Doug can be accurately accused of repressing the reptilian brain. And good for him. Reptile politics would be pretty scary.
On the other hand I have always that Zizek Magnus was always quite reptilian. Anybody who can listen to Zizek while assuming the lotus position deserves to go off the deep end.
The following Zizek rondo walks appreciably like crocodile as far as I can see:
"Are we aware what is happening here? It is that in the last twenty years, the idea of a large collective act was kind of a phobic object. Everyone was afraid of it, like isn't it the lesson of the catastrophe of real socialism that we don't need large concentrated power decisions but this—and you can use all the poetic expressions—this organic interaction, all the poetic interaction, not command claim and so on. So the idea is that we should have a more dispersed, open capitalism, antiauthoritarian and so on. If there is anything becoming clear today for me, it's that we need to rehabilitate the notion of big, large, collective acts.
"Here then, even—for example, intellectual property—I mean, I even spoke with some conservative economists, who considered the point that intellectual property is—if I may put it in slightly ironic terms—is inherently communist, in the sense that it resents—it rebels against being treated as private property, which is why with some new software products, you know, that companies spend more money on how to prevent its free circulation of a product than on the product itself. I mean, I have nothing personally against Bill Gates, but as a nice [inaudible] conservative economist—sorry, I forgot his name—at some debate put it, that the fact that a guy who was thirty years ago nothing can be now—OK, he's no longer—now he's third, but he was the richest man in the world, this shows that intellectual property is a topic which cannot be properly value represented of the market. You get two crazy vibrations. Like he put it, with a normal commodity, material, of course, prices go up and down. It's like a normal EKG when you fear you have an attack, no? But with intellectual property, it's like a heart attack, you know? It oscillates too wildly, like, you—there is a problem. I think that the dynamic—social economic dynamic itself will force us to socialize it more and more, that it doesn't work, intellectual property. Then, of course, the entire problem of not only ecology, then there is the—all this biogenetic debate and so on."
On the other hand there was one interesting thing that Zizek said in his monologue with Amy Goodman:
"AMY GOODMAN: —you look at the protest, you look at the invasion, you look at the occupation, you look at war, and you say it's all of a piece, one reinforces the other. Can you talk about that?
"SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No, it's not so much that I was against the protests. I myself participated in protests. I just do not share the enthusiasm of some of even big European intellectuals, like Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, who saw in that widespread movement of protest almost a birth of the new civil society movement in Europe. What bothered me is the way the protest was in a way parasitic upon—upon—OK, the other guys, those in power who wanted the war, how they legitimized each other.
"For me, that protest was part of what I see as the main failure. But it's not a subjective failure. It's in the situation of modern left, which all too often for me adopts this rather comfortable moralizing position of we condemn, we criticize, but like we can't do anything more, so this safe moralizing position, which is why, as I like to emphasize, I was in Great Britain, in United Kingdom in that point. And what did strike me is how, after the big protests, both sides appeared satisfied in a strange way. The organizers of demonstrators made their point: you see the majority is behind us, people oppose war, we made our point. But silently, they knew they didn't stop the war, nothing. Blair government, the other side, was also satisfied. You see what an open society is: even when a country goes to war, we can—and again, the best answer, I think, was provided unintentionally by George Bush when he visited at that time UK. I remember, when asked by journalists, "How do you comment on big protests against you?" he said, "I totally support them, because, you see, that's why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this, massive protest against the government, so that things like this could happen only—will happen also in Iraq." So, of course, this was either a bad joke or hypocrisy or whatever you want. But there is a truth in it. Everyone, in a way, all the sides, felt satisfied. And this is what often worries me, this—how should I put it?—secret, symbiotic relationship. Those in power like a certain type of moralistic protest, which does nothing.
"And again, I think that even—of course, everybody likes them Zapatistas in Mexico—that even Zapatistas fell a little bit into that trap. At the beginning, they were a little bit of a serious threat. Then when their—this famous anonymous leader, Subcomandante Marcos, then he made the choice of playing this, how should I call it, moral authority, you know, and at that point making comments on what is wrong in Mexican society. From that point on, everybody loves him now, you know? Everybody—oh, yes, he's our moral consciousness, and so on and so on.
"But again, I'm not simply reproaching the left for it, because, how to put it, of course now then there is the cruel question: but what can the left do? What can you effectively do? So I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing this. I'm just saying—what I'm saying is basically one simple thing. I repeat it in all my talks, and so on. It's fashionable to make fun of Fukuyama, End of History, but even the majority of today's left is effectively, if I may make an adverb, Fukuyamaists. Basically, isn't it that most of us leftists silently believe capitalism is here to stay, parliamentary democracy is what we [inaudible], so the problem is simply how to make it work better? Our ultimate horizon is, again, in the same way as we were talking about socialism with a human face, global capitalist democracy with a human face. And for me, the key question is, is this enough?"
Good old Zz!