John Gulick wrote:
>
> Doug:
>
> >But how about the ... bartender I overheard in Toronto saying that Bill
> Gates >deserved "every penny" of his fortune? That's a different kind of
> weird. Why do people think that way?
>
> Gulick:
>
> Doug raises a crucial question. Steeped in a populist outlook, much of
> the U.S. "left" (such as it is) clings to a vulgar "propaganda" model
> of what ideology is and how it works.
First, the bartender in Toronto is not in the least weird. He is wrong, very wrong, but he is as rational as those leftists who confuse being wrong with being weird or irrational. The world is filled with irrational acts and irrational conceptions and theories, but "irrational person" simply makes no sense. This is my reason to begin with for saying that Zizek's _question_ was silly. But as this thread tends to show, the question is rather worse than silly, it is aggressively reactionary. (Please note that it is the question, not Zizek, that I am terming silly and reactionary. To assume that because his questions are silly he is would be to accept his Miltonic/Thatcherian premise of a world made up of isolated individuals, with social relations merely being the additive result of the acts of those individuals.
The assumption that the bartender is weird or irrational is also the assumption that (a) social relations are unintelligible and (b) that he/she who calls the bartender irrational or weird has the divine knowledge of individual essences that (as I suggested in an earlier post) Hamlet quite cogently refutes. You can study that bartender from here to eternity and you still won't have an inkling of "why" he thinks as he does.