, saying, "Let's all get along,"

Well, it certainly may keep things calm right this second, but to Zizek, all you're really doing there in practice is supporting whatever the current political party is that's in power right now. You're keeping things the same. Moderation becomes a universal of its own. But sometimes, Zizek, when things are bad enough in a given society, sometimes we need to be able to embody radical positions if we want things to continue getting better.

But that said, there's a whole other way of getting out of this difficult place of seeing the bad in the world and then feeling like you need to take revolutionary action about it. It's something far different than moderation, and as it turns out, it's something far more common among people today than moderation. Just like there's coffee without caffeine and there's ideology without ideology, for Zizek, when it comes to changing the world, for a lot of people with this post-patriarchal nihilism, what they end up seeking is revolution without revolution.

And this is all the obvious things you no doubt suspect when hearing that. This is the superimposing of the flag on your profile pic in solidarity. This is the donation of money to a charity claiming to help the victims. This is going to a protest, marching down the streets, blocking traffic, coming up with a little nice rhyming Dr. Seuss poem to chant with your friends about how mad you are. This is surface-level, marketable revolution, without all the risks and implications and work required to be actual revolution.

And this detached, disenchanted spirit of revolution gets captured by larger social processes as well. Slavoj Žižek talks about Martin Luther King, and he says if you read his speeches and his books, he barely ever actually talks about something like tolerance. There's this confusion, Žižek says, that most white liberals have when they think the main goal to bring about racial equality should be for problematic white people out there to become more tolerant of black people and their differences.

But Zizek says Martin Luther King wasn't marching around saying that white people need to be more tolerant of black people. If you pay attention, he was asking for specific concrete changes to law and economic policy that would address this inequality directly. It was a very clear thing to ask for by Dr. King.

And by the way, if there was more effort to bring about those real concrete economic changes like that, maybe things would look very different today. But instead what happened, Zizek says, quoting the work of Dr. Nikki Houston, is that white liberals changed the discussion from a question of concrete economic policy to one of tolerance, where now the problem exists up in people's heads somewhere, in a place where no one can see, it's ambiguous. Even if you say you're not a racist, well, maybe you just need to go to your therapist and try to work out some of these implicit biases that you don't even know you're carrying around.

the problem becomes this unsolvable thing where it's nameless and faceless and now people's job is to go around policing other people's thinking rather than actually bringing about structural change. Again, revolution without revolution. And not surprisingly to Zizek, the exact kind of situation that emerges where it expresses all the outrage at the way that things are and could be a lot better, but it does it in a way that doesn't mess with the global capitalist economic status quo. And again, not in a conspiratorial way.

But this is the aggregate of everyone's decision-making when they're simultaneously just trying to do what's best for their family and caring about others in this type of system. This postmodern trap though leads to other big problems, he thinks, and things like political correctness, where he thinks that the reflex to say things in a way that removes the harmful reality of things mirrors the sort of surface level engagement that's embodied by wisdom without real wisdom or coffee without caffeine.

For example, on my LinkedIn page, when you set it up, you got to put in a work history because apparently that's really important. And before I did the podcast, I just worked at a grocery store. And for the first year I was there, I was a courtesy clerk, which means a big part of my job is going and cleaning the bathrooms. So for my job title on LinkedIn, just describing what the job was, I said that I was the toilet scrubbing manager extraordinaire or something like that. You know, just having fun with these euphemistic politically correct job titles.

But to Slava Zizek, the reality of that job was that for $7.35 an hour, which was pretty good at the time, I was scrubbing human feces off the toilet, then going and bagging people's groceries and sending them home so they'd have something else for me to scrub off the next week when they came in. This was the reality of the situation. And toilet scrubbing manager extraordinaire doesn't really convey the real place I existed in in the economic setup of that time.

Now, that example aside, think of all the ways political correctness is used to shield people from the true reality of what's otherwise being said. Should we just not talk about this stuff? Find more easy-to-digest, marketable language that makes people feel better about the way the world is, or the ways real people refer to things in the world?

Political correctness, just like wisdom, often in practice, becomes a tool to keep things exactly how they are. And cancel culture, to Zizek, as an extension, in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, just ends up doing the opposite. It ends up excluding the people he thinks who are truly diverse from the common, universalized narrative.

Let's talk more about that tendency, though, because it's maybe the biggest thing we need to be aware of to Zizek as these postmodern subjects. It's that thing we ended last episode talking about that makes him a moderately conservative communist. What we need to always be considering, he thinks, is that political movements always have the ability to and often do devolve into their opposites. Even a movement like Buddhism, he says, that of every grand narrative on planet Earth is probably one of the most committed to simply the elimination of suffering.

But even Buddhism is capable of being captured by political forces in the world and used as a justification for violence and suffering. He cites a situation going on in Myanmar recently, where Buddhist rhetoric and symbology was used as a rallying point to justify violent action against Muslims.

Now, his point is not to call out Buddhism or to paint it with a broad brush. You know, the stuff in Myanmar was massively condemned by almost every Buddhist everywhere. But his point is more of a dialectical one or a philosophical one. No matter what your cause is, no matter how far it seems away from something that could ever justify bringing the world into a worse place than it is now, it is the nature of ideology to obscure the possibilities latent in every way of thinking.

And the only antidote, if there even is one, is for us to be aware of these things before they come up. But again, this is why there's reason to be concerned about the postmodern subject in particular. Because again, they are particularly susceptible to thinking that they're beyond any sort of unexpected turn to violence. And it's only through this sort of engagement with the pitfalls of the current dominant way of thinking that it will eventually evolve into something else, which will then have its own problems, which will evolve into something else, and so on and so on.

But we still have the question of freedom. How does the postmodern subject see themselves as more free than every other generation before them? How does this subjectivity change the parameters that people use to think of what makes them free? Are we really free, Zizek? Well, the short answer from him is another direct quote. He says, yes, of course we're free. I'm not stupid. But the real question he thinks we should be asking is what has changed about the ways that we're free?

What has changed about the framework that we exercise our freedom within that makes the ways we're not free seem to us like more freedom? Also, what would it take to change the world if we wanted to? What does the future look like to Slavos Zizek? Why is global capitalism something he thinks is doomed to fail? All these questions will be answered next time. I hope you have a great rest of your week. The baby's out of the NICU. Everything's good. And I hope you enjoyed this episode.

By the way, thanks for all the great ratings lately on the podcast apps. It honestly helps a lot at spreading this around. But most of all, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.