A fraction of the wit and insight
The event was billed as “the debate of the century”, “The Rumble in the Realm of the Mind”, and it did have the feel of a heavyweight boxing match: Jordan Peterson, local boy, against the slapdash Slovenian Slavoj Žižek, considering “Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism” in Toronto.
In other words the event was hyped, so as to bring in more gullible punters and thus more cash. Woopeedoo.
The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.
One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.
Imagine bothering to pay a lot of money for tickets to listen to that.
And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.
And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.
No bang, much whimper.
Two boorish, woman-hating middle-aged white men meet up to bitch at each other and it's a "meeting of minds". If only they had a fraction of the wit and insight of Mumsnet.https://t.co/dvCF0N2TqD
— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) April 20, 2019
More. Their “enemies” are not playing the victim. Their enemies are simply refusing to be victims anymore and are speaking up about it to say “Guys, don’t do that”. Which is threatening to white male hegemony, the patriarchy, capitalism (apparently, anyway), and toxic masculinity.
So they take strong women standing up and saying “I refuse to be a victim any longer” and rebrand that as “playing the victim” so they can have their narrative. And the media goes along, and the public goes along, and everyone can keep hating women, feeling justified because now women are too busy “playing the victim” to do anything worthwhile, at least in the narrative. While they are managing, somehow, to oppress those who are interviewed on every issue, hold most of the power in government, in academia, in commerce, and in most households.
Last I checked, isn’t Slavoj Zizek part of the academic left? In fact, from the little I’ve seen of him, he seems to be an archetypal academic leftist, in that he seems more interested in abstract, theoretical naval-gazing and psychobabble than in anything else.
Men like these make me want to rethink publicly funded academies. Yeesh.
Here, a live commentary: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/live-commentary-on-the-zizek-peterson-debate
It’s funny, I promise.:D
Thank you, Kristjan. That is indeed funny; and, I suspect, is a great deal more amusing than the peacocking it describes.