Robert > Robert's Quotes

“Of course, there is always the risk of future shock,[2] and people will still carry within them the urge to control, to centralize, and to “rage for order.”[3] But technology is helping us to become far more collaborative, and there is more ordering power in that force than in any demagogue with a standing army.”
― Max Borders, The Social Singularity: How decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse

“One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” It is easy to understand what Mao meant here: when the existing social order is disintegrating, the ensuing chaos offers revolutionary forces a great chance to act decisively and take political power.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today, the situation is not one in which heaven is divided into two spheres, as was the case in the Cold War period when two global worldviews confronted each other. The divisions of heaven today appear increasingly drawn within each particular country. In the United States, for instance, there is an ideological and political civil war between the alt-Right and the liberal-democratic establishment, while in the United Kingdom there are similarly deep divisions, as were recently expressed in the opposition between Brexiteers and anti-Brexiteers . . . Spaces for common ground are ever diminishing, mirroring the ongoing enclosure of physical public space, and this is happening at a time when multiple intersecting crises mean that global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Our goal today should be more radical. As is becoming more and more clear from the ongoing crises (the Covid-19 pandemic, global warming and forest fires, and so on), the global capitalist order is reaching its limit, threatening to drag the whole of humanity into the abyss of self-destruction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“workers don’t protest when they live in poverty; they protest when they experience their poverty as an injustice for which the ruling class as well as the state are responsible.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The challenges that we face, from global warming to refugees, digital control, and biogenetic manipulations, require nothing less than a global reorganization of our societies. Whichever way this happens, two things are sure: it will not be enacted by some new version of a Leninist communist party, but it will also not happen as part of our parliamentary democracy. It will not be just a political party winning more votes and enacting social democratic measures.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The true “revolutionary” who undermines the foundations of our societies is not external terrorists or fundamentalists but the dynamics of global capitalism itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The path to true change opens only when we lose hope in a change within the system.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Direct violence is as a rule not revolutionary but conservative, a reaction to the threat of a more basic change—when a system is in crisis, it begins to break its own rules. Hannah Arendt said that, in general, violent outbreaks are not the cause that change a society but rather the birth pangs of a new society in a society that has already expired due to its own contradictions.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The situation is hopeless; it is clear that there is no hope of finding a solution within the existing order. One has to gather the courage to openly accept this hopelessness and to then propose in its place a radical socio-economic change: a direct “politicization” (socialization) of the economy, with a much stronger role for the state and, simultaneously, much greater transparency of state apparatuses within civil society.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“In the Trump era, the United States was in a de facto state of ideologico-political civil war between the populist new Right and the liberal-democratic center, with even occasional threats of physical violence. Now that Trump’s authoritarian populism has been defeated, is there a chance for a new “democracy reborn” in the United States? Unfortunately, this slim chance was lost with the marginalization of “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and AOC. Only the alliance of Left liberals with democratic socialists could have pushed the process of democratic emancipation a step further.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“We are barreling towards a nation with three million lords being served by 350 million serfs. We’ve decided to protect corporations, not people. Capitalism is literally collapsing on itself unless it rebuilds that pillar of empathy”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“I find this supplementation of market mechanisms by morality, love, and empathy utterly problematic. Instead of enabling us to get the best of both worlds (market egotism and moral empathy), it is much more probable that we’ll get the worst of both worlds.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The human face of this “leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity” is Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg—the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy, celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The new mega-corporations that emerge through the privatization of commons justify (to some degree, at least) the idea that we are witnessing today the rise of neo-feudalism, of feudal capitalism. And by controlling our commons, the new masters (Bill Gates, Elon Musk) act in a way analogous to feudal masters.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“This is how Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google function. We retain the freedom of our personal choice, but the scope of this choice is determined by whichever corporation privatized the particular part of our commons: we search for whatever information we need through Google, we freely determine our public identities through Facebook, etc. These mega-corporations try to colonize our future (Gates regularly proposes schemes for organizing our future lives) and even outer space (Musk owns many satellites and plans to build settlements on Mars).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“A poll taken the day after the assault on the Capitol revealed that 45 percent of Republicans approve of the action and believe Trump must be imposed as president by force, while 43 percent oppose or least do not support the use of violence to achieve this end. The Far Right has thus created a base of about 30 million people, an increasing number of whom explicitly reject the principle of democracy and are ready to accept authoritarian rule. We are lucky that the object of their veneration is crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline. It is only a matter of time, however, before a new Trump emerges, less delusional and more competent; the pathway to the installation of an authoritarian regime against the will of the majority of the electorate is now well established.92”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Except that Trump is not crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline—these two features are at the very roots of his success. His followers’ basic stance is that of a “cognitive decline”: of denying the true impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, of global warming, of racism and sexism in the United States; of believing that if there are any serious threats to the American way of life, they must be the result of a conspiracy. Out of this decline emerged a substantial radical-Right movement, whose class base is (as in Fascism) a combination of lower middle-class white workers afraid of losing their privileges and their discreet billionaire enablers.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Trump as such stands for radical division, for us against them (the “enemies of the people”), and the only proper way to beat him is to demonstrate that his division is a false one, that he is really one of “them” (a creature of the establishment “swamp”), and to replace this division with a more radical and true one: the establishment in all its faces against the broad unity of all emancipatory forces.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The fact that Bernie stole the show at Biden’s inauguration, and that the image of him just sitting there instantly became an icon, indicates that the true world spirit of our time was there, in his lone figure, embodying skepticism about the fake normalization staged in the ceremony. The celebration of his image expressed that there is still hope for our cause; people are aware that radical change is needed.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“In the domain of cinema, the latest example of such “classism” is Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020) which portrays the daily lives of our “nomadic proletarians,” workers without a permanent home who live in trailers and wander around from one temporary job to another. They are shown as decent people, full of spontaneous goodness and solidarity with each other, inhabiting their own world of small customs and rituals, enjoying their modest happiness (even the occasional work in an Amazon packaging center goes quite well . . . ). That’s how our hegemonic ideology likes to see workers—no wonder the movie was the big winner of the last Oscars. Although the lives depicted are rather miserable, we are bribed into enjoying the movie with the charming details of the workers’ specific way of life, the underlying message being: enjoy being a nomadic proletarian!”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The popular appeal of WSB means that millions of ordinary people, not just high-flying financial traders, can participate in it. A new front in America’s class war opened up. As Robert Reich tweeted: “So let me get this straight: Redditors rallying GameStop is market manipulation, but hedge fund billionaires shorting a stock is just an investment strategy?”141 Who would have expected this: a class war transposed into a conflict among stock investors and dealers themselves?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The irony is that Wall Street, the model of corrupted speculation and inside-trading, always by definition resisting state intervention and regulation, now opposes unfair competition and calls for state regulation . . . As for the accusation from Wall Street that Robinhood is a platform for gambling, suffice it to recall that Elizabeth Warren repeatedly accused hedge funds of using the stock market “like their personal casino.” In short, WSB is doing openly and legally what Wall Street does in secret and illegally.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Yes, the January activities of the WSB participants were nihilist, but this nihilism is immanent to the stock exchange itself; it is already at work in Wall Street. To overcome this nihilism, we will have to somehow move out of the stock-exchange game. The moment of socialism is lurking in the background, waiting to be seized, as cracks appear in the very center of global capitalism. Will this happen? Almost certainly not, but what should concern us is that the WSB crisis is another unexpected threat to a system already under attack from multiple sides (the pandemic, global warming, social protests . . . ), and this threat comes from the very heart of the system, not from outside. An explosive mixture is in the making, and the longer the explosion is postponed, the more devastating it could be.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion that shame for one’s country, not love of it, may be the true mark of belonging to it.154 A supreme example of such shame occurred back in 2014 when hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors bought an ad in the New York Times condemning what they referred to as “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine.”155 The statement read: “We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch.” Hopefully today, more Israelis will gather the courage to feel shame apropos the politics enacted by leaders such as Netanyahu and Trump on their behalf—not, of course, shame for being Jewish but, on the contrary, shame for what Israel’s policies in the West Bank are doing to the most precious legacy of Judaism itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Instead of a clear agent addressing demands to the state and thereby offering itself as a partner in dialogue, we get a polymorphous popular pressure, and what puts those in power in a panic is precisely that this pressure cannot be localized in a clear opponent but remains a version of what Antonio Negri calls “multitude.” If such a pressure expresses itself in concrete demands, these demands are not what the protest is really about . . . However, at some point, hysterical demands have to translate themselves into a political program (or they disappear).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Maybe what we are witnessing today, with “post-truth” politics, is the end of the entire idea of a true and authentic people’s will that is usually manipulated and misrepresented but for whose adequate representation we should strive. The way to beat Trumpian populism is not to claim that it doesn’t really stand for the people, and that the real people’s will should be allowed to express itself outside this populism. The very fact that people’s will can be “manipulated” in such a thorough way signals its fantasmatic character. In a Hegelian way, the critique of representation should thus be inverted into the critique of what representation is supposed to represent.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited government power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the smallholding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.166 And was it not the same in Egypt when the Arab Spring protests, with their demand for adequate political representation, overthrew the Mubarak regime and brought in democracy? But with democracy, those unrepresented went to vote and brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood, while the participants in the popular protests, mostly the educated middle-class youth, with their agenda of freedom, were marginalized.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today the problem of representation is exploding also in the developed Western countries. Whole strata don’t represent themselves—they even actively reject being represented since they perceive as fake the very form of representation—and when they mobilize it is under the banner of a populist leader.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“China after 1980, arguably the greatest economic success story in human history, where hundreds of millions were raised from poverty into middle-class existence. How did China achieve it? The twentieth-century Left was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics, and authoritarian-bureaucratic state power. What we get in today’s China is exactly the combination of these two features in its extreme form—a strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics—and this is the most efficient form of socialism today . . . But is this what I want?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder