Interesting Slavoj Zizek Quote

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John Ess Posted: Fri, Aug 14 2009 10:34 AM

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For "an orthodox Lacanian Stalinist", he makes good sense here.

"Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down to 'I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others.'"

I think this is a great quote.  What is today called liberalism is really an attempt to destroy private space not in order to collectivize but perhaps to both use and to also paradoxically get away from others -- using reason to convince people of things or serving/tolerating their actions being unacceptable. This in opposition to both communist all inclusiveness.  As well as emerging rational standards under private property that have to do with subjective preferences in a market/voluntarism.

In a sense they are retaining a type of individualism of original Liberalism, but without the rational justification or a universalizing it to all other people.  They imagine a world in which people have "positive" freedoms, not for social harmony or out of the entitlement to "humanity". But because they imagine people can be atoms somehow which do not at all have to serve others.  Hence, their belief in abstractions like "public good", only, instead of the less glamorous task of the exchange of values/ideas between free individuals which in turn make up good publics. 

They demand the state not to destroy individualism, but because they think the state installs individualism.  It disallows certain decision making and can somehow bypass the democratic nature of unregulated society and emergent phenomenon.  Not for the benefit of collectives, but for the benefit of those types of individuals which do not want to "infected" by the germs that accumulated by people under free exchange.

Liberals are not alone in this, however, as (Christian or otherwise) "progressives" (fascists) and "conservatives" do the same under nationalist (and national socialist, of course) schemes.  Where in which they demand socialist privilege be safeguarded and people not have to subordinate themselves to the changing times.  Seeing "Americana" as a dying species to be preserved.  Whether the stereotypical Christian, the factory worker, the "free" academic, laborers of some lobbied-for product, or some other piece of American pie.  Wherein their freedom to "tell it like it is" must be maintained at the expense of what people actually want to reward for their ill-informed opinions.  And at the expense of having to serve the overall social zeitgeist.  Instead, it seems they are put in a vaccuum and serve just their own purpose (like pieces in a museum) -- all other people be damned.  Just as professional poor people exist under the state's welfare scheme.  Unemployment percentages being an economic necessity (though without any of the eugenic implications of "progressivism" prior in the century).

Fast forward to zeitgeist addendum and job-doing robots and "post-scarcity"...