Slavoj Žižek - How to become free

[Music] my name is slavo vek I'm a philosopher from Slovenia and I am honored by this kind invitation to present to the Korean public the strange Destiny of the notion of freedom to day freedom is at the same time something very obvious to all of us you know where and when you are free you know you are free at least in your head you can think about anything you want you know you are free when you can do in society what you want to do live your own way of life and so on but the

moment you you get closer and try to analyze the notion of Freedom you can immediately notice many paradoxes and inconsistencies why Freedom appears a very simple notion spontaneously we all know what it means freedom often hurts it involves a painful renunciation especially when you are doing your duty when you are really free it's not just about free to choose I don't know strawberry case or cheese cake it means for example fighting for freedom and there you don't have the same Choice Fighting For Freedom means I have to sacrifice maybe my love life I have to

do something although I am afraid of it but basically I have no choice I couldn't live with myself if I don't do it in politics Freedom means to act freely within the frame of existing customs and legal regulations but there are times when to be truly free means you have to violate the sphere of what is legally permitted and finally while we are free to circulate in the Digital Universe does this Freedom not give birth to a non-transparent universe prone to manipulations you are as free as you can imagine you surf along the web you

do whatever you want but the more you do it the more you experience how manipulated and controlled you are I will not try to provide clear answers to all these questions I would just try to bring out the complexity of freedom so the first empirical observation with which I want to begin is that freedom can unite us a whole nation can be United in a struggle for Freedom it can unite us but at the same time each of us has in his or her head a different concrete notion of freedom for example a country fights

against the aggression for Freedom we are all United We shout Freedom we are ready to die for our freedom but it's easy to see upon a closer look that each of us means something different by it so uh the best example from art of this Paradox is for me the finale of the First Act of Mozart's Opera Don [Music] joani where the hero Don joani invites his guests to a big reception and greets them with triumphant opening Viv liberta Long Live [Music] freedom and they all joined they all from different strata poor poor peasants other

nobl men and so on it's an emphatic moment which as it were stops the development of the Opera they're all transfix but it's clear that they don't have the same idea of freedom now my point here is not simply that this is a confusion no such moments of emphatic identification with freedom have their own efficiency the such freedom is not just a an illusion it's illusion with real effects they all really fight for freedom from my own experience I remember how here in Slovenia when we were under much more modest than now in Ukraine but

nonetheless aggression from the Yugoslav Army we were also all for freedom but immediately after we achieved Independence it was clear that each group had its own idea of freedom for the church freedom was freedom to get back all our uh uh possessions freedom to organize ourself as a Central Social Power for new capitalist it was again freedom from capitalist expansion for new leftist it was a different thing and so on and so on be careful how in every Epoch and also within the same Epoch with different uh strata of or States Freedom means something different

as I already indicated in premodern times when people lived in a traditional way of life Freedom simply meant the freedom to live the way they were used to live the freedom to follow their Traditions without disturbance in modernity Freedom became a freedom of Commerce abstract legal Freedom uh for socialists freedom is the freedom of that has to be guaranteed by certain social rights freedom is only actual possible again with health care with uh guaranteeing minimal standard of living free education and so on and so on and also today the typical Freedom today is the freedom

of choice which is often a false freedom because the the choices you are given are very limited like it's a little bit like yes you have the Freedom between uh uh Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola but what if you want something more radically different but my point here is that this is the reason that maybe the deepest ingredient of freedom is the very gap between abstract notion of freedom and concrete content of freedom uh it is very good for you to experience that your concrete notion of freedom is not Universal when you become aware of this

that your concrete content of Freedom what Freedom means to you is limited this precisely gives you the freedom to change the very Contours of what freedom is uh for [Music] you true freedom is precisely the freedom to change the rules under which you are free and I think this freedom is imminent to language human language itself this may sound complex but let me give you an example which I hope all of you know recently in the mid-march of 2022 a video was everywhere on social media a video clip showing a woman being arrested by the

Russian police for holding up a small piece of paper [Music] that RS two Works Dava in Russian you know we all know what was behind it it's prohibited to talk about war now in Russia so the two words were in the mind of most of Russians n v no to war this was prohibited to say so the lady this is freedom in language gave just on a paper two words literally not no to war but two words it was written two words and the irony is that the police still grabbed her and arrested her why

it was just two words written there of course everybody knew that two words meant no to war but of course in the concrete situation this meant I am for peace I am against War but I also protest the fact that I am prohibited to say this [Music] publicly but you see although she supported or didn't violate censorship she did get the message through that's why she was uh arrested and let's not forget that this freedom is the freedom of true human language it's the freedom to make words mean almost everything that we want in a

brief scene from uh uh uh from a British movie from mid 80s I think uh brast off there is a wonderful short scene of a guy accompanying a girl after dat to their home do you want to come up for a coffee I don't drink coffee I haven't got any the erotic power of this brief exchange is wonderful she makes it clear that she didn't mean coffee at all it's an invitation to sex it's clear but what I want to say is that you see this is the incredible creative freedom of language so to conclude

with two paradoxes the first one is that the highest form of Freedom we have to accept this Paradox is the point when Freedom coincides with necessity let's take a great artist he is free in his or her creativity but he doesn't really have a choice his inventive Spirit tells him he as it were knows exactly what he has to do so he feels totally free but he totally follows a necessity and isn't it the same again in love love of course has to be free a free choice but did you notice another Paradox that you

never can give the reasons why you are in love if I tell a lady I like your legs and eyes that's why I love you it's already clear it's not love because then it's not Freedom it's a kind of a comparative procedure I like your eyes I like your legs I like your smile okay let's make a comparison who wins no you fall in love for reasons but these reasons become clear to you only after you already fall in love and once you are in love it's a fate it's a necessity isn't this the beauty

of love that it's totally free but at the same time it's the most radical chain that you can imagine but it's a free chain my uh last point to complicate things I like to finish with bad news is that at the same time you know the notion of freedom is not is self-contradictory if you ask Ordinary People do you Want to Be Free their answer would have been usually yes of course but then if you look at it closely you will see that the majority of people me included wouldn't really like to make radical choices

all the time what they want to maintain is the appearance of freedom but discreetly they want to be told what choice to make they want to be told by media experts leaders whoever that's the right thing to do and then they want to freely choose it in an appearance so you see this is the Paradox of Freedom often to be free means to maintain the appearance of freedom and to choose what you feel it's necessary this is not a bad thing this is how our freedom actually works thank [Music] you now I will speak about

our freedom to change the past of course from a scientific standpoint the notion of changing the past is a nonsense what happens happens science described it and even science at its most radical science which like quantum mechanics introduces contingency into nature itself so that nature is not fully determined by necessity there is no space for Freedom there because Freedom doesn't mean contingency Freedom means a determinism but a determinism of your own Freedom means to freely choose determine something like if you grab a piece of candy by chance this is not Freedom this is contingency but

my thesis will be that nonetheless we can freely change the past the problem is only in what precise sense of course from the scientific standpoint freedom is ultimately what they call in cognitive Sciences a users illusion you think that you act freely which simply means you do what you want or what you intend but the content is already determined by Society or by neuronal processes in you and there is even a well-known scientific experiment done already I think almost half a century ago by Benjamin liet where he scientifically for some people demonstrates that there is

no Freedom he asked people to do something in a totally contingent free way he had measuring apparatuses conect connected with your neurons and he demonstrated that a split of a second before you decide commands from your brain were already on the way to your hand so when you made a free decision you just registered something that was already going on but does this cancel Freedom liet's answer is very interesting he claims yes the content of decision is predetermined by neuronal processes but you can say no you sabotage the decision and that is your freedom your

primordial form of freedom is to say no to stop it then there are other attempt attempts to save Freedom uh the classical one is to uh differentiate between many levels of reality they claim of course at the elementary level of atomic interaction and so on there is no freedom but then nature organizes itself into animal life human mind and there at a higher level there is a space for freedom of course uh naturalist scientists would have said this is just an illusion in reality there is no freedom but what I want to prove today is

that in the specifically symbolic Universe the universe of human Spirit of our symbolic language interaction there is a space for Freedom so let me introduce this Dimension with a quote from one of my favorite poets what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it what does this mean uh let me take the example of Shakespeare's Hamlet I think it is wrong to read Hamlet as a great work of art which contains in itself an incredible depth all possible variations and so

on it's much more productive to read a great classical work of art as something unfinished in itself Shakespeare didn't know what he is saying just Deep Thoughts came to him he wasn't even aware what they can mean I think that now we can know better than Shakespeare what is in Shakespeare great works of art are retro actively recreated all the time the best Cinema version of Hamlet I think is the one by the Japanese director Akira kurava from early 60s which transposes Hamlet into modern Japan where Hamlet is an Japanese student he returns there from

United States from the studies and then the same story as in Hamlet his father the owner of a big company is murdered and so on and so on but you see this is the mystery of changing the Past after seeing this version of course we transpose hamlet in a different context the situation is totally different but in a way we fill in the gaps which were already there in the original this retroactivity is crucial let me give you here a wonderful example which is the favorite one which scientifically it's Madness but I think it's the

best theory of ideology that I can imagine you know when Charles Darin proposed his theory of evolution one of his friends who was a conservative theologist saw the truth in Darin yes fossils Pro that Universe lasted for millions of years that there was life on Earth before humanity and so on but he nonetheless this guy believed that the Bible is literally true and if you count years in the Bible our universe should have been created a little bit over 4,000 years ago so how does this guy propose to bring together Daris and theology an ingenious

solution God directly created fossils in the same way that in a movie scene you have painted background to create a false temporal opening you know God created the illusion of the past now this of course is scientifically nonsense but I think it is true literally as a theory of ideology ideology means that every historical Epoch perceives the past in a different way here I would like to take a an example from politics it's my favorite example when in 93 in Geneva there were negotiations about how to end the Korean War the Chinese uh prime minister

Chu and li who represented China there was asked by a French journalist what does he think about French Revolution and he gave a wonderful answer his answer was it's too early to say we don't yet know what was the French [Music] Revolution and it he was right because when uh communist socialism disintegrated incidentally you remember exactly 200 years after French [Music] Revolution French Revolution became the beginning of an Epoch revolutionary epoc of progress which ended in 1990 and so now when we are fighting for Freedom we are still fighting for what the French Revolution is

or was the reality is the same people were dying there and so on and so on the reality is the same but the symbolic weight of this reality changes [Music] let me go here even a step further uh and give another example from Cinema which makes this clear in the Hollywood director who was of course an immigrant from Germany Ernest luit in his film nka there is a wonderful joke mentioned there uh the hero of the film visits a a cafeteria and orders coffee but he says coffee without cream please and the waiter answers sorry

I cannot give you coffee without cream because we run out of cream but we have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk now uh you see the Paradox we have the same in any case the guest will get we have the a cup of pure black coffee but if you order just plain coffee this can be coffee plain coffee this can be coffee without cream and this can be coffee without milk it's physically the same but in its symbolic impact it's not the same how why not let me give you a political

example the first step of feminism is always like my coffee is coffee without milk in the sense of in the traditional Society a woman who is trained to identify with her traditional position in a patriarchal society a woman simply accepts her position it's natural for me to work at home to obey husband and so on and so on to be a good wife feminism begins when you say I don't want just to be coffee I experience my position as coffee without milk that is to say there is something which I should have would like to

have but is not there and the difference between multiple versions of feminism is how do you define this Dimension that is missing for predominant American me too feminism unfortunately what the woman is missing is identifying in typically upper middle class term more manager positions uh uh less violations of women's rights and so on in Korea I noticed what women were demanding was much more deeply located in everyday life something IM unimaginable in United States happened women protested for multiple forms of being abused by men there were big demonstrations about against this horrible fashion of men

uh displaying on the web naked uh photos of their girlfriends and so on and so on so again more radical feminists say no we are not women without milk without legal equality we want more we are without cream cream means actual actual Social Power responsibility better jobs and so on and so on and this is what today's feminism conflicts in feminism are about they are about uh the struggle of what women are without today you as a feminist again feel deprived of things but what are you deprived of it's not enough legal equality you want

Social Power and so on you want much more in this sense we can change the past the past Remains the Same women were exploited all that stuff but what the women were deprived of so what they demand now in this is open to interpretation the general lesson just to conclude is that uh the limit I think of uh scientific determinism is that it gets involved in what philosophers call pragmatic contradiction which means at the level of the object that you are analyze you as a scientist can say we are don't have free will we are

totally determined by uh natural laws and so on but scientists argue with Arguments for that they try to convince each other which means that although they claim there is no free will in their very scientific debate they act as if they are free beings if you are dealing with a person without Freedom you wouldn't argue with that person because argumentation means I think you are free to decide you listen to arguments and I will try to convince you so uh this is a good philosophical Point against Natural determinism yes you may be right at the

level of content you give a correct description of our biological reality but the way we do it implies Freedom you act as a free you act as free beings here again even the hardest science displays in how it proceeds freedom [Music] I will talk now about a crucial distinction I think politically between freedom and liberty unfortunately it works only in English in French it's liberte liberty in German it's fright freedom but I think the distinction between freedom and liberty is very useful let me begin with another Paradox of Freedom sometimes the awareness of Freedom the

awareness that I have a free choice is precisely what prevents me from getting R getting free of something it guarantees that I will not change the example here of course I didn't make a scientific experiment but I checked with all of my friends is smoking many smokers want to stop smoking but you know which is the logic of uh excusing your yourself to go on smoking you tell to yourself not a problem I'm free anytime I can stop smoking and you use this as an excuse never to stop smoke smoking you tell yourself okay no

problem I will stop tomorrow at any point I have the chance to stop so you de facto never stop smoking and my good friend Alena zupanic a sloven philosopher proposed here a wonderful experiment let's say you are such a smoker who said I'm a free being I can smoke at any point and I can stop at any point that I want so you use this awareness of a choice never to stop smoking Alena Zan said but imagine a situation where somebody would make a choice more radical somebody on Authority would tell you yes you are

free to choose between smoking and not smoking but the choice you make will oblige you to the end that is to say if you choose going on smoking you will never be allowed to go back to non-smoking and vice versa that would be the real Choice then you would really have to decide and I think through Freedom would be this more difficult situation where you don't have the excuse okay I will decide tomorrow you have to take the big decision now with no chance of undoing it later this is what happens in Wars for Freedom

like in Ukraine today they're not just saying we are doing this today tomorrow we have another choice no their choice is now they have to decide now forever here enters the difference between Liberty and freedom this difference I think uh refers to what the German philosopher Hegel uh defined as the difference between abstract and concrete Freedom what we mean in our daily language as freedom is what Hegel calls concrete Freedom which means freedom whose Contours are determined by the existing space of not only explicit regulations and rules but especially even more Unwritten rules for example

that's why I in a position which is very problematic for some that's why I was absolutely for obligatory vaccination because of course in some abstract sense you were not free if the state says You must get vaccinated but a good argument for vaccination is for me that by not getting vaccinated you limit everyday freedom of other people you expose them to danger and so on and so on we are only free within a certain scope of rules for example let's say I'm free at the most stupid level I'm free to go into the city to

walk around to buy things whatever this pre supposes that I can expect other people to follow certain rules of decency that they will not beat me attack me this presupposes that everybody recognizes money and I have normal space of social interaction even more important here is that to enjoy this concrete social freedom I have to obey Unwritten rules written rules are not enough I think our freedom only works if me and people around me support sustain again Unwritten rules what do I mean by this one beautiful example and there are many others here in Europe

especially at least in my own country is that you have a strange phenomenon of what I called false free choice for example let's say that I have more money than you and I invite you out to dinner it's clear to both of us that I will pay but there is a ritual in my country that when the bill arrives you my guest you have have to pretend oh let us fleit let me pay and so on it's pure politeness the worst thing I can do to you is to say okay then you pay I mean

you know and this is what human culture is I make an you make an empty offer we both know that I will pay but to assert our link and friendship we have to go through this so again an even more radical example is language we are only free within a language to think freely means to totally obey the rules of language otherwise you cannot even think so this is again concrete Freedom B and here I am radically on the left the left is right to point out that to be free a whole set of conditions

have to be established like uh to be free you have to have some kind of a social health care social welfare and so on without all this you are formally free but in reality you are in total danger in constant anxiety and so on and so on uh so this is concrete Freedom Hegel was aware of them where Liberty as concrete Freedom Liberty to live the way you want within a social order that Liberty falls apart and you need the more radical freedom to act outside the Contours of Liberty as in a situation of social

Revolt revolution war and so on zul stter the French existentialist put this in a wonderful way in a a text that he wrote uh at the end of 1944 after France was liberated stter wrote never were we French people more free than under the German occupation we had lost all our rights and first of all our right to speak they they the Germans insulted us to our faces and that is why the resistance was a true democracy for the soldier esos here Superior the same danger the same loneliness so the situation stter is describing it's

not of Liberty you will totally controlled by the German people were liquidated tortured abducted and so on but in some sense they were radically free they had to make the radical Choice Risk Everything fight for freedom and I think the same holds now for Ukraine they are certainly not living in Liberty even in the parts which are not yet occupied by the Russian army they have to obey certain discipline and so on but since their way of life is at stake they have to decide radically to choose a sight to fight for their way of

life and this is freedom now I come to our today's situation I think something very strange is happening now more and more people think that they have to practice radical Freedom which means violating social rules and so on to retain their Liberty the distinction is no longer clear what do I mean by this uh think about uh the attack on Capital on the 6th of January last year 2021 when the mop of trump supporters did something which was an act of Freedom they violated the rules of Liberty of social order they occupied the capital so

they think that the only way to retain their Liberty is to exercise [Music] freedom I think that we Humanity not just the developed world are entering a new era in which liberal capitalism as we knew it is coming to an end what it is replaced with is what some people call uh corporate neoism it's a problematic term but there is some truth in it there is at least one thing about this neoism that is well known you remember now it's already half a year ago when Mark zukerberg announced Meta Meta vers what he proposes is

a new social space where we all can communicate do do all the exchanges from dating to business and so on it's literally a meta verse no longer our material vulgar universe but the virtual space where we are free to play with our identities and so on and so on but he forgot to add something that this universe within which we cooperate is privately owned this is falis and this is neoism that the new Masters are no longer capitalists who just take the profit exploit us as common workers I think we are returning more and more

to a period of uh rent how did Bill Gates become so wealthy it's not that he exploits his workers and so on no he occupies an almost Universal Monopoly position so in order for us to go on with our daily business collaborating with each other we pay him a rent by subscribing to Microsoft one of his programs by using his software and so on and so on so uh the very what Marx called Commons the common space with in which we interact gets privatized and I think uh the other side of this Neo falis is

something almost more horrible I would have said which is uh the more and more important role of precarious work what's the trick of precarious work it is that you get a false freedom in precarious work no like uh look at an Uber driver he owns his own means of production he can work whenever he wants and so on and although he never can be sure will it last his work and so on he in a way acts as an entrepreneur on his or her own so the Paradox is that while it's he experiences his life

as more free than ever you just work when you want and so on and so on his subordination to the existing order is uh much more total than at any point before so the great danger today I think is not the traditional domination where you know my master is out there the most dangerous form of unfreedom today is the unfreedom that you experience as freedom and I think the latest most dangerous form of this is is uh is cryptocurrencies the idea of cryptocurrencies was of course anarchic Freedom we can make money with which will not

be dependent on any state institutions it's like direct transparent exchange the result of it is total impenetrability we are more manipulated than ever and even the very structure of manipulation is not transparent so this is our predicament today I almost have a longing for the good old times which persist up to a point in China where you know you are not free my friends from China who are under observation police tell me you know you're observed you look back there is a secret policeman behind or whatever but what about something much more horrible you freely

you freely run around on the web you are totally free you buy what you want Etc but you are totally denominated your freedom is regulated that's the danger [Music] today and now I will talk about the importance of knowledge how knowing what the situation is can even prevent us from acting from doing something if you just follow the media I'm sure you have noticed a strange thing we are all the time told what our situation is and what is wrong there was a conference half a year ago in Glasgow about the dangers of global warming

where all the right things were said we need Global cooperation we need to change our entire way of life to cope with global catastrophe and so [Music] on but these were just words they adopted some empty rhetorical measures but nothing really changed so we live in a strange time where we know what is wrong pandemic global warming now the war we know even vaguely what has to be done but although we talk a lot of time about it we are unable to act why we cannot act precisely because we are hyperactive all the time look

at our daily life in today's global capitalism all the time you have to be active intervene participate in something and so on and so on but in order to properly act to change things you have to step back a little bit to acquire a minimal distance this we cannot do it the system never leaves us alone it's something that I know very well because in psychoanalysis we call it obsessional neurosis and I know what I'm talking about because I think I'm one of them an obsessional neuron is active talks all the time but not in

order to achieve something but in order to make it sure that nothing will really change and I'm sometimes like that I talk all the time why because I am afraid that if for a short minute I stop talking you will maybe notice the vacu of what I'm saying and ask me a real question so you see the Paradox being hyperactive is a way to make it sure that nothing will really change you know who knew this clearly George Orwell he wrote already back in 1937 that Progressive radical leftist talk all the time about how necessary

it is to change society but he said they talk all the time about it but with the secret wish that nothing will really change this is also why I think many public intellectuals today like to spread total pessimism like we are already 5 minutes past 12 we are doomed it means I'm in a comfortable position position of knowing that everything points towards a catastrophe I don't have to act to do anything in uh psychoanalysis we uh we call this cynical reason or in technical terms fetishism we know what the situation is but instead of making

us act talking is here as an excuse not to do anything if some of people viewing this show are in any way involved in art art exhibitions art banal they know what I'm talking about if there is a form of art which is fully integrated into capitalist circulation are this big art banales Venice castle and so on and their ideology is strictly radically leftist you have endless debates about how to fight global capitalism how we are all manipulated by big Capital but they fit perfectly the global Capital the formula of iCal reason was proposed half

a century ago by German philosopher Peter Slaughter Dy who said people know what they are doing Horrors dangers about what they are doing but they are nonetheless doing it did you already encounter a person who is properly cynical like this I did when I was young in communist times at my department of philosophy there was was a very cynical corrupted Professor who openly told that student I know I'm a piece of [ __ ] I cheat I inform to police but that's it what can I do I'm like that you know where he was cheating

he thought that if he says this openly if it in some way redeems him it makes him better no it doesn't the formula that applies here is the wonderful formula a joke from one of the Marx Brothers movies I think it's Duck Soup but I'm not sure where grouo marks a lawyer in the movie defending an idiot sayson this man looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot but shouldn't deceive you this man really is an idiot he really is an idiot I implore you that's how we function today uh unfortunately again we live

in an era of cynical reasoning where telling the truth is not enough you can say the truth but it's immediately Incorporated there is a film which is not a great film but nonetheless it demonstrates this aspect of our predicament uh perfectly it is Adam MC don't look up about you know a Comet approaching the Earth threatening to destroy all life on the earth and the target of the film are not some kind of Donald Trump like populists but precisely the Democratic establishment and protesters who Warren we are all in danger look up and they just

make the spectacle out of the danger but uh they don't do anything really life goes on as normal and this is I think our again this is our problem [Music] today knowledge is not enough what we need is truth truth is not simply knowledge truth is knowledge which subjectively engages you and today we know everything but we don't really subjectively assume this knowledge that's why I think today more than ever we need to distinguish between knowledge and Truth again knowledge is objective knowledge but it doesn't oblige you to anything uh we don't need need just

science telling us how things are we need knowledge which is engaged knowledge this is why I hate although they do some good work I hate the logic of Charity which is part of the big corporate capitalism today charity I think helps reproducing the very situation which it pretends to fight what do I mean by this allow me to read you a quote the beginning of Oscar Wild's excellent essay the soul of man under socialism which tells it all why Oscar Wild claims that quote indeed their remedies charity and so on are part of the [Music]

disease the proper aim is to try and reconstruct Society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible it is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property this last sentence I think provides a nice formula of what is wrong with for example Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Bill Gates first in a very brutal capitalist tactic a masses enormous amount of money and then gives part of it back I think that we should attack also Bill Gates vacuous pun humanitarianism the answer to Bill

Gates should be the title of a book published by an Austrian friend of mine s naami the title of the book is refusal of respect why we should not respect foreign cultures and our own also not I think this Multicultural formula of all cultures are worth of respect and so on is totally deceiving and false no behind every culture there is a barbarism so the solution is not respect other cultures but despise your own it's also not of course the racist formula of only our culture is great one despite others no uh we should be

Universal in the sense of sharing what is wrong connecting what is wrong in our culture with what is wrong in other culture I that's why I will go to the end here it may shock you the citizens of a developed country who thinks that most that he can do is to open his land to immigrants is in a way wrong no I'm not saying that I'm against immigrants but I'm saying that already to formulate the problem in this way as if the big dilemma is open our limits to immigrants or not is to accept the

basic mystification to confront the true problem [Music] but why are there why are there immigrants we should fight to change the social order which makes some people immigrants humanitarianism again is not enough and especially to go even more to the end pacifism is not enough it's horrible to say this AO Ukrainian War but I really despise all those who are saying these days we need peace and so on are We aware that peace the desire for peace is always the desire of occupiers Israel doesn't want anything more than peace on the West Bank peace means

you firmly have under your hand the terrain that you occupied and I'm totally convinced that Russia now wants peace in Ukraine peace means we occupy it we we have the firm hold over it no we live in a crazy time where Wars are no longer the old Wars between nation states but they are really in some sense peace peacekeeping interventions so we need a total mobilization against this type of false piece so uh to conclude I want to destroy another of your maybe Illusions which is yes we have to step out of these political manipulations

and so on we need poets and thinkers no they're the worst I hope to shock you here a little bit my formula is no ethnic cleansing without poetry you you know most of us we are relatively decent people and take any of you since you are probably normally human and me also if I were to kill you obliged to kill you it would be very difficult for me I see you in your eye I see you another human being I cannot do it and here poetry and thinking or religion some high ideology enters as Steven

Weinberg the wellknown quantum cosmologist said he said without religion good people would have been good people and bad people would have been bad people but we need something like religion to make good people do bad things I'm speaking here from from my own experience the horrible Civil War in ex Yugoslavia where we can clearly see how the war was grounded decades ago in nationalist poets and so on just look at modern poetry how many of them from Yates to Ezra pound and so on were fascists so uh uh again since we are minimally decent people

we need poetry or national mythology to make us ready to do horrible things again the horror of today's Wars is that they express something that we no longer can call as when I was young AO Vietnam War the military industrial complex but I think we should call it the poetic military complex the Army doing the work outlined by Poets and thinkers and it's the case today in Russia you cannot understand Putin without Russian nationalist artists doing propaganda for him convincing Russians that they have a special Mission or without his scor philosophers like Alexander Dugan who

claim there is a special Russian truth against opposed to European truth and that only War can decide so we are in a very difficult situation both obvious Solutions that is to say uh uh poetry thinking but also it's opposite brutal pragmatism they don't work and uh I think this is why a true Revolution is needed not the old Communist Revolution but we have to change the basic paradigms of how we perceive reality in 20th century we tried to change the world too quickly too much now we have to step back and interpret understand our world

in a different way thank [Music] you today we conclude with a topic which unfortunately is on all our minds War again so what has the ongoing war in Ukraine to do with freedom I think that ultimately this is some kind of metaphysical war in the sense that it's not just a war about controlling to territory exercise of power it is ultimately a war between different Notions of not freedom but Liberty who is Putin here I don't underestimate Putin he's not just a paranoic maniac who wants to occupy all of Europe he is supported by a

well elaborated metaphysical [Music] vision and I oppose Putin already at this philosophical level I don't know how many of those who follow me now how many of you did notice a very important detail when Putin announced military intervention in Ukraine he mentioned critically only one name Lenin he said you remember uh Ukraine was a bevic invention doesn't exist as a nation and so on and so on so for all those leftists who still think nonetheless the great enemy today is American imperialism so in even if Putin is not exactly a model of democracy he opposes

the greatest threat NATO and United States so we can be his allies if you think like this this should ruin your last Illusions Putin is simply a dangerous National conservative who is thinking in what terms remember many people don't know this which is Liberty provided by a safe network of authoritarian power it's interesting to know who is Putin's official philosopher it's Ian Ilan a conservative Russian theologist from 1920s he escaped Soviet Union and then he developed something that he directly called a new Russian fascism which was an authoritarian patriarchal order Ilan said we only vote

in order to affirm our Collective support for our leader isn't this incidentally how elections effectively work now in Russia so no wonder Ilan is really the official philosopher now do you know that I heard from Russian frch his books are now reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies by the state every military conscript is given them every state administrator is given his books and so on and so on then the present Court philosopher of Putin Alexander dugin follows this line but with a postmodern spin of historicist relativism a quote you have to hear it to

believe it that it's true I'm quoting Alexander Dugan postmodernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing so we believe in what we do we believe in what we say and that is the only way to define the truth so we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept if the United States does not want to start a war you should recognize that United States is not anymore a unique Master this is the question of who rules the world only War could decide really that's Putin's official uh philosopher so what's important

to note here is that uh when Putin when sorry when Dugan says we have our own truth and so on and so on he reduces this truth nonetheless to a couple of big SARS like we can ask what about Ukrainian truth what about Syrian truth no they don't they don't care Russians about them another Russian State philosopher Ephraim ofri said brutally in the next couple of decades the world world will be changed into four great spheres of influence American Russian Chinese and Indian all other sovereign states will disappear they will maybe continue to exist formally

but they will be uh they will be uh subordinated to this this is the vision which you should bear in mind this which is no longer the vision of War as a war between nation states no uh this is why I think within their view of the world Russia is right to claim that their attack on Ukraine is not a war for them War would have been the direct war between Russia and NATO or United States but they are now just on a peacekeeping mission within what they consider their sphere of influence why is this

situation so dragic because uh if anything is clear it is that we all of us Global capitalist order we are at a moment of crisis [Music] I would be even a little bit critical not of Ukrainian heroic resistance to Russia but of how they sometimes ideologically formulate it their formula is we are defending Europe European civilization my God my reaction is if they say this are they not aware that they are already speaking Putin's and uh dugin's language as if there is a European American sphere and Russian sphere and we defend our sphere no I

think that the battle going on in Ukraine is a universal Global battle it's a battle for what the New World Order will be I almost have a Nostalgia for the Cold War which was cold war in the sense that it was war but it was cold kept cold by fixed rules that all sides obeyed now we don't have yet new rules big powers are making experiments of of course experiments at the expense of smaller Nations what the new rules will uh what the new rules will be and the madness is this one exactly in the

situation which is today's where our very existence is under threat first we have global warming it's one cannot even imagine how we will all be affected 10 20 years from now we will have other pandemics we have social problems even in developed countries at this point War returned War which precisely prevents what we need a global cooperation to deal with global warming just think what is clearly happening even if there will be no further big Wars if a compromise will be found in Ukraine there will be refugees because of global warming new deserts are forming

and so on and so on so where will millions of people go in the old time this was decided by Wars today because many states have Atomic weapons chemical weapons and so on we cannot afford this cooperation is a matter of survival uh so let me give you uh an interpretation of what is going on today I think that the mistake of ukrainians who think they are defending Europe is that they don't see that what they call Europe the European civilization is in itself in a deep crisis remember protests like yellow vest in France pemos

in uh Spain and other places these were not protests which articulated a desire to be more European these were signs of a crisis of the existing European civilization itself I think that if or let's hope when Ukraine wins then they will confront the real problem which is what kind of Europe do they want to join do they want this new fundamentalist Europe neoconservative Europe which excludes immigrants and so on or do they want what really is the best in Europe feminism human rights social democratic tradition welfare state and so on and so on so again

now I come to my really please listen to this really crucial point the tragedy of the ongoing war is for me that it's not the moment of truth in the sense of now we were we were fighting wrong battles who cares today about feminism global warming all this is forgotten now we have the real conflict there Europe or Russia no this war is in some sense the deepest lie because through long-term problems disappeared you know where you can feel this or see this clearly something which really made me S happened recently among European conservatives till

now they had some understanding for Putin some of them even said yeah we understand Putin he has his own right on his side as you probably remember Donald Trump openly first praised Putin but now even the extreme right in Europe militarized itself but with an implicit argumentation which I find terrifying the logic is this one this war finally enables us to get rid of all the Pudo problems global warming uh uh uh sexual oppression feminism and so on now the situation is real war neoconservatives follow dug and European conservatives for whom war is the only

true ethical mode moment in war you make the basic choice you do what is needed to do and it's incredible how neoconservatives celebrate what is going on in Ukraine now where they claim uh the proper sexual difference is again established they say forget about transgender and so on no sexual roles are again affirmed women Escape Ukraine with children to do in safety their proper job which is of course raising children and so on while men even return to Ukraine [Music] fighting this is the real conflict and that's for me again the tragedy of this war

EX exactly the wrong interpretation is prevailing against this we should I think adopt some very sad Insight what the first one is that again this is not just a war between Russia in the west or whatever this is a war for a new world order what will be the New World Order and uh the Russian project is clear that's why they don't don't even call the attack on Ukraine war for them this is limited intervention intervention into their own sphere what they want is Global Peace but peace in the sense in which each country big

country is allowed to maintain peace within its sphere of influence to what the Russians call peaceful limited Military uh operation the vision of Russia is that why this is what Putin says again and again I don't get it why doesn't life go on Putin is all the time saying we still deliver oil to the West their vision is as I call it not cold war but hot peace Global Peace where there are always local Wars here and there which maintain peace and this I think is the catastrophe that we should avoid at any point [Music]

something like new nonalignment is needed by this I mean we should not just say we protect the European way of life in Ukraine no our struggle there when we support Ukraine is a global struggle a global struggle for a certain notion of Liberty which in includes again welfare state uh feminist human rights feminism human rights and all that is Progressive in European Legacy what Russia and China unfortunately more and more stand for including some European conservatives who joined them is a type of multiculturalism which is very dangerous which is peaceful coexist of as they say

different ways of life the message of Putin repeatedly to the West is let's coexist you have countries where you do your own stupidities you allow gay marries and so on all that there are other countries Arab countries where you can do cloy beat women whatever why don't we all peacefully exist together together so it's a version of Global Market but between countries Each of which has its own way of life I think we the new nonalignment should mean nonalignment in the sense that we are not aligned to a specific way of life I don't like

when Ukraine are saying but we belong to you we are white people like you you should support us no I don't care about that white Europeans also can do horrible things should we forget that Nazism was done by Germans by the nation which embodies the highest European culture so uh I'm for globalism for Universal struggle but again the universalism which is universalism of of a shared struggle we should not isolate Russia today we should establish all connections possible with maybe the true heroes of this war Russians who risk their lives and D to protest in

all possible way against Putin's war and we should do the same in our own countries this is the solidarity We should strive for so uh uh I think that that's crucial to say our message to Russians who protest against the war in Ukraine is not oh thanks that you are not Patriots you are uh uh universalists no they are the true Patriots a true patriot that's for me the best definition I can imagine a true patriot the one who truly loves his country is a person who is ashamed of his own countries when his country

is doing something wrong that's the difficult thing to doday today I think that there is no more disgusting slogan then the well-known saying my country right or wrong if you say this you are not a true patriot and now to conclude I'm coming back to Freedom the First Act of freedom is to be able to resist your own country when it goes wrong that's even that's why patriotism and freedom are not opposed if Patriot ism is a true patriotism for example my Israeli friends who they oppose terrorism but they understand the difficult plight of Palestinians

in the West Bank they are for me the true inheritors of the great Jewish Legacy that's what we should be able to do this is where true patriot ism is not opposed to internationalism you can be a true patriot and an internationalist and if you are ready to be ashamed of your own country this is the first step towards Freedom today today you cannot be really free without being at least a little bit ashamed of of your own country thank you very much for your patience for watching the great minds and although I have some

doubts if I am really among the great minds I hope at least that I perplexed you a little bit I didn't want you to bring you clear answers so that you can say okay now we know it let's go to sleep I want to disorient you to make you think if I succeeded in this even if you don't agree with me I think I achieved what I wanted so it was an honor for me thank you very much