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It’s been a little while – I had a daughter four days after the last post here, so I’ve been very distracted for obvious reason. Nevertheless, let’s continue.

In Part 7, Zizek continues his point that, to the fundamentalist, what we would call “belief” is in fact “knowledge” to them, in that they have not even a sliver of doubt about the veracity of the claims.

He talks about Catholic priests and pedophilia, but I don’t consider the point salient, so I don’t really have an interest in discussing.

Zizek then makes a point about Land Rovers in his country being driven from the suburbs to the city (whereas we had Hummers in the United States). These vehicles are not bought for utility, but rather to make a statement. Similarly, Hegel, for Zizek, is talking about this relationship with regards to the “spirit” of the state. In fact, Zizek tells us that Hegel is being very materialistic here, by saying that the state isn’t just a tool but rather that it is a statement; that rituals (and perhaps jingoism) are the “self-consciousness” of the state not as a supernatural spirit but (in my words) as an “emergent phenomena”. Thus, while government might be a tool to make decisions for a nation, things like inaugurations, mottos, anthems, and seals are a statement about the nature and “persona”, if you will, of the state.

This concludes Zizek’s lecture, which also concludes most of my interest in the video series. What follows is commentary by Dr. Cornel West, and then a Q&A with Zizek and West. I do love Cornel West, but I don’t think he says anything, in these videos, that is pertinent to my topic here – belief, existential crisis, and post-modernism. However, since there’s a sprinkling of interesting comments in the remaining videos, I’ll do one final post to summarize the remaining videos later.

I’ve done 6 parts of the Ignorance of Chicken video analysis, but now we come to the meaty bits, which get their own post. So, if you haven’t read the other parts – no worries! This part is written so I can just point you to it and hope you get my overall point.

So let’s begin my thesis with Zizek’s thesis:

Paraphrased, there is a function of ideology where you are not aware of your own beliefs. This is contrary to our common understanding of ideology, where we see the ideological mind as hyperaware of its beliefs. Instead, we are hedonists and nihilists, and thus, in order for an ideology to survive, it must not be taken seriously by its believers. The believer must have a distance from his or her beliefs.

To elaborate further, belief in a God is totally absurd given the world we live in. Belief in a god is absurd because bad things happen to good people, because nature kills without feeling or fairness, because no one has documented a real “water into wine” miracle in a world full of cameras, et cetera. I posit, then, that most believers do not believe because in their “heart” – or rather, their subconscious mind – they know that to “have faith” or “truly believe” is to affirmatively claim that the absurd is true, and furthermore it means that they affirm that the absurd article of faith is as true as a proven fact of science.

Zizek points to the attempts to humanize people (or their attempts to humanize themselves) by describing themselves in the most mundane ways to distance themselves from being perceived as ideological fanatics. In this way, being a “true believer” is seen as shocking and problematic. We don’t value fundamentalism in our modern Western culture. Again, we’re post-modernists and nihilists in our subconscious - the fundamentalist, to us, is the model of insanity.

But, ironically, fundamentalism shares something with cynicism. Zizek points out that cynics and post-modernists don’t believe in ideological articles of faith, obviously. But he says that fundamentalists also don’t believe. This isn’t a paradox – rather, the fundamentalists accept absurd articles of faith as basic facts. For them, articles of faith are treated like knowledge, and thus, they don’t need to assert that God exists, or that Christ died and rose from the dead – these are simple facts of the universe.

In this, a true fundamentalist is nothing like a believer. To the fundamentalist, the claims of their faith are just like my knowledge of math. “2+2=4″ is equivalent to “The Bible is the divine word of God.” So then, a true fundamentalist sees the world just as a cynic does – they just disagree at a very basic level about what “the facts” are.

Now we get to the crux of issues in our culture and – especially – in our politics. I’m sure I will expand on this a lot in later entries, but let’s begin here.

It doesn’t start with Lee Atwater, but let’s begin with him anyway. Lee Atwater was a political figure who many would call diabolical. Here I would recommend the documentary “Boogie Man,” available on Netflix instantly (note: Netflix isn’t paying me). Lee Atwater’s attitude was “Perception is reality.” Does that sound, perhaps, like a man consumed by post-modern thought? So, Atwater takes this philosophy and applies it to politics. As a campaign manager and strategist, he makes up stories and floats them out to the press through third parties.  The documentary can give you the specifics, but, for instance, Atwater was the man responsible for the infamous “Willy Horton” ads against Dukakis. In our case, let me explain a totally fictional example.

Let’s say Atwater was trying to elect Mr. Adams whose opponent was Mr. Brown. You might find an official from the Adams campaign saying to the press, “Look, we can’t confirm the rumor that Mr. Brown arranged to have rape charges against his son dropped.” Now, has anyone said that Mr. Brown arranged to have the rape charges against his son dropped? No. Has anyone said that there were rape charges against Mr. Brown’s son in the first place? No. But here, it is paralepsis (meaning “mentioning by not mentioning”) that stands as an accusation. Of course, Lee Atwater didn’t invent this, but he used it to very great effect against a news-hungry press right when the 24-hour news cycle we know and love was barely in infancy. Atwater’s protege, Karl Rove, has been accused of using it to similar effect.

I don’t want to get too far into the political angle, so let me make my point.

Atwater’s tactic was to feed stories to the news media. The news media mostly knew these stories were fabrications or misdirections. They reported them anyway because it made for good television. The voter may have taken these stories as fact. But I think it’s more likely they knew these stories were fabrications and misdirections, but chose to believe them as a factual in order to justify a decision to vote along a predisposed party line. Was the public truly mislead? Possibly. But the more alarming possibility is that they knew they were being lied to, but chose to “believe” because it suited their mood or other predispositions.

(This goes along with my belief that most self-proclaimed “independents” are predisposed to one party or another, but self-report as “independent” because political independence aligns with some value they have.)

In other words, I think it’s possible Atwater wasn’t misleading as many people as we might assume. Rather, he was just giving the voters a reason to vote with their emotions instead of their brain.

In the United States, we know that many people vote against their own self-interests. Particularly, they vote for issues they feel something about instead of issues that might benefit their wallet or hometown. Why do they do this? The reasons are undoubtedly complex. But let’s examine something that goes alongside this – cultural conservatives “counter-movements” whose goal is to undo progressive change.

Did all of the people shouting for a birth certificate really believe that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.? No, of course not. In this, Lee Atwater was short-sighted. “Perception is reality.” Sure, but Atwater should have known better than anyone – in the mind of the post-modern American (who is blithely unaware that he is a post-modern nihilist) accusation is reality. In the mind of the post-modern American, “If I don’t like you and someone says you’re a murderer, then I will claim you’re a murderer, even if I don’t believe you’re a murderer.”

The problem in our culture, then, is not the prevalence of absurd beliefs but rather a persistent nihilism that allows for the insistent proclamation of absurd beliefs despite contrary evidence.

Polls show that 90% of Americans believe in God. I have come to tell you that such polls are illusions and the result of the self-reporting bias. Americans say they believe in God because that is what they are expected to say. That has become the jingoist line, and we have been touting it since we were overturning every rock to look for “the Commies.”

But it’s simply not so. I will agree that 90% of Americans will report that they believe in God. I will agree that most Americans even think they believe in God. But the modern world constantly assails that belief and tears it down. I think that an undercurrent of cultural relativism and moral relativism erodes at faith in essential goodness. I think that people realize, subconsciously, that science has produced technology beyond their comprehension and that the world is beyond their understanding.

You might say, “Why do so many people claim to believe in absurd things, then?” For the answer, let’s go back to Nietzsche. Nietzsche tells us that nihilism – the idea that there is no meaning in life and no purpose to existence – is a reaction to the decline of Christianity. I don’t agree exactly, so much as I believe it is a reaction to the technology and information revolutions we have experienced in the previous centuries and so acutely in recent decades. God can no longer dominate knowledge when we know so much about the universe that it takes a quarter of a lifetime to learn it. The average person does not understand time dilation, but the average person needs time dilation or else their GPS navigator would be constantly off course. That’s flabbergasting because they know that it’s true but they don’t understand why.

Regardless of the source, you have a generation of people who grew up on God who have been flooded with information thanks to radio, then television, then the internet. This information tells the Baby Boomers that other people don’t share their beliefs. Their “small town” values aren’t universal. What was once a world of insular communities with the occasional big city “melting pot” is now exposed to the radiation of a million cultures all at once. Sure, some of these people were hippies, some of them went to Woodstock, and those people probably fared better. But let’s face it – Woodstock wasn’t that big, and there were still plenty of people who went through the `60s without painting a single peace symbol.

Instead, the legions of small-town faithful are assailed by Nietzsche’s immortal words – “God is dead.” There is no meaning. There is no purpose. Their beliefs are just one set of a hundred million sets.

There are a few who confront this information with a calm shrug and no crisis. These are fundamentalists. But everyone else experiences that moment when they accept nihilism, and the world becomes an absurd farce. Nihilism is destructive in the absolute – if there is no God, if there is no objective truth, then there is nothing.

No one – and certainly not Nietzsche – could prepare an entire generation for coming face to face with nihilism. Nonetheless, nihilism made itself known, and integrated itself silently into American culture, always without announcing itself or describing itself to its adherents. Anarchists, objectivists, punk rockers – nihilists took many labels, but it is present in everything from a Pollock painting to a Scorsese movie.

And so the quiet revolution of the post-modern began, and everyone was in on it. Christianity in this country became nihilist without even knowing it. The rejection of the papacy transformed into the embrace of the Whatever You Like, as protestant Christian movements became a million shards where each church was a Vatican unto itself. You might call it “Cafeteria Christianity,” but at its heart it is nihilistic (and it is post-structuralist) – “it doesn’t matter what is written in the Bible, it only matters what I read from the Bible.” (For philosophy nerds, just apply Foucault to the Old Testament, and then tell me that modern Christianity isn’t post-structuralist.)

But the post-modern is utterly destructive. It offers only a problem and not a solution. Nietzsche knew this about nihilism – he wasn’t preaching nihilism as the new philosophy of our time, he was warning that it was the gnawing problem resulting from the decline of Christianity. Of course, he posited a few ideas, but I’ve always felt Nietzsche never really offered a strong solution to the problem of nihilism.

Now, in American culture, the reaction of the many to their frustrated search for meaning and their absurd articles of faith is not to reject that faith. Quite the opposite – they re-embrace their faith. Why? I would guess it is simply a human desire for consistency. It’s difficult to simply reject what one has become accustomed to, even if it is failing. This isn’t necessarily good or bad in nature – we probably should stick to tough spots in our relationships or marriages, for instance, because it should get better. Still, if it continues to fail despite effort, we are likely better off if we reject it. I would say the same is true for religion, of course.

But the believer doesn’t reject their religion when they first hear contradictory evidence. Instead, they tend to double-down. Again, this is a kind of human nature to rigorously defend what we are invested in. And again, the nature itself is not necessarily good or bad. Still, it does mean we tend to re-invest in a bad idea we’re already strongly invested in, which only means more destruction if the idea turns out to be totally wrong. How many times have you seen friends argue where one of them obstinately sticks to a stupid idea no matter what evidence is presented? Ask yourself – why do people do that? I think you’ll agree it’s simply that we protect our perceived investments.

Over time, as the individual is presented with evidence of meaninglessness, even their insistence in a belief in meaning becomes a burden. They are worn down to a nub. And this is where I get back to politics.

Politics is tantamount to a religion for many, many people. Both politics and religion become a part of an individual’s very identity. Now, for instance, if a person has a strong identity as a social conservative, they might oppose gay marriage. Then, they see the world around them rejecting that belief, and they have a crisis of faith. Instead of changing beliefs, they protect their investment and double-down. Now, not only do they oppose gay marriage, they are bitter about it. They are left floundering in a changing world, and they again confront that nihilistic shadow – “God is dead. There is no meaning. There is no purpose.” Their belief in the so-called “sanctity of marriage” becomes a part of them, and when that belief is torn down again and again, they see it as an attack on themselves. So they double-down again.

The worst part about this cycle is that their subconscious understanding of gay marriage becomes irrelevant. It is likely they subconsciously know what progressive thought indicates – that there is nothing wrong with gay marriage. However, they have an emotional investment in the statement of a different belief, and thus they maintain that face.

Of course, I am a progressive, so you might be saying to yourself, “Well, of course you think that way, you pinko liberal communist scum.” Sure. But progressive movements have a strong track record. Thought always moves forward and attitudes change. But let me explain, in reasonable terms, why I accept progressivism.

There’s a quote I’ve remembered since I did a report on F.D.R. in grade school – “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.” Conservatives will always go against the flow. They are, at their heart, a dam against an enormous river. In worse cases, they are a rockslide across a major highway. They say, “The Old is better than the New.” But the New has a way of winning. I don’t mind conservatives who want more extensive testing of the New; I just don’t like those who want the Old over an effective, better New.

Moreover, a conservative will always have to contend with Nietzsche’s problematic quote and have no means of moving forward. “The Old ways are dead. There is no meaning.” How does a conservative accept that? A progressive mind reacts differently. The progressive says, “So we shall construct the New and give it new meaning.” Anyway, that’s how I feel about the whole thing.

Coming around full circle, the Ignorance of Chicken is a metaphor that exposes how belief has been destroyed and reformed into “What we claim we believe” and “What we truly believe.” Imagine, now, that the joke is phrased slightly differently.

A man walks into a nihilist’s house. He says, “I believe in God.” The nihilist says, “There is no God. There is no meaning. There is no purpose to life.” The man says, “Oh. You know, you’re probably right. I don’t believe in God anymore.” The man leaves Nietzsche’s house, but quickly walks back in and tells the nihilist, “Yikes. All my friends, my family, my culture, my fellow church-goers, my entire life experience up to this point, and my fear of the possibility of a God are standing outside.” The nihilist says, “Yes, but you know that there is no God, and no reason to continue practicing your religion or claiming you believe in him.” The man says, “Sure, but do my friends, my family, my culture, my fellow church-goers, my entire life experience up to this point, and my fear of the possibility of a God know that?”

Long-winded, but if you can get through it, I think you get my point. Inside the nihilist’s house, the “believer” knows there is no God. It’s an absurd notion. But outside, it’s just too difficult to maintain with the pressures he perceives around him. What isn’t presented above is the frustration, the despair, the bitterness and the fear of the unknown that this crisis causes. Also, in the real world analog to the joke, the poor man probably walks in and out of the nihilist’s house over and over again, never certain what he believes or what the consequences of either location are.

I am absolutely not a post-modernist. I don’t believe in God, but neither do I think that the nihilistic crisis is a good thing. Just because the “faithful” in our culture are likely faithless on the inside, constantly conflicted about the notion of God’s absurdity and the nonsense world we live in, that doesn’t mean I like it. As I said above – I am a progressive. To me, the nihilistic crisis is meaningless itself. “God is dead.” So what? I believe in community. We’ll find meaning in ourselves and in each other. We’ll find meaning by fulfilling constructive urges and finding ways to deal with the destructive ones. As such, I don’t believe in a meaningless world, but rather an existential one – that meaning comes after existence begins, and is not set beforehand.

I maintain, then, that the nihilistic crisis is still holding us back. Because most of our culture cannot deal directly with the absurdity of their articles of faith, we’re stuck in a cultural quagmire. Because they are haunted by the statement, “God is dead,” and are not resolved to find a new way through, we are fighting the same battles for human rights over and over again.

And while I dealt directly with “God” throughout this entry, that is not the limit of the crisis by any means. It is not just that “God is dead” that disrupts our cultural progress. There are many other revelations that upset the political climate – first and foremost, to me, is the plain and obvious fact that people don’t always get what they deserve. The poor aren’t lazy and stupid, rape victims aren’t asking for it, and the plight of blacks isn’t due to any inferiority on their part. Conservatives seem to maintain a belief that this is a fair and just world, and their inability to accept that the world we live in is neither fair nor just by default means that social justice – a value that Christ himself was pretty big on – goes unfulfilled.

As an aside, one wonders how the faithful can maintain that the poor deserve what they get when Jesus, through his insistence to give to the poor and meek, was obviously affirming that the earthly existence is not inherently fair. If earthly existence was inherently fair, then Jesus wouldn’t have to tell you to clothe the poor. He would say, “Don’t fret about those less fortunate than you – they deserve what they get.”

It is absolutely absurd to believe that this world is fair and just, so that leads me to conclude that it is a situation that absolutely extends metaphorically to the same nihilistic crisis that “God is dead” evokes.

I’ve meandered a lot, but my short thesis is: People do not believe what they claim to believe, and the distortion of their “subconscious” beliefs into their stated beliefs is a conflict. The conflict between these two sets of beliefs creates nihilistic thoughts. The utter lack of ability to deal with this nihilistic crisis causes a widespread unwitting post-modernism that ruins our ability to use reason, logic, evidence and knowledge to move forward in a constructive and unified way.

So, there you go. I’ll go on to continue with Part 7 and make my way through the rest of the Ignorance of Chicken lecture and debate, but that was the Meaty Bits.

In this video, Zizek starts by using the metaphor of “canned laughter” on TV shows to describe belief. Canned laughter, he says, is not there to coax the audience to laugh, but rather to relieve the audience of the responsibility of laughing. You watch the show, the show ends, and you feel as if you laughed even if you didn’t.

(He also coins a wonderful phrase: “Maybe I’m the idiot here, but I’m afraid only that I am not.” That’s just a perfect Socratic quotation, to me.)

This metaphor is about going through the motions and feeling affect as if you had truly performed. A church-goer might derive a lot of pleasure from church without believing because the congregation believes on his behalf. In fact, this is the nature of vicarious experience, from watching sports to playing video games – you have a partial experience without the risk or cost of the real experience, but then feel affect that is derived from the experience in toto. But a question remains – is the vicarious experience near or far from the actual experience? That is, if I walk into a simulator that recreates every aspect of skydiving, but I know there is no risk of death, can I say that I went skydiving? That’s not really the point, here, it’s just a question about vicarious experience that could be asked similarly of those who experience faith with distance.

But faith is not a simple feat. Never misunderstand me – true faith, in my opinion, takes a great effort. True faith requires your faith to be tested in every imaginable way and to hold fast nonetheless. Most people who are believers do not experience true faith – they have the vicarious experience of true faith as they see it through the eyes of the minister, the holy writings or the experiences of their messiah of choice. Their faith is not tested. They are not defenders of the faith. They simply sit back as the “canned faith” is poured out onto them.

Now, we get to the meaty bits, and I’m going to contain them in a separate post without a video link.

I know you might be getting tired of these, but I promised myself I’d finish them before I went on to another topic!

In Part 5, Zizek applies the Ignorance of Chicken to religion.

Basically, in the same conceptual situation, a religious person is “cured” of their religious belief, but they still fear punishment from God. “I know that God doesn’t exist,” says the person. “But does God know it?”

This is a critical element of many people’s transition from theism to atheism. Unlike many of my atheist colleagues, I will not call what religions do to the mind “brainwashing.” Brainwashing is blatantly immoral, and what religions do is much more powerful because it is not blatantly immoral – in fact, both the members of the religion and the person being brought into the religion view the acts as quite moral (I would disagree, but I lean more towards the acts being amoral – devoid of any true “good” or “evil” in and of itself.)

Regardless of the moral value of it, religion has set into it a sense of fear. This is true of all religions I am aware of, even Buddhism. Every religion has something immaterial, transcendent, and/or eternal to fear. It is usually eternal suffering – Hell, distance from God, poor reincarnation, or just plain unhappiness. Religion always gives a path away from that eternal suffering – accepting Jesus Christ, doing what is right, or meditating on the Four Noble Truths. Once the mental patient is “cured,” however, the fear remains. It is because the apostate does not believe what the apostate now professes – that they are faithless and god is not real. In these cases, it will often take a lot of time before they truly believe and act as if they believe that god is not real.

But Zizek takes this all in another direction – to Matthew 27:46, where Jesus (on the cross) cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Zizek, quoting Chesterton, is saying that the Christian God himself has a moment of doubt – a moment of separation from God when he himself is God. It’s an interesting post-structuralist analysis of Matthew 27:46, but apologists have been tackling that quote for ages, and I don’t really think pursuing it will help us understand what’s really underneath the Ignorance of the Chicken.

By the way, aren’t apologists just like Star Wars fanboys? If you pick apart how Episodes I, II and III cause continuity problems with episodes IV, V and VI, they always have an explanation. It’s beautiful in its devotion.

Anyway, for you readers, Matthew 27:46 (a quote which is not present in the other 3 Gospels) is a reference to Psalms 22:1. I have no doubt the intent of Matthew’s author (who, Biblical scholars tell us, was not the apostle Matthew) was to link Christ on the cross with his purported ancestor, David, who Psalm 22 is attributed to, thus further fulfilling prophecy in the mind of the reader. Of course, what it says in the book that Jesus says on the cross is completely meaningless to me, as I don’t believe it’s anything like a literal account of a supposed historical figure… but it is interesting literature, when you’ve got all these folks willing to discuss it especially.

But finally, Zizek comes to an important point – many people today practice Christianity as atheists, not truly believing that there is a supernatural god, but rather going through the motions as “cultural” Christians.

Some of these people may profess doubts (“Can anybody really be sure there’s a God?”), or they may profess outright atheism (“I don’t believe in God, but I like the sense of community.”), but in America, I think most of these people also profess belief and hide their atheism because of the mistrust (and outright hatred, at times) of atheists in our country. In fact, not unlike closeted homosexuals, many of these people no doubt see their atheism as a trial they are undergoing, or moreover, they completely suppress their atheism and only encounter it occasionally.

To be an atheist, for certain, is to be an outcast in America. There are some groups where my atheism is welcomed (among my friends, for instance), but among my family, my atheism is a dividing line and a point of contention. My family are loving, wonderful people, but outside of my immediate family, arguments have been had. And by far, I am lucky – atheists can get a lot worse treatment from a religious family or friend.

Of course, as minorities go, atheists, like homosexuals, can pass pretty easily. No one knows about us until we profess. It is not like a racial minority, who stand out in a crowd. So, don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we have it as bad as anyone else. Atheists can still marry who they want (unless, of course, they are also gay) and can go through life generally pain-free. Naturally, if we want our beliefs to be properly represented, and if we don’t want the world to devolve into theocracy, we have to speak up, and that’s when the trouble, for us, starts.

Anyway, Zizek goes into a point about “someone else believing for you,” which is an interesting concept about how this “not really believing what you profess to believe” propels itself, and I think has a lot of implications in today’s American politics, especially how political movements succeed while having policies contrary to the interests of their members. I’m not going to get into that too much here because it’s not relevant to my immediate points, but it will feature in a later post on this topic.

Zizek then goes into “believing without believing.” This is another angle of the same idea – “professing beliefs which you don’t believe.” Zizek says, “You believe with your acts,” but I think this might be misleading. To me, an obvious implication of Zizek’s premise is that people “believe” by professing belief (“I’m a Christian!”) and by performing ritual (“I go to church every week!”) but in the end, they don’t really believe what they profess, or they have beliefs contrary to their professed system of beliefs, and their actions reveal their non-belief (“I just think I need $10 million more than poor people do.”) There is a kind of “atheism” here that is actually a “pick and choose” theism. By taking some, but not all of the precepts of your religion, how can you truly be a believer? How are you informed of these “higher truths” that let you be selective of what religious precepts are the right ones? That sort of iconoclasm against your religion’s truths is tantamount to atheism (although I realize I’m not providing a full argument for that here, and I should do that later).

I do think Zizek is talking more about someone who goes through all the motions of a Christian, for instance, but has none of the beliefs in his “heart” as it were. This person doesn’t necessarily hold truths that run directly contrary to his religion, but rather his “heart isn’t in it” – he doesn’t cognitively have the beliefs that are professed.

Zizek then relates an anecdote about Niels Bohr, who (according to the story) was asked about a “lucky” horseshoe he had hanging near his home. “Of course I don’t believe in it,” said Bohr. “But I was told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

That is a wonderful summary of the nugget I think the reader should get out of all of this talking and writing. The difference between what a person professes as belief and what they truly believe is only measured by the investments they have. For instance, how much work did Bohr invest in hanging the horseshoe? Does he get a laugh out of it? If Niels Bohr’s horseshoe fell off its nail, how disturbing would it be for him? Bohr’s investment in the reality of the horseshoe is the only telling measurement of his belief. In fact, it may be a mystery to both Bohr and myself how “real” his belief or disbelief is until something tests that investment.

Of course, all of this ties into a big question I have about belief. “Do you believe what you believe, or can you ‘want’ to believe things until you believe them?” I’m sure we’ve all seen people ‘convince’ themselves of something irrational or unbelievable. But I wonder how far that conviction goes. When do people simply delude themselves and when do they truly believe what is unbelievable?

Anyway, more to come, including my “real world implications” of the Ignorance of Chicken!

The first part of this video finishes Zizek’s thought from Part 3, and it contains an interesting observation. That is, paraphrased, people accept inequity precisely because it is unjust. That is, they accept their place as a member of a lower class, or a member of an oppressed minority because they can attribute the position not to their own failings but to things outside their control. This actually induces a real (if subconscious) comfort, which should not surprise us in the least. It is the alleviation of responsibility for one’s lot in life, and I think we can all understand how the alleviation of any responsibility can give comfort. This applies not only to capitalism, but to all sorts of inequitable systems of interaction.

Now we come to the chicken…

This whole series of posts revolves around this joke – a man believes he is a kernel of corn. He spends years in an institution where he is finally convinced he is not a kernel of corn. However, when he leaves the hospital, he immediately comes back inside shaking with fear. When the doctors ask him what’s wrong, he tells them there’s a chicken outside. The doctors say, “But you know you’re not a kernel of corn!” The man says, “Yes, of course I know that, but does the chicken?”

Zizek says this is exactly how belief works. I agree with him, and obviously this series is meant to clarify what he means and why I think it’s a very important problem of our time.

Zizek says that the chicken represents our subconscious. When it comes to belief, it is easy to convince our conscious mind – the hospital patient – that X is true and Y is false. But the patient is controlled not by his own thoughts, but instead by the chicken.

Let’s dissect this further before we move on.

In the western world, we cannot help but be very aware of what the subconscious is and does. It is this obfuscated gearbox in the back of our mind somewhere that is secretly whispering thoughts to our conscious mind at all times. Pychologists, authors and artists remind us of it all the time.

The mistake we make, in a large way, is the belief we have that our general awareness of the existence of a subconscious cancels out its ability to affect us. I submit that we make the assumption that, because we can all cite a definition of “the subconscious” that we believe we have conquered it. It is a special kind of hubris – write it down in a book, admit it to a friend, post it to your Facebook and you don’t have to worry about the subconscious any more.

But the subconscious lurks constantly out of view. It is that leering phantom that moves as quickly as you can turn your head, always there when you least expect it. That is not to say it is unconquerable or unfathomable – just that it is at least as sneaky as we are (being that it is a part of us).

And so, while we laugh at the story of the man and the chicken, we ourselves will no doubt succumb to our own chicken a hundred times before we lay down to bed tonight.

The paradox of belief, then, is that we are constantly claiming beliefs that truly lie opposed to what we believe subconsciously, and that what we believe subconsciously could be called, in many ways, “what we truly believe,” especially if it is secretly informing our behaviors. (And this leads us to the “great problem of our time” that I mentioned in previous posts… but more on that later.)

Got that? Now back to Part 4.

Zizek uses the chicken joke – this paradox of belief – to talk about the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism.

Summarized: You think your car is just a collection of metal and plastic, but it is actually a complex metaphysical object imbued with special powers.

This seems, to us, contradictory to what we should expect. We, as post-modern materialists, should expect that our emotional and theological understanding of existence endows metaphysical properties to a collection of plastic and metal called a car when that plastic and metal called a car is just a collection of matter, itself breakable into molecules, itself breakable into atoms, etc, and that this collection of matter has no special power outside of itself.

But that is the exact problem of the mental patient in the joke. We are post-modern materialists in our conscious mind, able to look at physical objects and laugh at the idea of the objects having magical powers. But, when we are not paying attention (when our mental patient leaves the hospital and encounters the chicken) we will begin to behave as if those objects had magical properties (because the chicken doesn’t know we’re humans and not corn kernels).

And Zizek makes an important point here to further clarify. I will use money as an example, but any commodity (in the Marx sense of the word) works just as well. We believe that a twenty-dollar bill exists in two ways. One way could be called “material reality” – the money exists as a paper slip. The second way could be called “economic illusion” where the paper slip actually represents some amount of goods or services.

Zizek’s interpretation of Marx, however, introduces a complication to these two ways that the twenty-dollar bill exists. We “know” and “claim” that we understand that money is only paper, and that it “cannot buy happiness” or what have you. We claim to understand the difference between the thing and what it represents – and that goes for cash money, money in the bank, investments, real estate or any other form of material wealth. However, we still behave as if money defined our social reality, and because we behave that way, it does define our social reality despite our beliefs and claims. (Or possibly, because our social reality is defined by material wealth, we are forced to attribute a great deal of importance to material wealth in order to gain comfort in our social status).

On this topic, Marx said, “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es,” which is German or something, and means, “They don’t know, but they do it.” I agree with Zizek – this is not a simple comment about the ignorance of the populace, but rather a complex evaluation. We slip into a sort of “magical thinking” by default, relying not on our intellectual conclusions about our reality, but relying instead on heuristic and emotion, which informs our behavior… or perhaps a subconscious evaluation of “the way the world really works” as opposed to our conscious ideology of “How I ideally believe the world works” (neither of which necessarily constitutes an objective case for how the world works).

And this is our “ideological illusion” – the illusion that what we state as our beliefs, and/or what our conscious mind believes, is the set of beliefs that is informing our actions when, in fact, our actions are informed or influenced by subconscious beliefs.

Reading over that sentence, it might seem elementary because the narrative of our culture is “People act on subconscious impulses.” However, despite that narrative being pervasive, I don’t observe anyone acting as if they themselves are the victims of their own subconscious, but rather everyone acts as if everyone else is a victim of their individual subconscious. Also, we do not generally act as if the claimed beliefs of the people around them are subject to the same insidious forces, but rather we assume people truly believe what they say they believe.

What Zizek calls “Contemporary Cynicism” or what I might call “Skeptical Belief” or even “Critical Contingent Acceptance” (because I obviously don’t want to make it easy to say) feeds off of this sort of ideological illusion.

To explain my thoughts on this a bit further, “Skeptical Belief” is the Christian who readily says, “Well, I can’t say for sure there is a God, but…” The believer is claiming a belief when, in fact, they are probably not truly acting as if that belief is true.

As an aside, imagine that you truly believed in an all-powerful deity. How would you behave if, every moment of every day, you were even a little conscious of your conviction that Heaven and Hell were real. Now, evaluate the behavior of so many inconsiderate and cruel people who label themselves Christians. Certainly, they cover up their gaps with the word “Sin,” but “Sin” is essentially the “mental patient” going outside and seeing the chicken. “Yes, doctor, I know I was specially and wonderfully created by God – but does the chicken know that?” Thus, they fall back into a behavior informed by their subconscious, which is no doubt fraught with a sort of nihilism. But that’s for another post.

“Critical Contingent Acceptance” is a mouthful, but it’s how I could describe “scientific” belief. For instance, I can say, “I believe the sun is a massive nuclear engine that makes helium out of hydrogen in a process called fusion.” And I do believe that. But, it is a Critical Contingent Acceptance. First, I am critical of the belief. I am willing to hear arguments that it’s not true. Second, it is contingent on evidence. Finally, I accept this belief as fact because there is evidence that has survived criticism. I could go on and on about how belief is informed, but that’s for another time.

I’ll also talk about  how I think “the Ignorance of Chicken” can be “solved” in a later post. But first, I’ll talk about the rest of the Zizek video parts, in order (though some of later parts may be single paragraph posts). Now we’re really getting somewhere, huh?

If you have any questions or comments at all, please post them!

I would love to discuss this topic.