Don’t you tell me what to think! A few thoughts on Zizek’s last oeuvre

So I’m back from the Quaker meeting. Today, a woman stood up and ministered in the following way: “What I really like in Quakers is that they don’t force me to believe things that I don’t believe in, like, you know, God having a white beard and Jesus physically rising from the dead”.

Today was a bit of a popcorn fest, which in Quaker parlance means that plenty of the attendees pop up with something to say. About six or seven people shared similar views: “yeah, I hate it when Christians from other denominations tell me what to think”.

I hadn’t been to a Quaker meeting in a while and the thing that struck me most is that they haven’t moved one bit in the last six months. Six months ago, a number of spiritual refugees from various denominations were saying the exact same things and everybody was nodding along.

The first thing that came to my mind was “Gawd their theology is bad!”. See, they don’t really mean it with God having a white beard and all that. But these cute little childish tropes hide the fact that they don’t know that much more.

I know it because I do it too. Pretending to be more stupid than I am is a way to communicate to others to please not probe me too much on a given topic. Behind those sibylline remarks is a gapping hole of misunderstanding and indifference. As someone who is sometimes involved in other expressions of church I resent the placation of their indifference. Making stupid comments about the white beard of God is like shouting to my face: I couldn’t care less what Christians believe, I’ve never bothered finding out, and that’s why I’m here among you tolerant Quakers who let me believe what I want.

The striking thing, though, is the amount of emotion that was involved in these "I want to believe what I want" statements. Seriously, the woman was feeling so strongly, it was almost like a tantrum: “Let me believe what I want, don’t tell me what to think, don’t tell me what to think!”. I did not argue with her, but I would like to venture the thought that in fact, she did yearn for something more. She has spent the last two years of her life becoming free, and now what? Maybe she needs to become freer still and self-actualize more or some other crap along these lines.

One of the passage that struck me most in Zizek’s tome is the passage about the fascination that the “free” individuals have for what they think is real faith. I went through a bit of a revival of my own faith last year. I’d found some folks whose thoughts echoed mine and I tried to be faithful to that truth. I regularly bawled people out on things faith-related. And boy did they love it!

After a short while, I began to feel a bit reflexive about this parasitic relationship. I wondered how much of me was morphing into a poser. We were parasiting each other, they consumed my enthusiasm while I consumed their fascination. In a cultural critique of Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”, Zizek describes this parasitic relationship in those terms:

What if Stalker, far from directly believing, manipulates, feigns belief, in order to fascinate the intellectuals he brings to the Zone, arousing in them the prospect of belief? What if far from being a direct believer, he assumes the role of a subject supposed to believe for the eyes of the decadent intellectual observers? What if the truly naive position is that of the intellectual spectator, of his fascination with Stalker's naïve belief? And what if the same goes for Tarkovsky himself, who —far from being the authentic Orthodox believer in contrast to Western skepticism— acts out this role in order to fascinate the Western intellectual public?

Hell, I’m not a super believer! My grandmother died of one of the most horrible degenerative illnesses on the planet. And I’m not impressed with tsunamis and earthquakes that kill children in agonising pain while God doesn’t seem to lift a finger. I believe against reason, in an experiential sort of way. One of my favourite blogger lost her husband to aneurism a couple of years ago. She is 40 and has three children; one of them was a baby when his father died. She hopes that there is no God. She really hopes that there is no God, because if God is real she hates Him so bad she could spend eternity hating Him. She’d rather there was no god than a God she would loathe. I can understand that.

And still faith fascinates. It fascinates precisely the free individuals who endlessly reassert that nobody has a right to tell them what to do. It fascinates those who are passionate about being left to think for themselves. I didn’t realise how prevalent this ideology was until about a month ago, when I got into a very heated argument on yet another blog. On that occasion, I got in touch with the blogger telling her that it was irresponsible to depict a victim of rape liking what was happening to her, especially on a mainstream support (she was writing a series of short stories to be published at a later stage, and this was one of them). She got back to me with the now habitual stance of “DON’T YOU DARE TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!”.

She asked me to preface all of my comments with a statement sounding like this: “personally, I think that it could be perceived as offensive by some people, but that’s just me. Other people think differently and, at the end of the day, everybody is entitled to their own opinions”. I disagreed. I reclaimed the right to speak in absolutes and reasserted that what she was doing was objectively wrong. She then proceeded to reframe me as if I was a five year-old who had yet to learn the basic principles of tolerance and anger management.

That’s it. Nobody can speak in absolutes anymore. In this postmodern world speaking in absolutes is a form of “terrorism”. Terror is wanting someone else to change the way they think. Zizek illustrates this point with the movie "Derailed" in which Jennifer Aniston tells Clive Owen that she doesn’t just want him to do the dishes, she wants him to want to do the dishes. That’s the way in which Zizek understands terror.

The book goes on reviewing historical accounts of terror, particularly Robespierre’s views. Robespierre wanted everyone to subscribe to revolutionary ideals. He wanted people to want to be revolutionaries. When he failed, that’s when the real physical terror entered the picture. Zizek thinks that all revolutionary violence is a failure. A failure to make people want to be revolutionaries. This is also the failure of Che Guevara.

Still Zizek argues that "while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity [...] this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection and it is crucial to isolate this moment".

So I got interested. Every time I go to church I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite. That’s why I’m interested in those “God against the world” theories. Maybe there’s a revolutionary movement somewhere that would turn me into something less hypocritical. So I googled “revolutionary ethos” hoping to find some bullet points that would tell me what the revolutionary ethos was. I found nothing. Noone was describing a revolutionary ethos anywhere. Noone was laying out how they were being faithful to the Event of their encounter with a life-changing phenomenon.

So now, what are we left with? The freedom to think what we want, or the terror to tell others what to think? Now, whenever I think of the first option, I’ll think of that woman in the Quaker meeting who’s been trying to be free from people telling her what to think. I’ll remember the fact that she’s been saying this for years. I’ll remember that she was nearly in tears with frustration: “don’t tell me what to think, don’t tell me what to think!”.

Truth of the matter she is ultimately disempowered. She is alone, imprisoned in the single cell of her freedom to think. One of my favourite quotes by Stanley Hauerwas is a passage in which he has a go at the movie "Dead Poets Society" and argues that the freedom to think what you want is a form of oppression too:

It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students' (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves. This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. (From this website)

We gave up the terror of telling people what to think. How many times have we heard the cliché that we can’t change people, it’s got to come from them? So we told them nothing. We hoped that they would find the commitment to justice within their own heart. And they didn’t. They just got more self-absorbed. Bring back “terrorism”! Tell people what to think! Sure, this might raise a few knee-jerk reactions. But ideas take time to mature. This is not a call for everyone to mindlessly follow their leaders. This is an appeal for the terrorism of absolutes. Zizek wants to be able to talk in absolutes again.