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March 15, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
39:29
20240315_slavoj-žižek-on-russia-israel-hamas-oscars-royals
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dangerous Communist Philosopher 00:05:11
He's often been called the most dangerous philosopher in the West, locking horns of Dr. Jordan Peterson and captivating crowds that sell out speeches.
Very similar to the best-selling books, span everything from geopolitics to psychoanalysis and popular culture, all with a controversial communist bent.
At the most elementary level, you are not bullshitting.
You are an open mind.
What is your view about where we are with this war?
There is no opposition.
I agree with you.
The West has to stop this ambiguous game, trying to support Ukraine, but not too much.
Some people now claim that Hamas is basically an armed resistance movement.
In some sense, it is.
Both sides have to accept they are condemned to live with one another there.
If they don't do this, they will just be dying both.
The problem with cancel culture is they are precisely excluding everyone who is diverse.
Slavoy, Žižek, joins uncensored.
Great to have you.
And great to be with you.
I'm really proud.
You know why?
Because although we probably don't share the same political view, I'll put it at the most elementary level, you are not bullshitting.
You don't follow neither right-wing not left-wing vogue dogma and so on.
You are an open mind.
This is more than ever important today.
Well, thank you very much.
And in fact, I was doing a lot of research into you, Slavoy, about your views about various issues in the news.
And as I went down the list, I realized we pretty much agree on almost everything going on.
And I realized then that I must therefore be the second most dangerous philosopher in the West.
I am not surprised by it because to provoke you and our public now, you know how I define myself, quite seriously.
A moderately conservative communist.
Don't go into panic.
By communist, I simply mean I think that the present global capitalist system is approaching some kind of a crisis, environment, migration, and so on and so on.
That's all.
A new practice of global solidarity will have to be activated.
But here comes the moderate conservative, but I'm extremely skeptical then to any proposed measures that we have.
Democracy.
People say we need authentic democracy.
Sorry, I'm here against Lincoln.
You know, Lincoln's famous, you can deceive some people all the time, all the people sometimes, but not all the people all the time.
Unfortunately, I think most of the time, most of the people are deceived.
Second thing, freedom.
What do you mean by freedom?
Let's take decolonization.
Yes, I am for it.
But as a leftist, I am obsessed by how things went wrong in many cases of decolonization.
Take Uganda.
You know that they voted a law a couple of months ago which unanimously almost makes homosexuality punishable even with death penalty and they justify this with rejecting Western culture colonialism or South Africa one of my most depressive experiences I spoke recently with a very Grent old lady,
very high position in African National Congress, and I asked her what's the real situation in South Africa.
You know what she told me?
Nightmare.
She told me more and more among the poor black majority, the atmosphere which dominates is nostalgia for apartheid.
The standard of living for the blacks was more or less the same, maybe even slightly higher as now, but there was precisely because it was a police state, more public order and so on and so on.
These are the real problem.
And I think the game that we should reject is blame the white.
You know, oh, it's all effects of colonization.
No, it's not so simple.
The next thing that makes me really dangerous, maybe, hopefully, I think, is, you know, maybe you know it, what's my favorite philosophical joke.
You know, Nils Bohr, quantum physics and so on.
He had a house outside Copenhagen, and a friend visited them and saw a horse flew on the entrance door.
This is, with us in Europe, a superstitious object.
Israel Gaza Conflict 00:10:50
Allegedly, it prevents evil spirits to enter the house.
And the friend asked Nils Bohr, listen, do you believe in this?
This is bullshit.
Aren't you a scientist?
You know what Bohr answered.
Of course, I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Unfortunately, that's how all the democracy, legal system, human rights work today.
Mostly we practice them, but we don't believe in them.
We don't take them seriously.
Yeah, I think you may.
Listen, I don't think you're dangerous at all.
Let me talk to you first about Ukraine, Russia.
I had a guy called John Mearsheimer on recently who was arguing to me that Russia was provoked into this war, they shouldn't be blamed for it, and so on.
I have a very different view.
What is your view about where we are with this war?
This conversation is turning very bad because, again, there is no opposition.
I agree with you.
But what may be a surprise for you is that I agree with you as a leftist.
That is to say, don't people listen, my God, to what Russia, their official media, Putin and so on, what they are saying.
Some of my crazy leftist friends even claim, but nonetheless, Russia is anti-NATO, so it must be good.
Are they crazy?
Look at whom Russia is supporting in Western Europe.
Only the radical right-wingers, Le Pen's alternative for Germany in Germany, and so on.
Second thing, you know what Putin said on the day of the invasion, 21st and then 23rd of February, a year ago, or two years ago even.
He said something terrifying.
He said the true name of Russia should be Russia of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
So he wants to take from Ukrainians something that only paradoxically, I'm very critical of Lenin, the early Bolsheviks gave them.
So this is clear for Putin.
He is in no way a leftist, my God.
He's a dark, conservative, religious fanatic.
That's why I, to provoke people, as you know, I think, I said give even nuclear arms to Ukraine.
Well, on that point, I'm saying I think it was a terrible mistake for Ukraine to be persuaded to give up their nuclear capability because it seemed to me that was just a green light to Putin to then invade them.
Absolutely.
I mean, okay, it's true that at that point, am I correct or not?
I'm not sure, it wasn't yet Putin, it was Yeltsin.
Right.
But they should have taken this precaution.
Because it's clear, here I disagree with Merzheimer, it's clear that it's not just Ukraine.
It's clear that it began with Grusia, Georgia, Crimea, Moldova, and so on.
No, Russia is, they openly say it.
It's in an imperial expansionist state.
And I think the longer we tolerate it, the more horrible will be the final confrontation.
That's why, incidentally, I read as far as I can their media.
You know, I hope we agree also here.
One of the most stupid, politically correct pacifist saying is an enemy is somebody whose words you did not listen.
No, sorry, I read Hitler, Mein Kampf, and after reading that, he was even more my enemy.
So that's why I think we should read what horrors they are saying, Russian media.
They have a full return to religious fundamentalism.
They portray the war in Ukraine as the war of Christian civilization against demoniac Satanism and so on.
I mean, they are no less than Arabs.
They are today, in the worst sense, fanatical religious fundamentalists.
They have to be stopped unconditionally.
The West has to stop this ambiguous game of trying to support Ukraine, but not too much, so that we will not annoy Russia too much and so that we will not hurt our standard of living too much.
No, we are in an emergency state, we Europe.
I completely agree with you.
I cannot understand, particularly can't understand.
It looks bad.
When will we?
I want knives.
When will we disagree?
Let's go on.
Let's move to Israel-Palestine.
I don't think we will hear, because you've taken a view of trying to see both sides of this, and that's made you unpopular with both sides.
And I've done the same, where I try and look at it fairly and understand the history, but also understand what happened on October the 7th and understand the questions over proportionality of response and so on.
What is your view of where we are with the Israel-Hamas war and what's happening in Gaza?
First, to clarify, things.
Even if some people now claim that Hamas is basically an armed resistance movement, in some sense it is.
But nonetheless, many of its acts, most of its acts, especially October the 7th attack, were purely, clearly acts of terror.
You know why?
I didn't know people there in that area attacked by Hamas, but I knew people who knew the people there, and they were shocked.
You know that that raving party, these were the most pacifist people in all of Israel, the young people.
It was almost an act meant to be an act of solidarity with Gaza.
The kibbutz, Hamas slaughtered, was a kibbutz well known for helping, even half illegally, people in Gaza all the time.
So here things are absolutely clear.
At the same time, I have big problems with this almost, I would say, pseudo-religious nationalist twist by Netanyahu and especially some guys in his government who even use the terms Palestinians are like Amalek, those in the Bible, slaughtered, and so on.
And especially what's problematic with me is West Bank.
There, a slow colonization is happening.
Now, on behalf of Israel, I so wrong.
The main culprit is, don't you think?
What's happening on the West Bank is really surprised you?
Yeah, I just want to say, Sabo, I think that what's happening on the West Bank is actually that's the one thing everybody should agree is completely wrong.
You know, you can argue about the proportionality of Israel's attacks in Gaza, but nobody should be happy with what the Israeli settlers are doing on the West Bank.
It's completely wrong.
And now I will tell you something that will not shock you.
You appear to me a more reasonable being, but what shocks many of my friends.
You know who is for me at this point the greatest voice of reason there.
Two act Secret Service Israeli cliffs.
Especially, did you read the interview by ex-Hinbat cliff, Ayalan?
Who he said that the formula there is give Palestinians a hope and that's the only way, long-term way to peace.
And he even proposes a scenario.
You have Marvin Barghuti, who is for 20 years in prison, had an horror of Mandela, but he is now, I know people who spoke with him, absolutely for a peaceful solution and so on and so on.
So for me, the true horror is that Hamas and the Israeli hardliners are in a tango embrace, strengthening each other.
I think, and here I agree with Yuval Harari, when he speaks about the struggle of the two souls of Israel.
This more open, pacifist soul.
And here, I'm not a utopian.
I'm not saying Israel should disband secret services.
No, I'm not crazy.
I'm just saying both sides have to accept that, as Ayalan put it, they are condemned to live with one another there.
If they don't do this, they will just be dying both together there.
And it's incredible how in this sensitive situation, you say things like this, and at the same time, you, I mean me now, are attacked as anti-Semitic Hamas supporter.
And from the other side, in Al-Dlazira, there was a whole campaign against me that I am just a soft liberal Zionist and so on and so on.
It's a very sad situation.
Well, we live in a very strange world, don't we, where everyone is very tribal, is fueled by social media.
You have to take a side, you have to be implacably on one side or another.
And even if facts change, you can't change your opinion or support for your tribe, if you like.
Fascism and Woke Culture 00:05:54
And what that means is that free speech becomes under more and more threat because people dare not actually express their honestly held opinion.
That's why you and I get attacked by people on both sides of a lot of these debates because we refuse to be put into a box.
Absolutely.
And I think those who are especially stuttering or are affected by this is the so-called, let's call it, liberal, moderate left, with the madness of wokeism, cancel culture, and so on.
Why?
What for me, the problem with cancel culture?
It's evident to me as a philosopher.
They preach inclusion and diversity.
But what are they doing?
They are precisely excluding everyone who is diverse, who doesn't follow their line.
And the situation is extremely annoying.
Yeah, because you even don't know the rules in advance.
You know, all of a sudden, for something, you can be cancelled.
The rules are not clear.
So you know what this cancel culture reminds me of?
You know, this eternal joke, everybody knows it.
Researcher comes to a loan tribe and asks them, do you still have cannibals there?
The answer they get is, no, we just ate the last cannibal last week.
You know, that's what council culture is doing.
It is.
No, we have no male chauvinism, exclusionism, whatever here, because we just excluded the last one.
That's the reality.
That's the tragedy of cancel culture.
I agree in principle with their goals, some of them, but generally.
But the way they want to enforce their goals, the very way they do what they are doing undermines what they are doing.
It's a tragedy.
And as such, they are giving arguments, energy to the new populist right.
They fit together.
For me, the new populist right and this woke politically correct council culture left are simply two sides of the same culture.
I completely agree.
In fact, I would go further and say that they're basically both forms of fascism.
And the irony about the woke left is that if you ask them what's the thing you hate most in the world, they would probably say fascism.
And yet the way they behave in cancelling people for having opinions, in trying to destroy their lives, in cancelling history, in cancelling everything in life that people enjoy, is that they're behaving exactly like fascists would behave.
Here I would.
No, I completely disagree with you.
Finally!
Finally!
I completely...
No, no, no, no.
I agree with you.
I would just be careful with the term fascism because if we define fascism in a broader sense, not anti-Semitism kill all the enemy, but the basic idea of fascism for me, we want modern technology, modernization and so on, but we don't want the disruptive effects of freedom liberalism.
We want to control it by some central national imposed ideology and third party.
Then, you know how far I'm here ready to go.
Take countries like Russia, like India, like Turkey, and maybe China itself.
In some sense, this broad sense, not exactly Nazism, they are all moving in this direction of at least, if not more, stopped fascism.
Modernization, yes, but bridgled, controlled by a strong centralized state and founded in some nationalist ideology.
But I would see, I would say you're not necessarily disagreeing with me, because I totally understand that that is the definition of fascism.
But the ideology of fascists is that you will behave the way we tell you to behave, and if you don't, we'll kill you, either in reality, we'll literally kill you, or in the case of the woke left, which Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus, we will kill off your ability to have an opinion and will ruin your life for having an opinion.
That is the same kind of thinking of a fascist.
You will conform to the way that I decide you will lead your life or we will destroy you.
I agree with you, but I would just add something, that there is another phenomenon in our Western liberal countries, which a phenomenon which worries me even more.
In marginal media and so on, you still can say important things, but in some sense, the effect is cancelled.
Like, you can, up to a point, tell the truth about ecology, about I don't know what, but yeah, yeah, yeah, we all agree, and then it goes on.
Criticism of Western Liberalism 00:02:34
I know this because I was years ago in psychoanalysis diagnosed by obsessional neurotic.
And I will tell you now, a funny detail, what happened to me.
I was talking during the session, there were short sessions, all the time.
Why?
Because I wanted to, I didn't want even to give a second to the analysts to ask me some tough questions.
So the idea was talk, talk, talk, not so that you achieve something, but to make it sure that nothing will change.
And I think that, you know, a lot of today's tolerated criticism works like this.
If you allow me, it's in my nature, in my dreams, I cannot change it.
A wonderful, I use it often, dirty joke, not too dirty still for the public, from, I think even pre-revolutionary times.
We're uncensored, you can far away.
Yeah, was occupied by Tatars.
Okay, a Russian couple, farmer and his wife, walk on the street, a Tatar comes on a horse and says, I will now rape your wife, but not only you have to watch it, you have to hold my testicles so that when I'm raping her, there will be no dust on my testicles.
Okay, the Tatar does it right away.
And then the farmers start to jump out of pleasure.
Ha ha, I won.
The horrified wife says, in what sense?
I was right.
The farmer said, but ha ha ha, no, his balls are full of dust, you know, like I didn't hold them.
A lot of criticism, especially leftist criticism, remains at this level.
Instead of confronting the true basic questions, we remain at this superficial level.
The most fascinating revelation about you recently, Slavoj, was that you wrote a piece for the new statesman explaining that Elon Musk had ruined your sex life.
Could you explain that?
Of course, this is my typical rhetorical exaggeration, but I can exactly tell you what I meant.
I developed this in a book that I wrote on dangers on what Elon Musk calls neuraling.
Trump Oppenheimer Monarchy 00:14:57
The idea of the immediate contact between our brains.
First, my thoughts can be read by a computer.
Computer is linked to your brain.
So that's Elon Musk's dream.
We even will no longer need language.
But isn't sexuality something that needs language?
All the flirting, the erotic games and so on, thrive in this gap between what you can say, what you only hint at, and so on.
Imagine what happens in this society where our brains are directly linked.
I see somebody, a woman, a man, a day, I don't care whom I consider desirable.
We just look at each other and, if I'm lucky, both of us in our brain think, okay, let's do it and we do it.
I claim this is no longer sexuality.
Fascinating.
Let me ask you about the most contentious debate in the world right now following the Oscars, which is Oppenheimer versus Barbie.
I interviewed Werner Herzog recently who said that he tried to watch Barbie.
He got about half an hour into it and said he deduced that could it be that the world of Barbie is sheer hell?
Would you agree with that?
I agree with him.
But you know in what sense?
It's sense in the sense that what I moderately liked about the movie was that it takes place among Barbie and other dolls and so on.
And it's nice to fantasize about it.
But in itself, this world is hell.
And we know it.
But the deeper question here for me is, why then do we need to dream about something of which, deeply in ourselves, deep in ourselves, we are well aware that this is hell.
About Oppenheimer, and same with you, good guy.
It took you half an hour.
To me, it took 10 minutes.
I couldn't watch it further.
About Oppenheimer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what I didn't like in the movie?
I liked all these political implications and so on.
Although I'm not simply even on Oppenheimer's side.
I think that his idea that the United States should not further develop nuclear weapons because then Russia will, is simply wrong.
Russia would have done it in any way and so on.
But I like the political aspect.
What I didn't like is this pseudo-oriental Hindu depth of, you know, Bhagavad Gita, all that stuff.
And let me briefly explain to you why.
This got me a couple of months ago in deep trouble in India.
You know, the first sexual act, Florence Yu, making love with Oppenheimer, and she asked him or she, who I was, to quote, read Bhagavad Gita.
Okay, Indians exploded.
They said, story, this is our sacred book.
How can you spoil it reading, putting it into such a dirty context of illegitimate sex?
You know what was my reply?
I agree with you, but in the opposite sense, you have a beautiful, loving, sexual act, and you spoil it by quoting one of the dirtiest books of all the time.
You don't believe me?
Let me tell you a fact.
Do you know that Bhagavad Gita was a favored book of Heinrich Schimmer, the author of Holocaust, chief of SS?
You know why?
Yeah.
He thought, in an ironic sense, ethically.
His problem was this.
SS officers and soldiers had to do horrible things, killing Jewish women, children, and so on.
How can they do this without becoming destitute brutal themselves?
And his reply was, Bhagavad Gita, don't identify with your acts, act at a distance from yourself.
So no wonder that some kind of this pseudo-oriental thought is extremely popular among parts of the new elite.
Like don't, you know you are doing horrible things, but you say, no, I'm just acting this, this is not the real me, and so on and so on.
You see, that's my problem with Oppenheimer.
Less of that oriental stuff of mysteries and so on and so on, and more about political background and so on.
Fascinating.
What is your view of Donald Trump?
And do you think he's going to win back the White House?
He can.
But again, ah, now you will see why here I get hatred from both sides.
On the one hand, especially considering the global situation, I think Trump's victory would have meant that United States will become one among the other, the so-called BRICS countries.
And their formula, I'm opposed to BRICS.
Their formula is you have your way of life, we have ours.
Let's tolerate each other.
We have seen what this means when Taliban won in Afghanistan.
There was immediate peace between Taliban, the new regime, and China.
The deal was, you, although you are Muslims, allow us Chinese to do what we want with Uyghur Muslims.
We allow you what you want to do with women's rights and so on and so on.
So here I have a problem.
And so with Trump, let me tell you a joke which I constructed.
It's a paraphrase of an old joke from communism.
Imagine that three big names in today's politics.
Putin, he, speaks to the boss of China, and Trump are allowed briefly to confront God, and each of them can ask God a question.
First, Putin asks, tell me what will be with my beloved Russia in next years.
God says, looks bad, not about Ukraine war, but you will be in a couple of years an economic province of China, basically economically colonized by China.
Putin turns around and starts to cry.
Then he turns to God and asks, what about China?
Will be so strong.
God says, sorry, I also have bad news for you.
Your economic miracle will stop.
You will either have to go to war, to China, sorry, with Taiwan, new militarization, or you will have to rely to Taiwan for economic.
Then Trump says, oh, wonderful.
America will remain.
So what will happen in America if I am elected president again?
You can guess my answer.
God turns around and starts to cry.
So what's my point here?
I'm not totally against Trump, because you know what you should never forget, with all my critique of Trump, that this Trumpian new populism didn't fall from the moon.
It is an outcome, a result of the failure of the standard welter state, American left liberal society.
Something went wrong there.
And I think that that's the problem with Biden.
I remember his inauguration.
It was for me an utterly disgusting spectacle.
It was a simple mistake.
Let's return to the glorious American dream welter state pass.
So that I think, although I don't fully agree with him, the moment of truth there at the inauguration was, you remember, Bernie Sanders spitting alone.
He caught the show, you know.
Millions felt something is wrong in this spectacle.
So the lesson for so-called democratic modern left in the United States for me is don't just hit at Trump.
Ask yourself what you were doing wrong so that we have such a strong wave of populism.
Because although I disagree with Trump, his basic idea that new mega corporations are controlling not only whatever remains of the working class, but also of, let's call them naively, small new creative capitalists, is in some sense true.
This is why my leftist friend, with whom I don't always agree, but here I conditionally agree with him, what my leftist friend Yanis Varoufakis claims in his new book, Techno-Feudalism.
These new mega corporations more and more resemble old feudal masters controlling a whole domain of our social life.
So, you know, the situation is here very complex.
So instead of just criticizing Trump, let's ask what did he perceive that the standard liberal democratic left is ignoring.
This has been fascinating, Slavoi.
I was going to ask you at the end whether you had any opinion about the royal family, given everybody else does right now.
I'm not fascinated by them, but I can tell you something which may be a shock for you.
This is my last text that I published, namely in defense of Hegel's theory of monarchy.
Hegel, the great German idealist, defended monarchy not as a king with full executive power, but a king as a purely symbolic figure which just, as Hegel puts it, signs his or her name, dot the I.
This is important because without such a figure on the top, you get the reign of experts, which is the worst thing that can happen.
It's the end of democracy.
So I think that, of course, we cannot return today to an old style monarchy.
But it's important that on the top of the state, there is, sorry for the expression, an idiot like we all ordinary people.
He stands for ASDES.
The paradox of a king for me, a good monarch, is that he is like one of us.
He stands there for common sense, not for some special knowledge and so on and so on.
In this sense, I see, crazy as it may sound, a potential positive role of monarchy.
Today it's not possible, but there are other options like lot, lottery and so on.
So I think that the persistence of monarchy signals a serious limitation of our traditional representative democracy.
And again, let's not just dismiss it as a remainder of some reactionary past.
Let's see what, why does it persist, what is no longer working as it should in our representative democracies.
Once again, Slavo, I find myself nodding away.
So people may call you the most dangerous philosopher in the West, but I think we found an awful lot of common ground.
So either I am equally dangerous, or actually you're a voice of common sense in a sea of tribalistic madness.
You know what I will tell you?
Very important what you said now.
Because you know that now I come to another point which will bring us to this.
That's why I'm not, no, don't know where he is now politically, but I have sympathies for people like Bernie Sanders.
I'm not talking about politics now, but about how they function.
Is that he for me, not in what he says, but in the way he acts, a true postmodern relativist.
He makes fun of everything, obscenities, and so on and so on.
But I think that Bernie Sanders often, almost I would say, stands for common decency and moral majority.
I think that if a new progressive left wants to have any chance, they should stop to despise ordinary people and accept that the main focus of politics should be how to not dupe but convince, mobilize ordinary people in appealing to their best moral instincts and so on and so on.
Let's not be afraid of this term moral majority.
Slavoj Žižek, what an absolute pleasure to interview you.
What a fascinating conversation.
I think people are going to love this.
And I really appreciate you going uncensored tonight.
Let's hope so.
It was a pleasure for me also.
Thank you.
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