Thus, the cunning of capitalist reason chose entertaining presidents for the USA, back to back: Bill Clinton & then George W. Bush.
Charles used to say often in his Zizekian fashion: It's not that the Big Brother is watching you, it's that you are watching the Big Brother.
***** From LRB Vol 21, No 6 | cover date 18 March 1999
'You May!'
Slavoj Zizek writes about the Post-Modern Superego
...A good illustration of the way the 'totalitarian' master operates is provided by the logo on the wrapper around German fat-free salami. 'Du darfst!' it says - 'You may!' The new fundamentalisms are not a reaction against the anxiety of excessive freedom that accompanies liberal late capitalism; they do not provide strong prohibitions in a society awash with permissiveness. The cliché about 'escaping from freedom' into a totalitarian haven is profoundly misleading. Nor is an explanation found in the standard Freudo-Marxian thesis according to which the libidinal foundation of totalitarian (fascist) regimes is the 'authoritarian personality' - i.e. someone who finds satisfaction in compulsive obedience. Although, on the surface, the totalitarian master also issues stern orders compelling us to renounce pleasure and to sacrifice ourselves in some higher cause, his effective injunction, discernible between the lines, is a call to unconstrained transgression. Far from imposing on us a firm set of standards to be complied with, the totalitarian master suspends (moral) punishment. His secret injunction is: 'You may.' He tells us that the prohibitions which regulate social life and guarantee a minimum of decency are worthless, just a device to keep the common people at bay - we, on the other hand, are free to let ourselves go, to kill, rape, plunder, but only insofar as we follow the master. (The Frankfurt School discerned this key feature of totalitarianism in its theory of repressive desublimation.) Obedience to the master allows you to transgress everyday moral rules: all the dirty things you were dreaming of, everything you had to renounce when you subordinated yourself to the traditional, patriarchal, symbolic Law you are now allowed to indulge in without punishment, just as you may eat fat-free salami without any risk to your health.
The same underlying suspension of moral prohibitions is characteristic of Post-Modern nationalism. The cliché according to which in a confused, secular, global society, passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values should be turned upside down: nationalist fundamentalism works as a barely concealed 'you may'. Our Post-Modern reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with rules and regulations which are intended to serve our well-being (restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against sexual harassment). A passionate ethnic identification, far from further restraining us, is a liberating call of 'you may': you may violate (not the Decalogue, but) the stiff regulations of peaceful coexistence in a liberal tolerant society; you may drink and eat whatever you want, say things prohibited by political correctness, even hate, fight, kill and rape. It is by offering this kind of pseudo-liberation that the superego supplements the explicit texture of the social symbolic law.
The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways. Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is not, 'Do your duty, I don't care whether you like it or not,' but: 'You must do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it.' (This is how totalitarian democracy works: it is not enough for the people to follow their leader, they must love him.) Duty becomes pleasure. Second, there is the obverse paradox of pleasure becoming duty in a 'permissive' society. Subjects experience the need to 'have a good time', to enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and, consequently, feel guilty for failing to be happy. The superego controls the zone in which these two opposites overlap - in which the command to enjoy doing your duty coincides with the duty to enjoy yourself....
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize2106.htm> *****
What Zizek says applies to American culture best.
Yoshie