Getting Lost
There is nothing arrogant
about mentioning ordinary people’s material concerns:
the poor have the right to do it,
and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices,
or suffering ‘whatever the price‘,
is as a rule the ideology of the privileged,
who are quite content to let the people
suffer for them.
So do I display a distrust in the people?
Yes, there is nothing non-communist in it.
‘People’ are an inconsistent multiplicity
capable of breathtaking acts of solidarity
that surprise cynical intellectuals,
but they can also get lost
In the lowest fascist passions.
—- excerpt, The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Zizek p. 92
The Saturday after Thanksgiving Thursday, decided to “sleep in” and arose later than usual. Somehow l am feeling in a fog, out of sync with my 
surroundings, while a steady rain falls outside. Life is complicated with many causes to an emotional state, the ‘affect’. What I must accept is the cause is, at best, only partially known. I’ll deal with what I know, what I can see, and trust that the rest, what is under-the-surface will take care of itself.
The quotation of today, from Slavoj Zizek reminds me that it is normal in life to be somewhat lost all of the time. We pretend that we know what we are doing. I run up the banner of civility, maintaining my social face, to sell the proposition that I am “ok,” that I am not inwardly terrified most of the time.
We are more alike than not. What I mean to say is that you and I confront the same demons of insecurity, of patterns of thought and action that obscure the way things are. We are lost, — pretending to “know the way.” Fortunate to be middle-class, possessing a iphone, and google maps notwithstanding, — we have never been more baffled, without our bearings, confused.
