Each A Weird Lunatic
…in his or her own way of course.
As you’d expect, I continue to read Slavoj Zizek — with more care the second time around. The European intellectual wrestles with the problem that confounds me: how to address a virulent ethnic hatred that matastasizes as a ravenous cancer in our society. Our President and his party seek their advantage to feed this fever.
Here is a quote from Zizek that caused me to pause long enough to write the words down.
The way to fight ethnic hatred effectively
is not through its immediate counterpart,
ethnic tolerance; on the contrary,
what we need
is even more hatred,
but the proper political hatred,
the hatred directed
at the common political enemy.
— excerpt The Courage of Hopelessness p. 174
What merits hate, full on, unconditional antipathy? That is not the immigrant, those who happen to be of a different racial, of cultural heritage than myself. What is the political common enemy, the threat to every life, the general darkness that threatens us all?
An idea about that is gradually coming into focus…….
And what about the weirdness, the truly difficult differences in life-ways and outlook between myself and “the other” immigrant? Zizek offers this from G. K. Chesterson:
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creature moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.
— excerpt The Everlasting Man, G. K Chesterton chapt. 1-i
And these followup lines from Zizek:
We are all, each in our own way, weird lunatics…..
To go through a zero-point of ‘de-naturalization’ if we want to engage in a long and difficult process of universal solidarity, of constructing a Cause that is strong enough to transverse different communities. …if we want this we have to become universal in ourselves, relate ourselves as universal by acquiring a distance toward our life-world. Hard and painful work is needed. p. 181
THE TASK IS THEREFORE not to idealize refugees but to accept them the way they are, equal to ourselves not in their humanity, but in their unprincipled opportunism and petty perversions. p. 183
2 thoughts on “Each A Weird Lunatic”
I tend to do two things when it comes to this kind of analysis: I over simplify and, at the same time, I overcomplicate the scenario of the human condition.
On one hand it seems that an understanding of where we are as a species is fairly straightforward. At least to me, I view our situation as having been brought about by a sense of self-importance and entitlement and that we have become blind to our place within nature. The gist of the a portion of the book of Genesis tells us that an ostensibly omniscient, magical being has given us dominion over all of the earth and the animals around us. From that perspective alone, we’re screwed, and so is the planet that is our only home. No species is above the laws of nature, but we somehow have come to believe that those laws do not apply to Homo sapiens.
And yet, our consciousness, our needs, our narcissism, and our bloviated self-importance are manifest from a complex array of nuanced behavioral patterns set in motion thousands of years before recorded history. There are no set of rules that we follow (aside of religious dogma which really has little bearing on our overall behavior) and no self-governing manifesto adhered to by all members of our species, so we make stuff up as we move through space and time. Each one of us brings our own highly subjective perspective to bear on the philosophy we subscribe to during the course of our lifetime. We are the ubiquitous herd of cats, each one of us with an individual agenda, so how can we possibly come to an agreement about our place in nature?
Perhaps the cataclysmic disaster of climate will snap us out of our collective stupor, or maybe the realization that we must come together to save our souls … — … will be too little too late. Unfortunately, even for us older folks, I fear we will find out the answer to this query in our lifetimes, for the future is now and we have no Plan B to fall back on.
…ubiquitous herd of cats.
The phrase is an apt descriptive metaphor. Cats are thoroughly domesticated, unable to fend for themselves when the bowl of milk is not proffered when hunger is knocking. A wild animal would fend for itself, taking enough to meet it’s needs. Our only hope is to break our isolation and begin to verbalize the observed devastation which is at the root of our civilization/way-of-life and make preparations to live differently. Some will fight to keep the old ways. But not all.