Guess what? It’s Fru’s Relationship With Netflix time, and today’s springboard is the documentary The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology, starring Slavoj Zizek.
Don’t let the title fool you, though, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the documentary and was, presumably, though up by some marketing hack who wanted to create cheap buzz.
Instead, it is a kind of enhanced lecture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who uses clips from various movies to illustrate the philosophical and psychological points he is making. And sometimes, via modern movie magic, even appearing to be in the movies himself, flopped on Travis Bickle’s cot or appearing at the wine orgy in the oft forgotten Seconds.
This little bit of razzle dazzle certainly helps to spice up what is essentially two and a quarter hours of a man with a thick Polish accent talking.
That’s just the price you pay in order to enjoy Zizek’s genuinely original and insightful thoughts. You want your Zizek, you learn to penetrate both his accent and his occasionally perplexing way of using the language both of classical European political philosophy and of psychoanalysis.
Oh, and he is obsessed with the term ideology, which I consider to be a word with too much baggage to be useful any more.
I don’t agree with all of his points, but how can I not love someone who sees psychoanalysis as continuous with philosophy and who illustrates his points with pop cultural references?
Take away the accent and add some jokes, and that could be me.
The main concept that I took away from his lecture was the concept of the Big Other, that is to say, the entity of whatever nature that occupies the position of being the overwhelming being of immense power who both guides and protects us.
As Lacan, who coined the term, noted, our first Big Other is our mother, or other primary caregiver. It is this person who hears our cries for help and understands them, who intervenes when we are upset, who provides the necessary protection from the big wild world for us, and who takes on the role of being ultimately responsible for our health and wellbeing so that we may live in the kind of safe, simplified world that our nascent consciousness can handle.
I have been thinking a lot about the need for such simplification recently. The most horrifying thought to any human being is the thought that the world is well and truly beyond our comprehension and we are naked before its chaos, unable to make intelligent choices in a universe which is ultimately unintelligible.
This idea is psychologically intolerable, and yet, ultimately true. Even the brightest among us can’t honestly claim to understand everything, and so some portion of the universe always remains unintelligible and unpredictable.
Even in a strictly mechanistic universe in which there is no such thing as uncertainty at the ultimate level and all is, in theory, predictable, we human beings are still finite in our consciousness and therefore there will still always be that area of incomprehension.
So how do we resolve this paradox of intolerable truth? In the most general terms, we generally decide that while we might not understand everything, we understand “enough” of our world to get by, and that will have to be enough.
We remain aware that the cold callous hand of remorseless fate is always in play and that therefore something unpredictable and unavoidable could always step in and ruin our feeling of being in control, but we push this thought from our minds as something impossible to control and therefore best not thought about.
More specifically, however, in political terms, we have different solutions based on one’s basic political view.
The conservative solution is to simply deny anything which suggests that things are more complicated than they can handle. They substitute raw emotion for reason and actively seek out whatever views stimulate the most primal emotions such as rage and fear and therefore the views that have the strongest simplifying effect.
Once this pattern is established, the conservative comes not simply to rely on these surges of simplifying emotion but to trust them exclusively. Every time they feel the tiniest twinge of doubt that their worldview matches the world, they experience a surge of primal emotion that drives out the higher brain function and makes everything seem simple to them again.
This, incidentally, is why they are so reliant on conservative media to reaffirm their beliefs constantly. The kind of emotional state on which they rely is difficult to maintain and requires constant emotional stimulation.
The liberal solution, on the other hand, is to accept a certain amount of doubt in the scope of their understanding in return for faith that what they do know about the world is verifiably true. Logic, reason, and knowledge may not deliver the kind of black and white rock solid certainty that conservatives crave, but its products can be tested for veracity.
It should be noted, however, that liberals can be just as guilty of substituting emotion for reason in an attempt to simplify the world when they are feeling doubt.
Liberals simply use a different set of emotions, like compassion, empathy, and altruism to do it.
We are, all us, operating in a noncomprehensive subset of true reality, and therefore we are all stuck making do with an imperfect map of foreign territory.
It should be no surprise, then, that the less intelligent, either due to a congenital lack or due to senility, tend towards conservatism, and that liberalism maps to intelligence so neatly.
In general, the smarter, the more liberal. That doesn’t mean that all conservatives are stupid or that there are no stupid liberals.
But it does mean you will find more liberals at Mensa than NASCAR.
We should have some pity, though, for those who must operate in a world they simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand.
Imagine how frightening that would be, and how desperately you might lunge for anything that promised to cut the complexity of the world down to a size you can comprehend if it was you.
That’s all for me for today, folks. Talk to you again tomorrow.