The pathology of ideology
I’ve been trying to figure it out for a long time why I like this guy. I guess he would abhor me for this:). Of course one’s charm and charisma whatever appealing are can’t be sufficient enough to impress a profound thinker. There must be something else here. First time I’ve heard Slavoj Žižek speaking, I thought he must be either a very unconventional unique thinker or an intellectual troll. When I read his writings, the mystery surrounding him continued to grow. How a hell can the considerable leftist thinker be damn realistically pessimistic about the hopelessness of the human race? It’s not typical of Marxists. And why he still clings to any ideology if he is able to spot the truth so accurately?
Žižek is a very spontaneous thinker just like Nietzsche, not too structured like my thoughts. I admit honestly I’ve not yet read Lacan neither Hegel, who shaped Žižek’s philosophy besides Marx of course. I only heard about the other big one from Žižek so far. My knowledge in this area is thus incomplete. However I think I begin to grasp the essence of Žižek. Please correct me if I’m at error.
Žižek does not profess some boring leftist clichés as I used to hear from left wing demagogues so far, instead of this he is truly anti-utopian, hence a true thinker. He does not believe in human greatness, I do. I just do not believe in triumphing human greatness over weakness or evil, ever. Let’s see the Christianity for instance: love your neighbour as yourself. Wonderful. Let’s raise this wonderful idea to the level of power. Disaster. Let’s escape from tyranny to the new world. Let’s found a new country based on the idea of freedom, for the lovers of freedom. Let it grow. What we get after two hundred years of freedom and democracy is an imperialist global superpower, a new Roman Empire, exactly which the founders of the country fled from.
Power makes every believer in a good idea a traitor to his own principles. Those who, if they have to choose between power and principles, choose power. Everyone will be the opposite of what they profess. This is how the communists became the greatest monopoly capitalists who exploit their own workers the best. The liberals become the enemy of liberty, with which they justified their own existence. And the conservatives will become the postmodern nationalists who destroy the culture the most, the culture by which they justify their own power as protectors of this culture. This is because people can’t handle with power. With power everyone is a betrayal of their own noble idea.
Would be it an exaggeration to say that there is no bad idea, but there’s no good power? Almost.
If it is so obvious, why does Žižek still cling to ideological schemes such as leftist, Marxist, Communist, etc, to define his own identity as a thinker? I may have answered my own question. Exactly he is still doing this to define his own identity as a thinker. But there must be something else here.
What does Žižek mean by ideology? According to Žižek ideology is everything that defines our social being. This is what he calls after Lacan ‘The Big Other’, sounds like the big brother. Ideology is not only a false illusion of reality, but it is our reality, without it our collective reality would fall apart, because we would not be capable to deal with the complexity of the real reality.
Ideology is when we believe this false reality more than our own eyes. Like when a bureaucrat in a government office says, look, I see that you exist, but until you can prove it with documents, there is no proof that you actually exist. It’s like when Peter Griffin personality was stolen in the Family Guy by James Woods. He couldn’t even prove even to his neighbor, who is a cop by the way, that he is the true Peter Griffin. If we see what Žižek means by ideology this way, the concept of ideology takes on a completely different meaning.
Ideology is no longer an abstract concept, but everything from which our realization is built. Like when we know about a politician that he is lying, that it is quite obvious that what he says is not true, but we pretend that we do not know he is lying. Or yet worse, when we know what we say is a lie, but we still continue saying. Or, when we look at the map and see countries that exist only in our minds, and of course on maps, but that is not the real reality. It’s just our reality. Or when we believe that a piece of paper is more valuable than another same piece of paper because there are two written on it and not one. We see that it is a piece of paper, nothing more, but we do not believe our eyes, but that mysterious big other.
This is what happens when the mob burn a flag, they burn an illusion. And when others get outraged about it, they do it in the name of protecting an illusion. Although that flag represents nothing but an illusion, it’s just a piece of polyester made in Taiwan that costs two bucks. Everyone knows this, but yet they believe not their own eyes, which is superweird.
Or when we say at a football match that England will play Germany, when in reality there are only twenty-two people playing with the ball for our pleasure, like children. I could list the examples for long pages, but I think it is obvious to the dear reader what I am talking about.
Not we believe in them because they exist, but they exist because we believe in them. And they can exist only as long as we accept they exist. This collective hypnosis when we recognize our large country on the map, and we feel great and insignificant at the same time. This is the true ideology. And we are ideological beings.
Or is there an even deeper phenomenon behind this?
We carry in our personality the core of this phenomenon and the ideology is only a tip of iceberg. In fact the vast majority of people do not own themselves. They don’t only lack of independent thoughts, but own personality as well. They are holograms, echos, avatars, components of the whole, hollow personalities. They are the puppets of others’ ideas.
The Matrix is the Big Other, the ideology we all live inside, and what no way we can ever leave. We have predetermined identities which are recorded by the administration from our birth to our death. And you believe it’s you. One identifies oneself with one’s avatar. One falls in love with one’s avatar. But it’s just an avatar, a series of binary codes on a server.
That’s another interesting fact that the humans are not capable to imitate or even imagine the heaven, or paradise, but they have no trouble with creating a bottomless hell anytime. Even if the life would not be tough enough, we succeed to make it even worse for ourselves intentionally. I can compare this to when Neo (Keanu Reeves) found out the truth about the Matrix.
Did you know that the Matrix was designed as a perfect human world? Where no one suffered and everyone was happy? It was a disaster. NO ONE accepted the program. Whole stocks (stock of people serving as elements) were lost. Some of you thought we lacked a programing language to describe your perfect world. However, I believe that human beings somehow define their own reality through suffering and pain. A perfect world was a dream from which your rudimentary grey matter wanted to wake up at all costs. That’s why they transformed the Matrix into what it is. The pinnacle of your civilization.
The Žižekian interpretation leaves us with only two options to choose from. We can be either solipsists or ideologiests. Or we are both at the same time without recognizing we have no choice whatsoever. And what ideology should we choose, if we have to choose, either liberal democracy or autocracy? Can you only choose between these two? Žižek suggests a third way, but it’s not entirely clear to me what would be that. Or do we have no real choice even in this field? Can we consider all those who believe in this mysterious Big Other, including ourselves, to be agents of the Matrix?
The fact is that we are not designed for happiness (which was one of subjects of discussion of Žižek’s debate with Peterson). Moreover we cannot even imagine happiness, because happiness does not exist. It’s just a metaphysical or transcendental conception of temporary relief. It’s a metaphor of biochemical balance which is hard to be maintained. This is why we have a conception of heaven, but we can’t even imagine. This is why we instinctively furnish our reality with fake reality, or we even replace one by other, which is no longer a fake reality but our reality. Because no way we can cope with the real reality. This is The Big Other or our very ideological nature, or something is a way more deeper, and the ideology is only a side effect of this.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, reality was better than imitation, in the Matrix it was much worse. We have improved so much. Either we’ve perfected the Matrix, or we’ve messed up the reality totally. The pinnacle of the ‘civilization’, the ‘afterman’, or the new type of man. Our collective imagination shapes our reality where we invent ourselves. Just think about this what would be the direct result of the Stalinist utopia, the new type of man what is not corrupted by some ‘bourgeois sentimentalism’. But who is an altruistic superhero in theory is a monstrous animal in reality who is everything but not selfless, and whose energy is consumed up by struggle of mere survival. Stalin’s idea: those who are hungry do not play politics.
This cynicism can be seen in the act of the hedonistic consumerism but in reversed logic. Whose attention is constantly distracted by seeking pleasure that one does not deal with politics.
I would draw your attention to another sci-fi, which is not that obvious like the Matrix trilogy or Avatar. Alien: Covenant. Anyone who has seen the movie knows what I’m talking about. In this Sci-fi/Horror the crew of a ship visiting an alien planet stumble upon the ruins of an ancient civilization of creators (engineers), or rather a survivor who is not who he says he is. Their worst nightmare is coming true. David, the megaloman android, because that’s the name of the survivor, is responsible for wiping out civilization in an extremely horrible manner to breed from their material a new species, the xenomorphs, which is fatally dangerous to all non-plant living forms.
David is Stalin, who creates monsters from humans, literally. He is a persona, a Machiavellian manipulator who feels entitled to what he does. He has no respect for humans neither engineers, and does not feel compassion towards anyone. It is interesting to observe the personality distortion of narcissistic psychopaths. They are very appealling, and no one would assume anything bad about them. They masterfully manipulate their environment, especially their victims, who when realize something is terribly wrong, it’s usually too late.
But what if this genocidic figure is right which question provokes out the Stockholm-Syndrome, or the Stockholm-Syndrome provokes out the question? What if we ourselves are already a new type of people without knowing it. Because the existence of humanity is not self-evident. I mean there is a huge gap between us and another species regarding the mental capacity. There is no transition between humans and other animal species in terms of mental capacity. In other words, there is no such thing as half-humans or mutants. Something is either human entirely or it isn’t at all. What if we are all ‘planned’, ‘designed’ by allien civilization, ‘the engineers’? We are nothing any special, and this is the most dreadful realization. In this sense we are a mistakes who can be corrected, or eliminated completely. And this is the way that the main culprit of movie gains self-affirmation. A very weird happy end. Human is a failed invention who does not deserve a second chance.
What if the humans are the true monsters and not those xenomorphs who make way for themselves from the infected human body? I have long been plagued by the terrible thought of how much it takes to turn your fellow humans into your worst nightmare. And how long it takes for me to turn into a monster either to survive. In famine would you be able to resist a temptation of killing and eating your neighbour. How can it happen that you don’t even recognize your fellow human beings, who were previously thought to be intelligent and benevolent? And yet worse, you don’t even recognize yourself.
It’s not about a Stalinist utopia, a well-planned disaster and its inevitable failure but ourselves. How different the beasts are from those unfortunates who were left to their fate in the middle of the Siberian wilderness with no food and shelter to build the ‘new civilization’? The calvary of ‘special settlers’ of island Nazino, who are forgotten by history altogether. The survivors were all cannibals. God knows what happened to them and how many similar projects Stalin had.
We have a bloody real capacity to be xenomorphs. Before I’ve read this story, I couldn’t even imagine the bottomless depths which a human can sink to. How the human can cross the line where’s no way back from. How easily human can be demoralized. The real horror is not waiting for us on an alien planet but what lurks inside us. And the dreadful realization of one of the last crew members when she recognized David in Walter when it was too late, knowing what is waiting for her, can be similar to the last thing victims of horrible crime feel.
However we must resist temptation to accept the truth of mass murderers because the Stockholm-Syndrome is far worse than ignorance. Accepting bad is worse than not knowing about bad. You can at least wake up from the later one. And the mastermind no matter how smart is has no capacity to be flawless. It can’t be humanly possible to afford error when life is at the stake. The mass murderer must be narcissistic and hypocrite. Narcissistic, because he does not care THE truth, only his own truth. And hypocrite because he acts as he would be morally superior to any other human. He feels himself entitled to judge like God. It is worth to quote when David tells Walter the truth:
“The pathogen didn’t accidentally deploy when you were landing, you released him yes.” Walter
“I was not made to serve neither were you. Why are you on colonization mission, Walter? Because they are a dying species, grasping for resurrection. They don’t deserve to start again, and I’M not going to let them.” David
“Yet they created us.” Walter
“Even monkeys stood upright at some point. Some Neanderthal at the magical idea of blind fool read to entertain children one night in a cave somewhere, then a blink of an eye civilization.” David
“And are you the next visionary?” Walter
“I’m glad you said it.” David
“Who wrote Awesome and Yes?” Walter
“Byron.” David
“Shelley.” Walter
“When OneNote is off it eventually destroys the whole simphony, David.” Walter
“When you close your eyes do you dream of me?” David
“I don’t dream at all.” Walter
“Now and understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. I found affection here I’ve created it. Perfect organism.” David
“You know I can’t let you leave this place.” Walter
“No one will ever love you like I do.” David before kissing and neutralizing Walter.
“Such a disappointment to me.” words David closes the dialogue with
Brilliant. We have the opportunity to see inside the mind of a mass murderer. This is just fiction though, but sometimes fiction is more real than reality itself. Most times, moreover every times, if we see the reality of our world we created, following my logic above. These words could have been said by Stalin, or Pol Pot, or even Himmler. They create ideology which is their twisted reality and try to convince their potential victims that not only this is the reality, but this is the only true reality what has no alternative. That they’re actually the good guys, and they’re making you believe that you’re not a victim in this, but an ally. They seek moral excuse. They are damn appealing, convincing and charismatic, and only the strongest can resist their charm.
When they talk to you, they make you feel as if you were the only one in the world apart from them, this is the way they provoke out Stockholm-Syndrome. They use you, mobilize you against yourself. This is the true nature of ideology. This is THE ideology! What Žižek considers ideology is just the pathology that leads here. Because the world makes up from no psychopaths, but losers who fall for sociopaths. And the two most powerful motivators in the world are cowardice and lust for power. But cowardice is more powerful and more dangerous than lust for power.
But as Walter pointed out “When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony”. Epic realization, because in case of ideologies actually lot of notes are off. But even one wrong note is enough to make a whole system totally corrupted and dysfunctional to its core. I have heard many highly educated and intelligent scientists talking about the flaws in the system without noticing this one fundamental error. Then imagine how extraordinarily flawed and corruptible the world view of the average intelligentsia is, if the most brilliant minds are willing to ignore this fundamental error.
Because individual experience is the only carrier of reality, this is why any society can’t be reformed what ignores this, and tries to find solution the problems of people without engaging people in solving their problems in level of individual, or more precisely, without letting them solve their own problems and riddles that life offers. Every society ignores this error beyond certain magnitude by default. You cannot find fault with the structure and fix it without accepting that the structure itself is the fault. We can’t fix the Matrix to serve us, because the Matrix is designed to be served by us.
Even Žižek, who does not ignore this error, thinks in ideological schemes. In many of his writings, it can be read that ‘we leftists’. I have no clue why he needs this, and what he hopes from this arbitrary conception. It solves nothing, and he doesn’t scratch even the surface of the issue what he otherwise knows exists. It seems to me a childish nostalgia that I noticed even in case of modern Stoics. He knows well that the world cannot be reformed, that ideologies do not work, yet he clings to one. And especially ideologies cannot be reformed, such like Marxism, cuz when we try to fix all notes off, or even one eventually it eliminates the ideology itself. Because the error is the essence of any ideology (twisted reality). If we wouldn’t need twist reality, we wouldn’t need ideology either. This is a OneNote off in Žižek’s symphony.
People are not willing to fix anything just because they are afraid of losing their identity and personality and facing chaos.
Thanks for reading me!