Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek Page B

scientists are telling us is that passive smoking can be more dangerous than active smoking. I think today that the discourse of victimization is almost the predominant discourse when it says that everyone can be a victim of smoking or sexual harassment. Today we have an extremely narcissistic notion of personality.
    So this all adds up, I think, to an absolutely narcissistic economy. We can have sex, but not love, and no passionate attachment, and we need to keep an appropriate distance, and so on. We are really like the Roman Empire in the third–fourth century, when it was in decline. This is a very sad thing. This is why I like to quote the famous lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats, who was right in his diagnosis of the twentieth century. In his poem The Second Coming , he wrote: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Is this not a good description of today’s split between anemic liberals and impassionate fundamentalists? Where do you find passion today in politics? Even though the so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalist is a disgrace to true fundamentalism, we can only find this passion with fundamentalists . The best are no longer able to fully engage themselves, while the worst engage in racist or religious fanaticism. This is what makes me sad.

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Dialectic of Liberal Superiority
    For another example of passion in political engagement and commitment, unlike the one of fundamentalists, I’m thinking of people like Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, who was assassinated. She was the one who took enormous risks to uncover the hidden stories of war in Chechnya and who opposed the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Do you think that courage is contagious? That many can be moved by the courage of Politkovskaya, for example? What role might such contagious courage play in social change, including revolution? Is there a source of some kind of seriousness or guidance – as we might see in Simone Weil or others?
    SŽ: First of all, I am against Putin. I don’t think that things are as clear as that. Of course it’s horrible what they did to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but he was no angel. You can’t become the richest man in Russia by being a humanist. Although I am intrigued by this person. I believe that Khodorkovsky tried to do better because he was probably intelligent, and he got the idea that if you organize it better for workers in the long term, it functions. Even the case of Alexander Litvinenko. It was of course horrible what the Russians did, but he wasn’t just a good, honest guy. There were different struggles and scandals on finding radioactivity on a fax machine, and poison, etc. Otherwise, I totally sympathize with Politkovskaya; I think all this has to come out.
    But what I don’t like is that you often find an aspect of satisfaction in saying: “Oh, poor Russia. But we know .… ” I always find it suspicious that, when you sympathize with freedom fighters in other countries, the conclusion is usually like this: “Look at those poor guys, but with us everything is okay.” If you take Stieg Larsson seriously, you can see strange things are also happening in our own countries.
    So you don’t even have to take enormous risks like Politkovskaya. From my experience of just a normal academic life – I don’t know how it is in Sweden, but I can tell you about the United States and here in Slovenia – there is so much conformism, back-stabbing, and plotting going on. What I’m saying is that if you are worried about honesty and want to fight for something big, don’t look for fights out there; you have enough fights and struggles here. I, of course, support them, but I just don’t like this liberal superiority .
    I also find this myth that the Putin regime is harsh but effective to be problematic. It is simply not true. He’s just the voice of the