OK, I lied. Zizek is interesting enough to merit a round two.
What makes Zizek interesting is that, besides the fact that he is easy on the ears, he is a pretty honest commie, insofar an honest commie is of course not an internal contradiction.
The left has a narrative problem. In the twentieth century, all narratives were leftist, as all dominant religions were leftist – progressivism, fascism, communism. In the twenty-first century, it has become obvious that every single one of these religions has spiraled out of control; killing lots of people, bringing chaos to its normie adherents. So, mass faith dwindles. It is in this faith vacuum that we operate: we offer an alternative faith. A pretty good one. Our biggest weapon is that we are cool, which of course is mostly best left unsaid. But of course this is a market with heavy competition, and the left will not move aside without putting up a good fight. Zizek is one of those fighters, he is sort of cool, and he offers a coherent leftist narrative. Let us take a look at three of his videos to see what he has to offer.
I think this gets to the core of Zizek’s ideas. Notice how he is exactly on the same line with Carlylean Restorationist in his anti-capitalism. He talks about ‘early critics of capitalism’ – what is early? Well, ‘a few decades before the French Revolution.’ Zizek thus assumes capitalism is recent, while we are pretty sure capitalism is ancient, demonstrated among many by the capitalist Phoenician ship industry some 3000 years ago.
Nine of out ten times, when a leftist thinker talks about the world, he is really talking about himself, because that is his only point of reference. Observe that when Zizek argues that capitalism is a religion, he is really saying communism is a religion. Zizek argues that capitalists were 18th century priests that took the power, are still in power today. Capitalists were never in power, never took power. Zizek applies his own priest mindset and projects it onto entrepreneurs, willingly blind to the fact that entrepreneurs don’t think like him at all. When Zizek says ‘a capitalist is someone who is willing to stake his life to ensure production grows’, again projects a false script on capitalists. He imagines capitalists act like priests, as he acts like a priest, while in reality capitalists just like to create stuff and earn a buck. While a capitalist might care mighty much about a business he built with his own sweat blood and tears, not a single capitalist will ‘stake his life’ for production growth the way a commie will stake his life for a chance to kill the peasant with two cows. There’s no holy aspect involved in the entrepreneurial life, hence the inability of capitalists to band together into a church, which, if I can readily observe, if Alinsky can readily observe, Zizek can also readily observe, hence Zizek is a liar.
What Zizek is really saying is this: ‘don’t you hate the peasant with two cows? I sure hate the peasant with two cows. We should do something about it. In fact, it is our moral imperative to kill him and take away his cows! But, in the twentieth century we killed too many people, took away too many cows and for some reason people got upset with that. So, let us think harder about how we are going to kill the peasant and take away his cows without too many people getting upset about it.’
Thus, when righties like Zizek for how he mocks other leftists, bear in mind: he might mock them, but whenever their disagreements run too wide, Zizek will always play his Joker card: ‘yes, well, we might disagree on this, but at least we both hate the peasant with two cows’, which is the central reason he is on the payroll of the left.
Video number two: Zizek on women.
Zizek is blue-pilled on women, which is to say, he is the kind of guy who will steal your stuff and murder you -and you can’t help but still sort-of like him while he does it- but he will not rape your wife. On women, he shows weakness – ‘in principle we should support #metoo’ he says, but of course, ‘it is not really about the working class appropriated by the bourgouisie and so on and so on.’ He criticizes Metoo from the left. Makes perfect sense, it’s the easy answer, but: women hate it. Women much prefer the man who calls them out for their bullshit, not the man who encourages them to create even more bullshit. So here he is weak.
Final video: ten Zizek jokes. Some of them are good. I especially like the first one by a young Zizek.
The joke about the dusty balls is a good way to convey his edginess: he knows he is on the payroll of the power left, but he is always looking for opportunities to eat the power left. Such is the relation of the lefter left to the central left.
The joke about Jesus Christ is telling. Perhaps I am looking too much into it, but it is true that Jesus was weak on the women question, and a good case can be made that it was the women question that eventually undid Christianity. So the joke is a useful meme: it is funny, but it also conveys information on the enemy’s weakness.
All in all, while Zizek is a dirty-cool intellectual, he says nothing we have not heard before, nothing we cannot handle. His memes are stale, in that at their core they are boilerplate Marxism, and we are in the last stages of having fully refuted boilerplate Marxism. Put Zizek up against a purple pill man such as Jordan Peterson, and Zizek will take him down, for Zizek is a holier leftist than Peterson, but pit Zizek against one of us and he will lose, for we will call him out for what he is actually doing. This is good news for the Dark Enlightenment.
An ideology’s attractiveness for young men might simply be a function of how sweet and personally supportive (as cuddly sidekicks) the associated women are. (E.g. my brother dropped out of Anarchism because the girls were bitches.)
Fred, that’s a valid point. Problem is that an ideology’s attractiveness for young women is predominatly a function of how socially accepted the movement is. Therefore females are very reluctant to join a “right” movement.
Any “right” movement has to start with a tiny core of hard men. This might over time attract females, but the effect of males attracting females to a movement is much smaller than the effect of females attracting males.
What can be done to increase the attractiveness of a “right” movement? Hire groupies? Tell your girlfriend and wife to attend? (Assumming that you have one of those – if you have both, it might cause problems if they are with you at the same event).
We, the tiny core of hard men, set the standard — pretty women can’t help but gravitate towards our rugged conqueror’s attitude, and males will follow the pretty women.
The problem is of course that right now we communicate in kilobytes, which is far too weak for women to pick up on, but sooner or later we shall be communicating in gigabytes, so better act as if we are already.
Successful memetic contagion requires formidable carriers to disseminate it. In other words, for an idea to be fashionable, need cool people to spread it; in this instance, it’s noteworthy that the left is running out of such cool people, though arguably the right is not gaining any. A general reduction in charisma may well prove to be an intrinsic feature of modernity, so expect nihilism to reign by the end of this century at the latest.
The seeds of leftism were always in Christianity, and Christianity has always suffered outbreaks of leftism
I think Christianity will be OK, provided it is integrated with natural selection, evolutionary psychology, and game theory.
But Trump’s story is not Christianity, but American greatness. A legitimate government is going to need a story that it is right for America to be great, that America is the new Jerusalem.
I have expressed my doubts about whether Christianity will be OK. But, you have been correct so many times, that I will abide. Let us see if Christianity is up to the task.