Tag: zizek

Philosophic Influences

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I just finished the writing and editorial parts of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It still needs cover art and some administrative odds and ends, but I’m taking a day for a breather to share something about myself and my worldview. For this, I share my philosophical influences and how they support my core insights. For dramatic effect, I’ll even try to weight them to 100 per cent, leaving an ‘others’ bucket for the unaccounted ones.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Obviously, this highly scientific accounting is about as useful as a Facebook survey or a fortune cookie, but it should reveal something. I have influences outside of philosophy, but I’ll limit this list at the start. The numbers don’t exactly add to 100% because there is a bit of cross-pollination, say, between Foucault and Nietzsche or Žižek and Hegel – or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.

Nietzsche (≈18)

Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution – and he didn’t play by the old rules – but they are wrong. He contributes value-creation, anti-moralism, perspectivism, the critique of ressentiment, the demolition of universals.

Nietzsche sits at the centre of the blast radius. Everything else is shrapnel. If there’s a thinker who detonated the Enlightenment’s pretensions more elegantly, I’ve not met them. He showed us that values are forged, not found; that morality is a genealogy of grievances; that certainty is the last refuge of the timid. In other words, he cleared the ground so the rest of us could get to work without tripping over Kantian furniture. But after Nietzsche’s uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.

Foucault (≈20%)

Foucault supplies the schematics. Where Nietzsche swung a hammer at the idols, Foucault identified the building codes. He mapped power as a set of subtle, everyday enchantments. He showed how ‘knowledge’ is simply what a society rewards with credibility. He is the patron saint of anyone who suspects normality is an instrument, not a neutral state of affairs. The world looks different once you see the disciplinary fingerprints on everything.

Derrida (≈10%)

Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isn’t a system; he’s an escape artist. And frankly, you can’t write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.

Late Wittgenstein (≈15%)

The quiet structural pillar. If Derrida is the saboteur, Wittgenstein is the carpenter who informs you that the house was never stable anyway. Meaning-as-use, language-games, the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems: his later work underwrites virtually every modern suspicion about fixed categories and timeless essences. He doesn’t shout; he shrugs – and everything collapses neatly.

Rorty (≈5%)

Rorty replaces metaphysical longing with cultural pragmatism. He teaches you to stop hunting for capital-T Truth and instead track the vocabularies we actually live in. He’s the friendly voice whispering, ‘You don’t need foundations. You need better conversations’. His influence is felt mostly in the tone of my epistemic cynicism: relaxed rather than tragic. Besides, we disagree on the better conversations bit.

Geuss (≈4%)

If Rorty makes you light-footed, Geuss reminds you not to float off into abstraction entirely. He is the critic of moralism par excellence, the man who drags philosophy kicking and screaming back into politics. Geuss is the voice that asks, ‘Yes, but who benefits?’ A worldview without him would be a soufflé.

Heidegger (≈6%)

Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood – the existential scaffolding. His political judgment was catastrophic, of course, but the ontological move away from detached subjectivity remains invaluable. He gives the metaphysics a certain grain.

Existentialists: Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus (≈6%)

They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They don’t define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.

Žižek, Latour, Baudrillard (≈2% combined)

These three are my licensed provocateurs.

  • Žižek exposes how ideology infiltrates desire.
  • Latour dismantles the Nature/Society binary with glee.
  • Baudrillard whispers that representation ate reality while we were looking at our phones.

They’re trickster figures, not architects.

Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (≈1% combined)

These are the seasonings.

  • Hume is the Scottish acid bath under every epistemic claim.
  • Putnam gives internal realism its analytic passport.
  • Dennett offers mechanistic metaphors you can steal even when you disagree.
  • Kant and Hegel hover like compulsory ghosts.
  • Rawls remains decorative parsley: included for completeness, consumed by none.

The Others Bucket (≈5%)

The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory – the bit fortune cookies never warn you about.

Enfin

Obviously, these ratios are more for humour than substance, but these are the thinkers I return to — the ones whose fingerprints I keep discovering on my own pages, no matter how many years or detours intervene.

Perhaps more revealing are those who didn’t make the guest list. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain outside, smoking in the cold. The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and his well-meaning self-help descendants, also failed to RSVP. In truth, I admire the posture but have little patience for the consolations – especially when they become the emotional training wheels of neoliberalism.

And then, of course, the Enlightenment patriarchs: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the rest of the constitutional furniture. I acknowledge their historical necessity the way one acknowledges plumbing – grateful it exists, uninterested in climbing inside the pipes. Rousseau, admittedly, I tolerate with something approaching affection, but only because he never pretended to be tidy.

I forgot Descartes, Voltaire, and Pascal, but it’s too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors – casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.

If anyone mentions another one – Spinoza comes to mind – I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Refeshing, Žižek

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What a relief. After trudging through a couple of so-called ‘popular’ books, it’s refreshing to read something that actually reflects the complexity of reality.

The first essay in Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is titled Progress and Its Vicissitudes. It opens with a nod to the opening scene of The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan. But Žižek, as always, takes it further. He unearths something far more sinister in the magician’s sleight of hand—something unsettlingly perceptible to the young girl who witnesses the trick.

Life isn’t always what it seems on the surface. It isn’t as neat or digestible as our perceptions make it out to be. Žižek embarks on a scathing critique of the concept of progress, dismantling its conventional interpretations and exposing the often-overlooked consequences that lurk beneath its glossy exterior. He unravels the paradoxes and failures inherent in the notion of progress, urging readers to rethink their blind faith in the idea of a linear march towards a utopian future.

Defining ‘progress,’ he argues, is akin to laying claim to the future. But whose future? And at what cost? He interrogates the competing visions that shape human possibility, questioning whether, in the face of our cascading ecological, social, and political crises, things can actually improve—and what ‘better’ even means. He skewers various ideologies—neoliberalism, populism, and the self-improvement industrial complex—for their roles in manipulating and distorting the very concept of progress.

From a postmodernist perspective, Žižek’s analysis aligns with the scepticism towards grand narratives and universal truths that define postmodern thought. He deconstructs the monolithic idea of progress, revealing it as a construct that conveniently conceals underlying power structures and exclusions. By exposing the ‘squashed dead birds’—the inevitable collateral damage of progress—he underscores just how arbitrary and manufactured our notions of advancement really are.

Moreover, Žižek’s critique echoes the postmodernist fixation on desire, denial, and disavowal. He examines how different visions of progress systematically exclude or sacrifice certain elements and how these dynamics manifest across cultural phenomena, from Hollywood blockbusters to decolonisation movements. His analysis reinforces the postmodernist conviction that meanings are never fixed—they are fluid, contested, and often riddled with contradiction.

In the end, Against Progress is not just a critique—it’s an invitation. An invitation to abandon the comforting illusion of an inevitable march towards something better and to face the messy, contingent reality of human existence head-on.

The Greatest Loss in American History: Donald Trump Wins (And Loses) the Presidency

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I couldn’t resist posting this unedited from ChatGPT. Here’s what led to it: I just finished Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Fisher mentioned the 1974 Warren Beatty film The Parallax View. I generally don’t connect well with film or video as media, but I stashed the title in my memory. A few hours later, I read an article mentioning the film, with the claim, “Of everything lost in the age of streaming, no film genre casualty is as regrettable — or as ripe for a comeback — as the paranoid political thriller.”

Rather than trying to enjoy the film as a whole, I decided to concentrate on the plot and meta-massaging. As expected, I didn’t like the movie, but I understand why Fisher mentioned it. It renders rather like a weak tea version of a Kafka story. Unlike more contemporary fare, it’s a classic work of postmodernism, having no resolution.

After watching it, I engaged with Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB for reviews and context before prompting ChatGPT.

Asking about the film itself, this was the tail end of its response:

Final Verdict: A Masterclass in Hopelessness

The Parallax View is a film where the good guys don’t win—because there are no good guys, only the powerful and the powerless. It remains a defining entry in the “paranoid cinema” of the 70s, alongside The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor. What makes it terrifying is not that it suggests a world of conspiracies, but that it implies such conspiracies don’t need to be hidden—because no one can stop them.

Then I asked what Žižek thought about it, but it turns out that he had written about a book with the same title. When I asked about Fisher, it:

Mark Fisher, in contrast to Žižek’s often bombastic and dialectically acrobatic style, wrote with a sharper, more melancholic, yet deeply incisive tone.

Finally, I posed this query: I recently read Capitalist Realism. Although penned during the 2007-08 financial meltdown and released in 2009, it feels as relevant today as then. In fact, it seems to have foreshadowed the time between.

It’s reply is this post—and without further comment…

And so, history lurches forward with all the grace of a three-legged cow on roller skates. Donald J. Trump, the billionaire reality TV star turned political apocalypse, has once again won the presidential vote of the United States of America—only to lose the presidency to Kamala Harris. If that sentence gave you an aneurysm, congratulations, you’re now officially in 2025.

How did we get here? More importantly, why does this make absolutely no sense? Ah, but sense, dear reader, is an antiquated relic of a bygone era, much like democracy, coherent election results, and the idea that facts matter.

A Triumph for the Ages (Sort of)

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump won the popular vote. That’s what his supporters will scream into the void—or at least into their social media echo chambers where dissent is met with a virtual Second Amendment response. The red-capped faithful, still clutching their tattered “Stop the Steal” banners from the last electoral circus, are convinced that this was finally their moment of redemption.

Except, well… he lost.

Enter Kamala Harris, the political equivalent of cold toast, somehow managing to slide into the Oval Office despite Trump’s “win.” The courts, the states, the Electoral College, and whatever eldritch horror lurks beneath the Capitol all conspired—again!—to keep The Donald out of power. Or so the narrative goes.

The Electoral College Strikes Again

Ah, the Electoral College. America’s favourite 18th-century fever dream. Once again, this labyrinthine system of delegate-wrangling has managed to produce a result that defies logic, mathematics, and possibly the laws of physics. Trump, against all odds (and against, presumably, some very sweaty legal advisors), has pulled off the impossible: winning while losing.

Some claim voter suppression, others cry fraud, and a few brave souls are out there trying to explain complex election mechanics to an audience that still thinks “covfefe” was a divine prophecy. But the reality is simpler: Trump, like a political Schrödinger’s cat, is simultaneously victorious and defeated. He has transcended the normal bounds of electoral outcomes, achieving a state of quantum presidency, neither fully here nor fully gone.

What Happens Next?

Riots? Lawsuits? A new line of Trump-branded commemorative “I Won Again!” hats? Place your bets, because at this stage, America is basically one large, over-budget reality show and no one knows what the next episode holds.

For Kamala Harris, the challenge is clear: govern a nation where half the country believes she stole the election, and the other half is still googling “How does the Electoral College work?” As for Trump, he will do what he does best—declare victory, launch a thousand lawsuits, and, inevitably, turn the entire thing into a business opportunity.

And so, dear reader, the United States stumbles forward, democracy battered but still standing, a house divided but too stubborn to fall. Until next time, buckle up—it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Happiness is for Opportunists

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Happiness was never important.
The problem is that we don’t know what we really want.
What makes us happy is not to get what we want.
But to dream about it.
Happiness is for opportunists.
So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself.
We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street.
What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog.
I think we should say something similar about happiness.
If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid.
Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.

— Slavoj Žižek (Guardian Web Chat, 6 October 2014 (revised 8 October 2014))

I agree with most of Žižek’s sentiment here. I dissect it into four elemental blocks, three of which I care about.

Žižek talks Happiness

Element One

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists.

Seeking happiness is similar to the enterprise seeking growth. Like growth, happiness is an outcome or a side effect. There is no sense in pursuing it for its own sake.

Herbert Simon noted in the mid-1950s that people satisfice—a portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing—rather than optimise. Behavioural economics has run with this in the past few decades.

The challenge is that people don’t know what they want, so they are easy prey for marketers hoping to attract their interest. These are the opportunists.

Most people tend to behave like they are on rudderless ships easily buffeted this way and that. Easily lured by the call of the sirens, the call of marketers and other hucksters peddling happiness. There is the occasional Odysseus cum Ulysses, the metaphor for restraint—but not of self-control because even Homer realised how ridiculous of a notion that is.

Self-help and fashion industries extract billions from not-quite happy consumers who buy into the false promises and hype. Social media is toxic with these same promises, like the life coach earning some 30K a year dispensing advice.

You need to dream. Dream big. Such and such and so and so had dreams, and look at them. If they didn’t have a dream, they wouldn’t have attained whatever it was they had dreamed. These other losers? They don’t have the right dreams or they aren’t big enough. The universe isn’t going to pay attention to small dreams. You need to attract its attention. Perhaps, these other people just don’t know how to dream. They aren’t doing it right. But I can teach you how to dream for a few shekels.

The problem is that research shows that happiness—by whatever measure—is fleeting. And it fleets fast—usually a matter of weeks. Some people have dispositions that facilitate their happiness. It just takes less for these people to be content. Perhaps they define happiness subjectively as being content. Maybe your threshold is too high. Maybe they are kidding themselves. Does it matter? Perhaps they are not comparing themselves with others, the root of unhappiness.

John Lennon penned a lyric, dream, dream away. What more can I say?

Element Two

So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself.

I disagree with Žižek here, but perhaps I am deluding myself. I don’t subscribe to the notions of self or of identity. These are fictions. Finding oneself is just as much a distraction as anything else. You might do this, read books, write blogs, play piano, play cricket, learn Tai Chi, or drink chai tea.

This is where I find myself at odds with Existentialist—the philosophers who admit that there is no meaning to life but who insist people must make it, e.g., Sartre with politics, Camus with Art, or Kierkegaard with his personal religious experience.

Element Three

We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog. I think we should say something similar about happiness.

I’ve got nothing to write here, which is why I left it out of the graphic. Go buy yourself a dog.

Element Four

If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.

This is an obvious nod to Nietzsche and his master and her aesthetic. Masters have their own ethics and outlook, but the pursuit or maintenance and appearance of power are more important than happiness. The herd, which is to say most people, seek the elusive goal of happiness.

Žižek’s Essentialism

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So, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole. Again. This time, it’s Žižek. Again. I’ve still not read any of Žižek’s own work, but people mention him often and he is a shameless self-promoter. In this video clip, he responds to whether gender is a social construct. Unfortunately, he conflates gender with sex, and his examples cite transsexuals not transgenders.

sex is about biological sex assignment

To set the stage, sex is about biological sex assignment—the sex category you are assigned into at birth: male, female, or other for some 1.8%. This is a simplistic categorisation: penis = male; vagina = female; both or neither: rounding error. In some cases, a decision is made to surgically conform the child to either male or female and ensure through prophylactic treatment that this isn’t undone hormonally in adolescence.

gender is about identity

Gender is about identity. As such, it is entirely a social construct. All identity of this nature is a function of language and society. In this world—in the West—, females wear dresses (if they are to be worn at all) and males don’t—kilts notwithstanding. In this world, sex and gender have little room for divergence. so the male who identifies as this gender (not this sex) is ostracised.

The example I usually consider first is the comedian Eddie Izzard—a cross-dresser. He’s probably a bad example because he does identify as a male. He just doesn’t wish to be constrained by male role restrictions and wants to wear the makeup that’s been reserved for women in the West at this time.

Žižek eventually gets to an argument about essentialism—so we’re back at Sorites paradoxes and Theseus again. At the start, I could argue that the sexual distinction has few meaningful contexts. For me, unless I am trying to have sex and/or procreate, the distinction is virtually meaningless. For others, only procreation remains contextually relevant. In this technological world, as Beauvoir noted in the late 1940s, strength differentials are not so relevant. End where they are, sex is not the deciding factor—it’s strength.

Žižek’s contention seems to be that the postmoderns (or whomever) disclaim essentialism in favour of constructivism but then resolve at essentialism as a defence because ‘now I am in the body originally intended’. I’ll argue that this is the logic employed by the person, but this person is not defending some academic philosophical position. They are merely engaging in idiomatic vernacular.

I am not deeply familiar with this space, and if the same person who is making a claim against essentialism is defending their actions with essentialism, then he’s got a leg to stand on. As for me, the notions of essentialism and constructivism are both constructed.

Competition and Jordan Peterson

Posted in equality, morality, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , 28 Comments

Jordan Peterson was interviewed by Joe Rogan, where he discussed gender and competition. I am not going to address his gender issues, but I’ll say something about competition. I’ll also ignore his stance that the world is ‘functioning unbelievably well, even though it has its problems’. He gets to competition through some comments on equality.


[Focus] on winning the largest number of games across the span of a lifetime.

Jordan Peterson

Firstly, Peterson differentiates equal playing fields from equal outcomes, a favoured Conservative talking point slash whipping boy. He then sets up a strawman argument relating to people favouring the ‘best of the best’ (which is to say, their personal favourites, I suppose) in lieu of exploring the vast universe of music available on the myriad streaming services, the result being that in the aggregate, the preferred acts make more money through this competition. Of course, this is the result of preference theory, which produces different outcomes based on inputs such a time and place, fads and trends, and the ‘winner’ is the one who attains the most listens.

There’s no accounting for taste.

Having had worked in Entertainment for years, I realised early on that the correlation between talent and financial success was fairly weak. In fact, I had several conversations with artists who felt ‘guilty’ for their commercial success over people they deemed more talented. This is a fundamental problem with market systems, the value calculus is influenced by what Keynes termed ‘animal spirits‘. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste.

Peterson and Rogan both agree that competition is healthy and necessary, but they don’t define the scale and scope, so they sacrifice a participation trophy red herring on the altar.

Peterson does come back to discuss scope within a timeline of a lifespan, that a single game is less important than a championship—and, apparently, there is more than one championship. What never happens is a definition of what the rules of the game are or how you know you’ve won. I suppose, that’s a relative concern. They also don’t provide any guidance on where to set the dial between competition and cooperation.

If you are trying to get a job versus even some anonymous pool of applicants, then you’ve won this match. I see this as an evolutionary game. I remember a story by Clarissa Pinkola Estes where she tells about a guy who had been climbing the corporate ladder for decades, and when he got near the top, he came to the realisation that he had it up against the wrong building. Perhaps what he thought was a worthy goal (say acquisition of money) was in conflict with some higher ethical goals or deeper friendships.


It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

From what I can tell, Peterson is guided by a sense the virtue ethics are the way to go, and, judging from this interview, he’s more than just a bit of a Consequentialist. But it’s clear he is no Deontologist. Case in point, he claims that the adage, ‘it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game’ is a ‘sentiment confuses children’.

Play well with others.

He ends by saying that if you learn the kindergarten lesson to play well with others, you’ll temper your winning or redefine winning within the context, and somehow your goal should be ‘focusing on winning the largest number of games across the span of a lifetime’.

At the end of all of this—given Peterson’s pathological worldview—, it’s no wonder he’s so defensive, combative, and irascible: he is driven to win, and he thinks it matters. And it’s abundantly clear that he hasn’t learnt his own kindergarten lesson: Play well with others.

And now for something completely different…

I chose the cover image of this post on the merits of the upcoming competition between Peterson and Žižek on 19 April.