I always enjoy interviews with Zizek, as he always manages to get me thinking. Admittedly, I don't always understand what he's trying to say. Žižek: No, for two reasons. The first is that our opponent isn't really religion. Zivko Kusti, a Croatian Catholic nationalist priest, declared Catholicism to be a symbol of the fact that people aren't prepared to renounce their national and cultural legacy -- "the whole Croatianness." This statement makes clear that it is no longer an issue of faith and its truth, but rather a political-cultural project. [...] The second reason, which is even more decisive, is that the unbridled personal freedom of choice fits in excellently with today's capitalism in the sense that the global social and economic process is becoming more and more impenetrable. Individual hedonism and fundamentalism are mutually driving each other. You can only effectively combat fundamentalism with a new collective project of radical change. And there is nothing trivially hedonistic about that. ...? I honestly don't understand his second point, try as I might.SPIEGEL: Is unbridled individual hedonism the only thing we have with which to oppose this fundamentalism?
(emphasis mine)
He is saying that we do not have a collective vision for a new society that can unify us all: i.e. a political project that could bring about a true globally unified humanity (our visions are of individual hedonism (religion of the self) and religious fundamentalism (religion of traditional values)). In the past there was at least Marxism (a religion of humanity) that was a political motivator because it had the vision of an interconnected "internationale" and the "end of history" as "post-communism". Today we have our personal freedoms but we don't really care about the collective welfare of everyone (we have no more religion of humanity) as we are not fighting for a real progressive (read: radical leftist) idea for a new utopia. Consequently the global sphere is dominated by corporatists whose only vision is to homogenise world culture and turn us all into a multi-billion person underclass (or the growing precariat as Guy Standing calls us). In other words today's global "social" and "economic" forces are becoming more and more unknown (e.g. TPP) (thus: impenetrable) and determined by forces which are not just inhumane but actually tyrannically insane. The longer this goes on the more and more impenetrable the global socioeconomic order will become. For me, a lot of the blame for this collective abandoning of the common space stems from the ridiculous dominant ideology in the humanities/social sciences today of "postmodernism", i.e. there is no direction to history, we are at the death of the grand narrative, culture is completely relative, etc. I say no to all three. If we do not have a collective vision for where we want to be: a direction (i.e. individual and collective freedom), a narrative (all of humanity together as one family), and cultural ideals (i.e. freedom, equality, justice for all) and if we do not redefine the collective global space as a space where the contours are determined by human values, then financial capitalism will continue to go unchallenged until there is another major financial collapse like in 2008.the unbridled personal freedom of choice fits in excellently with today's capitalism in the sense that the global social and economic process is becoming more and more impenetrable.
We might benefit from a unifying perspective that fills the vacuum that nationalism and religion once did. Western culture offers tolerance and stories where plot plays second fiddle to individual growth. Yet, ironically, although cultural limitations continue to melt away, economic and physical realities threaten to corral us all. We are collaborating in waste and oppression, and disagreeing only about the meaning we find in how we go about it.Žižek: Tolerance is not a solution there. What we need is what the Germans call a Leitkultur, a higher leading culture that regulates the way in which the subcultures interact. Multiculturalism, with its mutual respect for the sensitivities of the others, no longer works when it gets to this "impossible-à-supporter" stage. Devout Muslims find it impossible to tolerate our blasphemous images and our disrespectful humor, which constitute a part of our freedom. But the West, with its liberal practices, also finds forced marriages or the segregation of women, which are a part of Muslim life, to be intolerable. That's why I, as a Leftist, argue that we need to create our own leading culture.
Stories of a collective plot play second fiddle to individual plot (self-actualise yourself, but you are self-actualising yourself in a nightmare). Actually, there isn't even a collective plot anymore. Fundamentalists want to hide in their stupid past-world. Transhumanists want to hide in a computer. Here I think post-modern multiculturalism is in fact a view that itself produces fundamentalism because it gives us no direction - then people just stupidly cling to a non-existent past or a non-existent future.stories where plot plays second fiddle to individual growth.
Interested point. It's interesting to think of liberal multiculturalism as a monoculture that suppresses push influences upon society, but tolerates pull influences. By that avenue, capitalism wins, unions lose. Success is 'giving the people what they want'. It is fashionable to obsess about the means, but not about the ends. We have a cultural litmus test for the means, not the ends.
Thanks, that actually explains a lot. I understood most of that from what he said, but this helped bring the full picture into focus.