Episode #201 ... Resistance, Love, and the importance of Failure. (Zizek, Byung Chul Han)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So we're going to be connecting a lot of dots today from the last five episodes of the show we've been talking about Slavos Zizek. I highly recommend listening to those before this one. You obviously don't have to, but just know outside of a short recap about what's been said, I'm not going to be re-explaining Lacanian desire, dialectics, absolute knowledge, postmodern subjectivity, but you'll need to know what these are to get the most out of this episode. I put them out there. They're all there for you to enjoy. Check them out if you want to. Now that said,

Slava Žižek says that the postmodern subject we talked about all last episode, when they fully take on this way of looking at the world, supposedly without grand narratives to make sense of things, that person usually has about three choices at their disposal, he says, for how they can live their life from here on out. And as he says, they often oscillate between these three choices just depending on what position they're in in life, how frustrated they are, etc. The first choice a postmodernist has is just to burn out.

We can all relate to this one in some way. You know, the idea is with no objective meaning to anything and where the only thing I can do is shoot for career achievements that are ultimately going to be meaningless just a few years after I'm dead.

Easy place to go in your head from there is, what's the point of doing anything? I mean, in that world, why not just give in to my worst impulses every day? When life is giving me these psychological symptoms of burnout, the anxiety, the depression, the ADHD, why not just medicate yourself with something? Anesthetize yourself. To Zizek, things like drugs, alcohol, sex, video games, TikTok. The first option that any postmodernist has at their disposal is...

is to burn out and put yourself to sleep every day. The second option, Zizek says, door number two that you have as a postmodernist, is to just immerse yourself in your career, achievements, projects you want to accomplish, trying on different identities, going on trips, buying new things. In other words, door number two is to become a willing participant in the global capitalist religious system that you were born into.

Again, indulging in that narcissistic project that is your life, you know, progressively building up this collection of symbols that further identify you as who you are, and ultimately in your willing participation serving to keep the whole thing going as you stay true to the incentive structures that it gives you. Your life becomes about going to work, participating in the economy, so that you can go home and consume stuff and further participate in the economy. That's door number two.

And the third option you have if you're Zizek, if you want to escape this lack of meaning, is to find some way, he says, to, quote, artificially resuscitate a tradition from the past, end quote. This is another thing I'm sure a lot of people listening to this can relate to. Have you ever felt like, man, it would be so great if I could really convince myself for a day that these traditions were real?

Like think of the superpower I would have if I could do some kind of mental gymnastics that would allow me to think my way into a belief into something that gives me one of these totalizing answers to all of life's difficult questions. Again to Zizek, artificially resuscitating a tradition. That's door number three. These are the three options that these days most people have to choose from or to oscillate between as they go throughout their life. But today I want to talk about what Zizek thinks may be a fourth option.

And it's one that, dare I say, seems much better than these other three options. And just for clarity, I'm saying this is a fourth option. Žižek doesn't have a book called Door Number Four or something like that. In fact, he actually talks about a lot of different responses to the conditions of modernity. I'm calling this Door Number Four because we're talking about a lot of different ideas from him today, and I think it brings a cohesive narrative to help organize it all.

I like door number four as a way of describing this. And you can hear that and be like, wow, what is it? And by the way, if Zizek has a way out of these other three options he just talked about, why isn't he screaming this stuff from the rooftops anytime someone has a conversation with him? Well, because this fourth option is a way of looking at things that's really only available to people that have engaged with the world at a deep enough level to be able to find it.

It'll make more sense by the end of this, but again, like we talked about on episode one of this series, we have to remember, if you look at the world through a different set of ideological filters, you can oftentimes arrive at very different conclusions about what seems possible.

So anyway, in the interest of getting there though, if you don't want to drug yourself to sleep every day so that you can feel numb, and if you can't do the backflips required to get yourself to believe in a man in the sky with a plan for you, and if you don't want to just immerse yourself in a narcissistic achievement religion with your career, which if you're doing any of those things, more power to you, seriously, but if you're someone who can't do any of that, what can you do here? Where this story begins...

is in a place that I've been very familiar with the last few weeks of my life. The story for Zizek begins with a baby and a pacifier. It's actually a concept from Freud. Why does a baby suck on a pacifier? I mean, originally, a baby has to learn the skill of moving its mouth and applying suction so that it can get milk from its mom. In other words, the sucking is instrumental.

Kind of like when I first started this podcast. What I mean is for the baby, when it learns to suck, there's a very clear thing that baby is doing that activity for. But what eventually happens, Freud says, and it's already happening for my son just a few weeks in, is that the baby learns to enjoy the process of sucking on the pacifier or its hand, not because it wants milk.

But because there's a certain kind of satisfaction in the repetition of a particular task that will never be complete. There's what Freud calls an oral drive, where the original reflex of sucking becomes something that's a source of pleasure for the baby beyond any sort of immediate reward that was the original purpose of the reflex. Now Freud has his own ways that he attaches this to his theories of how adults behave. And Jacques Lacan, who came after Freud, thinking that Freud's work was maybe interpreted a bit too narrowly given the historical moment that it came out in,

In many ways, Lacan sees himself as taking some of the insights from Freud's work, expanding upon them, and then understanding psychoanalysis through more of a structuralist or a linguistic lens. And this leads Lacan to very different explanations for this behavior in the baby, but it also ends up being something he sees in adults. He calls it surplus enjoyment. It's going to be an important term for us here today.

And Zizek, by the way, building on both these thinkers, applies this concept of surplus enjoyment to the lives of people like us living in global capitalist society. Now, how does he do this?

Well, here's how I'd explain it. It would certainly be nice if we could explain people's behavior all the time, you know, why they make decisions in a way that was completely straightforward. It would be great if we could say people are simple. First they want things, then they go and do the work to get the things they want, and then they get a sense of enjoyment out of getting the things they want. And then that process just repeats itself. Human behavior is like that. It'd be nice if it were that easy.

But when you actually look at people's behavior, Zizek and Lacan think that what you notice is that people also get a sense of enjoyment sometimes out of the process of not getting what they want. More accurately, they get a type of surplus enjoyment out of something about the process of pursuing the thing they want, even if they don't end up getting it. For example, just to help us visualize this, let's say you wanted to get a special pair of shoes for an upcoming event where your feet got to look really classy or else all the other people are going to judge you.

So to get these shoes, you start searching for shoes online. You look at what other stylish people are wearing. You go to an online shoe marketplace. You browse for half an hour. You put things in your cart. You compare the shoes one to another. You imagine walking into this event wearing the shoes. You go down to the store. You try on the shoes. You really like them. So you go back home. You pull up your cart on your computer and you're about to click "buy now" and have the shoes shipped to you. And then you decide not to buy them after all. Now here's the question: Whether you got the shoes or not,

Was there a certain amount of satisfaction or enjoyment that you got from just going through the process of not getting the shoes? In other words, just like the baby in the pacifier, all this behavior from the outside seems to only make sense if it was instrumental towards getting the shoes you wanted.

And yet there's an undeniable type of surplus enjoyment that you get out of what appears to be from the outside a neurotic repetition towards getting something but not ending up getting it. This type of surplus enjoyment, Zizek, may seem like a fringe case because we're talking about hypothetical shoes, but it's actually far more common than you'd expect if you start looking for it in the world around you.

people will actually start constructing big aspects of their lives around this surplus enjoyment. Setting things up in a way where it starts to seem like they're setting their life up in a way where they ensure that they're never actually going to get the thing they want. So contrasting this against the backdrop of what we talked about before, Lacan's concept of the "Ager Petit A", where you're never actually getting what you truly desire. That what you truly desire is always something that lies beyond what we seem to want in the short term.

And knowing these things we want never actually satisfy those ultimate desires. Some people out there who are paying close attention to their thinking can start to realize that to them, when it comes to how they actually experience the world, it's usually not even in getting the thing that's the most meaningful part of it to them. It's in the struggle. It's in the pursuit. It's in the repetition. It's in the excess where most of the meaning of things comes from.

In fact, sometimes when you actually get the thing you supposedly want, that's when the thing is ruined for you. You can see this when you're looking forward to a delicious slice of chocolate cake at the end of the workday, and then you regret it. You can see this when your favorite movie comes out, you've been waiting for it for months, and then you feel sad when it's over. I mean, why do you think I make you guys wait for the podcast episode so long? I'm doing you a favor when I do that. Just kidding.

Anyway, the point is, we can acknowledge this surplus enjoyment as an aspect of what may seem to you like just individual human psychology, for sure. But then what we have to recognize to Zizek is that this surplus enjoyment becomes part of the way people reliably think and get meaning out of the events of their lives. Which is then something that becomes captured by larger social processes that then leverage this surplus enjoyment to keep the dominant system going.

In other words, you're not just controlled by the things you want that are attainable and then the process of going and getting the things you want. Structural processes, to Zizek, dictate our fantasies as well. And whenever you have a fantasy about some ultimate thing you want or some way you want the world to be in the future, if those fantasies are things that are shaped by the dominant order of things to begin with,

then the neurotic repetition that you engage in while going for those fantasies becomes something where effectively you're just showing up every day carrying out somebody else's dream. So as a structural critique, surplus enjoyment, Tzizek, becomes a way that we can remain trapped in that neurotic repetition, like the baby with the pacifier, that keeps things the way that they are. I think some examples here could help illustrate this.

We can see a lot of obvious ones like cake and shoes, but to get to the depth of this and how frequently this stuff is going on, Zizek's gonna say that there's a lot of less obvious examples in the world around us if you peel back some of the layers. Prime example for him, again targeting people on the left that are would-be revolutionaries, trying to shake them out of their ideological chains and make them real revolutionaries. Prime example are gonna be people that are passively committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

He's talking about specifically within that group a type of thinking where, for the sake of his example, usually a white liberal-minded person might fall into this, where they project a very outward appearance of somebody who's all about inclusion, you know, apologizing for their white privilege, saying how I can't possibly speak on this subject because of the color of my skin. Let me go flog myself in the corner and create a safe space for people more marginalized than me to speak.

This extreme type of person, Tzizek, is engaging in a particular kind of surplus enjoyment. They're finding surplus enjoyment and showing up to the cause every day in their pursuit for revolution without revolution, a process actively captured by surface-level consumer society that we talked about last episode. Think about it. This is a person born into the world, and they have privilege, significant privilege, but they can't enjoy that privilege in a traditional sort of way because they'd feel bad about it. So

So what's the only morally redeemable place you can enjoy a position of privilege and superiority? Well, embed it into a pseudo-revolutionary movement where you can apologize for how privileged you are and still be the morally superior arbiter that isn't bothered by any of this inclusive stuff going on here. No, no, no, no, no. I'm fine with this. Please, please take the microphone. Please speak your truth. It's about time. I'm totally comfortable with you speaking. In fact, I feel sick even being around myself right now, quite frankly.

The important point to realize here is that from the perspective of surplus enjoyment, this person has set up their life in a way where these things they do outwardly appear like they want revolution, but conveniently their behavior ensures that they'll never actually get what they supposedly want. They're like the baby with the pacifier. They repetitively, neurotically show up every day to the same cause, squeezing as much enjoyment as they can out of this position of privilege.

So the surplus enjoyment of it all effectively becomes a big part of how their psychology is being captured. It locks them into this repetitive drive towards this fantasy of theirs that ultimately will never be achieved given their current behavior, again, effectively keeping the world exactly how it is. Now, something that needs to be said here is that to Žižek, obviously none of this is being done by this person out of malice.

If this accurately describes anyone who's out there, then this would be someone who's likely not even self-aware enough to realize they're caught up in all this. Which means fundamentally, this is not a bad person.

They're certainly not trying to do anything bad. You can say something about the banality of evil here. But again, if we can pause on the moral judgments for a second, look at this more analytically as a type of subjectivity that's being produced based on how the world is set up, then at worst, this is a person, Dijak, that's found a place for their psychology where they get this surplus enjoyment and meaning within a social process that they really have no control over.

And this is going to be an important insight to have about this ideological process that we're all embedded in at different levels of awareness. This person's crime, if anything, is that they're really just carrying out and living somebody else's dream. They haven't undergone that ultimate act of self-liberation Zizek talked about. They haven't yet taken control of their own desires. Let's think about some less politically charged examples of this, something more everyday.

How about the person, I know several people like this myself, who work 10 hours a day to provide for their family, and they do that for 50 years straight. And if you talk to them in the middle of it at year 20, they'll be weathered, they'll be tired, but they'll say, hey, hey, I'm going to have to work a few more years for sure. It's going to be hard. But one day, once I retire, I've always dreamed of going on a vacation to Bora Bora. By God, that'd be nice to do.

And they have this dream, this desire that sustains them as they go to work every day, whatever it is they dream about in retirement. But you can hear somebody say something like this. I want to go to Bora Bora and think, man, that's cool and all. But this doesn't seem to really be about Bora Bora at some level.

Because what if this person's wife or husband comes along and they're like, you know, George, George, I have a surprise for you. I saved 75 cents a week since 1932. We're finally going on your trip to Bora Bora. Pack your bags. There's a sense in which that guy could feel like actually going to Bora Bora would sort of ruin the whole setup he has in his life that gets him out of bed every day in a way that's filled with meaning.

And Zizek would no doubt say this is yet another mark in the wind column for the absolute genius of global capitalism as a religious economic system that takes advantage of people's desires and psychology. This surplus enjoyment becomes part of the way this person lives their life out as a willing participant in it all.

Now we're getting really close to door number four here. The final piece of the puzzle that needs to be put in place is an explanation for how much alcohol Zizek likes to drink, which is none of it. In fact, he recently said that he's never actually been drunk in his entire life. He's never done drugs in his entire life. And the first question back to him when he said this was, why? And the reason he gave is because the world to him is a dangerous place, he says.

You can never be fully aware of where all the attacks are going to be coming from. Now, on the surface, this may seem to you like old man Zizek just getting paranoid. You know, the whole world's out to get me.

But I think I know where he's actually coming from. And it's not that, you know, the van parked down the street is actually an FBI surveillance van or that that crow in that bush over there that's looking at me. That's really a government drone. No, I think part of what he's getting at is in everyday life terms, the world we live in in liberal democratic capitalist society is an extremely competitive world.

I mean, that's one of the main reasons people give for why the system is so wonderful. It doesn't allow people to sit around and do nothing. We produce in this society. We come up with innovative new technology and ideas faster than some less competitive society might. And we accomplish this because people are competing for money and for power. We always have a new iPhone to buy because we motivate smart people to go out there and do it. But the flip side to that is that you have to realize you are always living in that competitive environment with all the people around you.

And there are people out there that are really, really smart. Like statistically, probably way smarter than you. Definitely way smarter than me. In fact, if you don't realize these people exist out there, it's probably a bad sign. And to be fair, not that it changes anything about the point here, but on top of people just being smart,

There are people born into the world with incredible advantages over you and me in terms of connections, in terms of resources, in terms of education. All this is to say that we live in this competitive environment that on one hand we say is amazing because it allows for smart, well-connected people to take advantage of opportunities.

And I think the Zizek, on the other hand, there's a sense in which if you're coming home after work, down in a couple tall boys, talking about how the Ravens might win the Super Bowl in four years if they can avoid injuries, you know, looking around you, wondering how anyone could ever think that this competitive environment could ever be taking advantage of anybody. Huh.

You're probably the one that's being taken advantage of. It's not a good sign. It's kind of like that saying, if you have to wonder who the dumbest one in the room is, it's probably you. Every second you spend numbing and distracting yourself, living a consumer existence of surface-level experiences of everything, you aren't living the dream. You're likely living somebody else's dream.

And just to be entirely clear here, this is not me saying that Zizek would say you should stop enjoying yourself at all and go out-compete all these people in the marketplace. He would no doubt resent the fact that our society is based on this fundamental antagonism. But the fact is, being born into capitalist society and not having anything to weigh it against, it's easy to just accept the fact that you're always in a competitive environment, living with your guard down all the time, not even thinking about the ways you're being taken advantage of all the time.

And again, this would just be a call to take responsibility and truly engage with the things around you that matter to you. Which further means to Zizek, to live in a way that resists the symbolic order, the surface level, static, fixed, common sense way that you're incentivized in capitalist society to see yourself and your place in the world. This is going to be door number four eventually.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. For an ad-free experience of the show, sub at any level at patreon.com slash philosophize this. Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. How drained is your social battery right now? It can be easy to ignore our social battery and spread ourselves thin, especially with social gatherings picking up after the winter.

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Think of what Zizek's been saying so far on this series. What are we as people? We are these subjects that are born into ideological constructs that give us our sense of who we are and how the world works. And while we always think in terms of ideological structures, there are varying degrees of self-awareness people have about the ideological structures they have to use.

And if you don't live in a constant state of examination of them, then you run the risk of being captured by these ideological structures in a way where you don't realize all that they're excluding that allows your way of seeing things to seem so clear and obvious to you.

So in the sense that we're not teaching ideological awareness or media literacy in public schools, as far as I know, what this means is that the default type of person that the structural arrangement of our society produces is someone who has a very static, massively oversimplified perspective of who they are and how the world works.

And you gotta wonder if there's a way to reorganize society that might fix that. But considering all this, at the very least, you can understand why the kind of stuff Zizek's gonna recommend people be doing if they wanted to get out of these ideological chains and understand their psychology and identity on a deeper level is to do things that resist that static, symbolic ordering of things. And this is where love starts to enter into the picture of what Zizek thinks is an important part of that process.

Because falling in love to Zizek is one of the most pure examples of these experiences in life that resists the static symbolic ordering of things.

When you fall in love with someone, it doesn't really matter what your life was like before you met this person. It doesn't matter how much of a groove you were in, or how habituated things had become in your life, your routines. When you meet someone new who makes you want to entangle the two of your lives together, it fundamentally shakes your entire life up, and it forces you to reconstruct it symbolically in consideration to this other person.

Again, in a world that otherwise incentivizes surface-level consumption and static identity, falling in love forces you to rediscover yourself in a new light. And in this way, love becomes a type of activity that mirrors the role he thinks that philosophy plays in shaking up people's common sense understanding of the world. This other person takes on the role of what's essentially a dialectical opposition in your life.

You can find the same destabilizing quality that love has in other activities, something like going skydiving or moving somewhere completely new or having a baby. Point is, true subjectivity to Zizek begins when we start to do things that call into question or undermine the rigid ways that we see ourselves or the world. There's a sense in which when you fall in love or you go skydiving or you move to a new place, you find a new version of yourself and of the world on the other side of those things.

This becomes very similar to his process of "I would prefer not to." These are the sorts of activities we should be gravitating towards. Now somebody can say back to this, "Okay Zizek, but look, I'm somebody that's a fan of surface-level consumer life. It's kind of my thing.

And I feel like what you're describing here is something that I'm already doing. In fact, capitalism allows me to find a constant influx of new things to buy that shake things up for me and allow me to try on different looks. When I changed my shoes last year from Adidas to Nike, that was me becoming a Nike guy now. When I stopped drinking drip coffee and started drinking a Cortado with a little sprinkle of cinnamon, that's when my coffee drinking really started to be an expression of my refined sense of identity.

But Zizek might say back to that, look, when you switch from Adidas to Nike, for example, you're not really changing yourself in any significant way. I mean, this is far from the sort of symbolic death that may come when you lose yourself entirely in another person and you fall in love. This is far from a total restructuring of the symbolic way you make sense of reality.

Because when you just buy something different, when that's the biggest change going on in your life, you're still operating in the same incentive structures, you're still commodifying every aspect of your identity, you're still essentially just rearranging the decorations on your facade of capitalist freedom and not really questioning the underlying framework that keeps you unfree. This is the same kind of point he makes where he says that the postmodern subject sees themselves as more free than basically any human being that's ever lived,

And how that shows up in global capitalism today is that we think of ourselves as free because there's no government providing us with housing. There's no dictator handing out food to you or taking care of you in retirement. More and more around the world, there's no government that's going to be providing you with all your health care needs. And this is seen by people generally as a good thing, Zizek says.

This person will say, look, this is what freedom is like. I'm not a slave to some dictator anymore. I'm basically a little capitalist, Zizek says. That's how we see ourselves. I choose where my money goes. I choose to buy medical care or to save for retirement or to go on vacation or to pay for mental health. I invest in myself in the areas that I want to invest in myself. And thinking of myself as a business like this is a far greater level of freedom than other people used to have. And in one sense, it is more freedom, Zizek says.

But if you stopped there, you'd be ignoring the other reality of this for people in the modern world, which is that with this freedom, like with all freedom, by the way, this always comes with much more responsibility along with it, which opens up the reality of increased anxiety. For example, there isn't some government-appointed job that you're always going to have, for sure.

But with that comes the additional stress in the modern world of constantly not knowing whether they're going to renew your contract next quarter. You know, always needing to be worried about being laid off. Am I even going to have money when I retire? Also, yes, there is not a government that if some emergency situation happens to you, they're always going to make sure you're taken care of. For sure, there isn't that.

But then when that comes within the modern world is the added joy of having to have insurance and constantly wonder if anything does happen to you, if it's going to be covered by insurance or if you're going to be financially crippled for the rest of your life because little Timmy fell out of the apple tree in the backyard. Again, it's definitely more freedom in a sense, but much more for you to worry about. So is it more freedom?

Now I'm so glad I have this podcast audience as a group of people I'm talking to this about, because you'll know this isn't an argument he's making for bringing about a dictatorship. He's really just trying to emphasize how things that seem like more freedom, like being able to choose between Nike and Adidas, are not examples of the most substantial forms of freedom that people can experience. It's worth asking, he would say, what is the framework that people are operating within where they're given these forms of choice?

Is there a level of freedom that matters more than just being able to make these superficial choices? It's the framework you live under, something you even have a hope of changing when you go to vote every couple years. Do people even think about the framework they're in, or do they spend their time thinking about all the shoes they can potentially wear?

He says, you know, historically, when you lived hundreds of years ago, you weren't free and it was obvious to you that you weren't free. You know, you speak out against the king or the supreme leader and you either get beheaded in the public square or you disappear and are never heard from again. That was your level of choice back then. People knew exactly where they weren't free in the past. And that's just the way life was.

But the diabolical way that this is set up to Zizek is that people think they're free simply because they can change the color of their shoes or the brand of their shoes. Or to Zizek, he says, quote, we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom, end quote.

Now, all of this said, if choosing between Nikes and Adidas doesn't count as a real restructuring of things when it comes to your identity, if that's again too surface level, then what would it take for Žižek to live deeper than that and to be living in a way that resists that symbolic order? Well, to put it simply, to Žižek, what you have to do is find something that you deeply value, that you can point yourself towards, and then find a way to fail at it continuously. Let me explain this.

Remember in our episodes on Chiron, when he was talking about how important failure is? And he was saying that failing at something is actually a really good sign for anybody that wants to understand who they really are. Because the second you go for something that's beyond your abilities to the point that you fail in trying to achieve it, well, it may not feel great initially for you to fail at something. But if you think about it, it's actually a good thing, he says, because it gives you an insight into exactly the limitations of who you are in that moment of failure.

So in one sense, failing at things becomes this thing like love that resists that static, rigid understanding of who we are. You rediscover yourself after every failure. And then think about how that connects to our understanding of surplus enjoyment, where there's a very real meaning and satisfaction that can come from striving for some goal that you're never going to actually achieve.

hopefully what he's saying is starting to become more clear. Door number four is going to be finding something that you truly care about, something with an infinite ceiling that you'll never actually reach the finish line on, but it's nonetheless something you can dedicate all of yourself to while failing to achieve it every single day. Tons of examples of this. I mean, maybe you already have something like this in your life right now, and that's how you've learned to find meaning with a postmodernist type of subjectivity.

I mean, it's certainly a postmodern type of ethos, right? This isn't somebody telling you to join their church, right? This isn't somebody saying, value what I value, come along with me. This is saying, don't make anything up about what you actually value. Just take what you're already into as a person. And the switch here is, do it the absolute best you possibly can.

If you're into comic books, for example, put in effort into comic books. Become a deep expert of all things comic books. Get to the point where you're the person everybody around you thinks about when they think comic books. Find a way to deeply engage with it to the point that you become an actual participant in the thing that you value. You study the progression in the narrative prose of the comic books over the years. You study about how the printers print the ink on the page of the comic books.

I don't know if it's obvious I don't read comic books, but that's not the point here. Here's an example. The point is, this could be anything for you. For me, it's writing. Maybe I should just talk about me. Every time I put out one of these episodes, I hate it the second I put it out. I'm dying inside. I think it's horrible. Like, I've made every mistake I possibly could. What have I done? I start applying to different fast food jobs around my city because there's no way I'm going to be doing this job come next week.

And genuinely, it's not until the day after, sometimes three days later, that I'll check YouTube and see what people are saying about it. And only then can I be like, okay, I guess it was good for some people. But man, do I got to get back to work and redeem myself with this next one. In a sense, I am always failing at writing. And I will never actually ever write the perfect episode.

But anyway, this could be anything for you, right? This could be you striving to be the best mom you could possibly be. This could be learning about philosophy. This could be your fitness goals. The most important thing though is that this is something you really care about and that it's something you can apply yourself to and fail at repeatedly.

Now, the subtext of all this is that, look, obviously Zizek isn't dominating the motivational section of Barnes & Noble, although he'd no doubt think it's cool if people found personal motivation from this idea. It's important to bring this back to our original point, that the real benefit of people living in this way is that by deeply engaging with and participating in the world around you at this level, you would be actively resisting surface-level, commodifiable, easy-to-digest existence, which is what consumer culture thrives on getting people to stay in.

Now, why is that the case? Well, as an example, let's think of what the typical experience is of someone starting a new hobby in global capitalist society. Let's say someone decides they want to start painting.

In consumer society, that person's got all the products in the world that they can buy that'll make them feel like painting is going to be their new passion. They can spend hundreds of dollars buying a bunch of new brushes, paints, an easel, a little painter's hat, special soap to wash the paint off their hands when they're done. They can have all the tools of being a master of painting, but never actually engage with painting deep enough to become a master.

In other words, what's so common for someone to do is engage with something like painting on a surface level. Do it a few times, run into a couple barriers, take a day off, which then turns into a few years off as all the painting supply sits around collecting dust in the garage. And none of this should be surprising to us in postmodern consumer society in particular. This is the same thing as wisdom without wisdom. This is travel without traveling. Well, now it's painting without painting. Consumer society is

is all about turning your life into an endless stream of these surface-level interactions with the world that are easy to consume. This is why TikTok is such a sensation these days. As Byung-Chul Han might describe it, it is the video form of what happens when you have zero constructive negativity in your life, zero patience required, zero discomfort, zero effort, zero boredom. The second that you're painting and start to get bored or have to do something that requires effort that would take you to a deeper level of engagement with the thing,

Well, your phone's right there on the table just waiting for you. Or the video games, or some other hobby to get into at a surface level. Consumer society wants to keep people at this surface level because there's always something to sell someone when they're there.

Think about it. When you're a thousand hours into being deeply engaged with writing, for example, when you're slowly, actively reading with a purpose, when you're paying attention, when you're brainstorming and making connections, when you're participating in a community of other writers, when you're living as an ambassador for something that you deeply are passionate about, what is there to sell you when you're at that point? A merit badge? A trophy?

Engaging with what you love at this deeper level is a form of resistance against the static symbolic ordering of things. And when you do this correctly, you set yourself up for Zizek to become an inspiration for others to engage in the world at this deeper level, becoming what he calls an authentic master. But that's a whole other episode for another day. The thing that needs to be restated here, though, is that if you consider the examples we gave of people earlier on in the episode, where the people were captured by social processes that they really had no control over,

A very important detail here is that you need to make sure that this thing you're being serious about is not just you becoming captured by living out somebody else's dream. You have to be self-aware enough to know, is this truly your dream that you're working on? Or is this ultimately something you're doing that makes you a pawn in some larger process that's going on?

There's a book Zizek wrote called Enjoy Your Symptom. And to put it briefly, what he gets at in the book is that we all have these symptoms that we're acting out in our lives that are manifestations of some deeper conflict that may be going on inside of us. Think of a germaphobe that washes their hands 20 times a day or wipes down the counters all the time. Or think of the mom or the dad that's always trying to be perfect for the people around them that they love.

There are symptoms of this that show up to the people around us in certain moments. Symptoms that sometimes are completely mysterious to us as to why we keep doing them. And the reflex in modern society, Zizek says, is to treat these symptoms, to medicate them away, to think about them a bunch and do affirmations in the mirror until you don't have them anymore. And certainly you may be somebody that could benefit from all that.

But there's something else to be said, he thinks, for embracing your symptom, for not living in denial of it, for not constantly renouncing it as a piece of you.

for understanding how ideology contributes to us seeing these things as symptoms and not a part of ourself. There's something to be said in a world that, again, incentivizes staying the same person, you know, surface level engagement, finding the middle ground all the time, moderation of everything, including the very symptoms that are an outward manifestation of what makes you the person you are.

Maybe there's something to be said for embracing this piece of who you are in a way that you don't apologize for anymore. Maybe there's a way to enjoy your symptom. And the larger theme is maybe there's a way to align that symptom with this activity that we set up in our lives, whatever it is that we deeply engage with and get satisfaction from failing at every day. Anyway, Zizek doesn't think that anarchism is going to work. How's that for a segue?

It sounds good in small numbers, right? It's good as far as it goes, as he says. No doubt good at organizing people in small groups. But he says, quite frankly, when I come home from work every day, I don't want to go down to the town hall gathering square and be talking to people about how to distribute water or how to deal with the pigeon problem in the park.

He says, no, what I want is a reasonable amount of alienation from the process of government. He says, I want people to do all these things for me so that I can sit around watching cinema, reading books, writing my philosophy. That's what he says he wants. Just saying this doesn't solve the problems we're facing at governing people by just removing forced hierarchical authority and making everything more localized and

And honestly, he says, the problems that are facing us as a species right now are not localized problems anyway. What we're facing are the problems of the commons. They're the kind of problems you face when you try to privatize the earth, he says, which should never be done. I mean, think of the problems that emerge when people try to stake a claim to a piece of the earth itself. The problems we're facing are the kind of problems that happen when technology gets to a point where the impact of it going wrong can have global consequences. You

You know, he says if Fukushima, that nuclear disaster in Japan a few years ago, if that had went even just slightly more messed up than it did, which it very easily could have, he says the plan among people that were on the ground at the time is that they would have had to evacuate the entire greater Tokyo area. 14 million people would have been displaced instantly, needing food, water, shelter, security. How do you deal with a problem of that scale?

Well, as he says, it's certainly not something that global capitalism can solve as our primary method of social organization. If something like that happened, you would need leadership and planning on a global scale, or at the very least on a regional scale. And you would need it in a way that doesn't involve there being a profit motive to get it done. To put it briefly for right now, and we'll expand much more on this next episode when we start talking about Mark Fisher. But to Slava Zizek, the current way the Western world is set up is coming to an end.

Because it just can't solve the problems we're going to be facing in the very near future. It's already proven to be incapable of solving many of the problems we face now. And to Zizek, something significant is going to have to change from here. Exactly when it happens is impossible to give a date for. And Zizek would always be very humble about making predictions about the future of the world just because of his respect to Hegel.

But as a philosopher, you really do specialize sometimes in not mistaking the forest for the trees. And to him, what it looks like as a student of the history of ideas, is that big changes are incoming and they're coming soon. How ready we are for it when it happens will determine how the world ends up on the other side of it, whatever happens. Excited to talk about more educated theories on what that might be. As always, I hope you enjoy this podcast in your life. I certainly enjoy doing it for you. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.