Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

at the end of this road is the ecological utopia of humanity in its entirety repaying its debt to Nature for all its past exploitation. In effect, is not the idea of “recycling” part of the same pattern as that of restitution for past injustices? The underlying utopian notion is the same: the system which emerged through violence should repay its debt in order to regain an ethico-ecological balance. The ideal of “recycling” involves the utopia of a self-enclosed circle in which all waste, all useless remainder, is sublated: nothing gets lost, all trash is re-used. It is at this level that one should make the shift from the circle to the ellipse: already in nature itself, there is no circle of total recycling, there is un-usable waste. Recall the methodical madness of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” in which everything, up to and including the prisoners’ excrement and urine, should be put to further use. Regarding urine, Bentham proposed the following ingenious solution: the external walls of the cells should not be fully vertical, but lightly curved inside, so that, when the prisoners urinated on the wall, the liquid would drip downwards, keeping the cells warm in winter . . . This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of a radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather that of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no purpose.

       The Utopia for a Race of Devils

      This, finally, brings us to the core of the liberal utopia. For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is “the crime which contains all crimes,” the mother of all crimes—it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of “moral temptation”: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered “realistic,” taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations. Here the market is exemplary: human nature is egotistic, there is no way to change it—what is needed is a mechanism that makes private vices work for the common good (the “Cunning of Reason”). In his “Perpetual Peace” essay, Kant provided a precise formulation of this key feature:

      many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will established on reason, which is revered even though impotent in practice. Thus it is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man’s power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.

      The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.” A problem like this must be capable of solution; it does not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men but only that we should know the mechanism of nature in order to use it on men, organizing the conflict of the hostile intentions present in a people in such a way that they must compel themselves to submit to coercive laws. Thus a state of peace is established in which laws have force.³⁹

      One should pursue this line of argument to its conclusion: a fully self-conscious liberal should intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the good of others, aware that the most effective way to act for the common good is to follow one’s private egotism. The inevitable obverse of the Cunning of Reason motto “private vices, common good” is “private goods, common disaster.” There is in liberalism, from its very inception, a tension between individual freedom and objective mechanisms which regulate the behavior of a crowd—early on, Benjamin Constant clearly formulated this tension: everything is moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as individual, but merely a cog in a machine when part of a crowd. Nowhere is the legacy of religion clearer: this, exactly, is the paradox of Predestination, of the unfathomable mechanism of Grace embodied, among other places, in market success. The mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits.

      The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism and political liberalism. Jean-Claude Michéa perspicuously links this to two meanings of the term “right”: the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense of human rights—often its sole remaining raison d’être. Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin.

      Today, the meaning of “liberalism” moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.). In the US, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Democrats in the second. The point, of course, is that while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the “true” liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by proposing a kind of “higher” dialectical synthesis, or “avoid the confusion” by making a clear distinction between the two senses of the term. The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that “liberalism” endeavors to designate, it is constitutive of the notion itself, so that this ambiguity, far from signaling a limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost “truth” of the notion of liberalism.

      Traditionally, each basic form of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other: liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces, while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values, and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpoint, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market (though less and less so, it is true, as Michéa notices) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders. (Half a century ago, the symptomatic exception was the unique Ayn Rand, who advocated both market liberalism and a full individualist egotism deprived of all traditional forms of morality concerning family values and sacrifice for the common good.) Today, however, we seem to be entering a new era in which it is possible for both aspects to be combined: figures such as Bill Gates, for instance, pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.

      Here, we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a “politics of the lesser evil,” its ambition is to bring about the “least worst society possible,” thus preventing a greater evil, since it considers any attempt to directly impose a positive good as the ultimate source of all evil. Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the others, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of terror (both the Jacobins and the Stalinists presupposed human virtue).⁴⁰ However, the liberal critique of the “tyranny of the Good” comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually replicates the very features of the enemy it claims to be fighting against. The global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds; its modest rejection of utopias ends with the imposition of its own market-liberal utopia which will supposedly