https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dyonAUXicLs
in that debate with Zizek, there was a piece that we’re going to clip out and but it’s part of something I already clipped out of a 15-minute piece of that debate. I talked about the Communist Manifesto as a call to bloody violent revolution and a significant proportion of the audience who were obviously pro-Marxist and had come to hear Zizek hopefully defend their hero cheered and laughed when I talked about bloody violent revolution. And you know it it’s also the case that once you make the prop look I’ve been trying to understand for example when the left goes too far you know where’s the cutoff line it’s very difficult to draw but the problem with the insistence that power structures everything is that as soon as you insist upon that you justify you can’t help but justify your own use of power and then that for me as a psychoanalytic thinker let’s say then that makes me suspicious that perhaps that’s the motivation for the entire bloody argument it’s like well everything’s about power so it’s perfectly fine for me to express power in whatever way I see fit especially if I’m serving the oppressed or I’m serving some higher moral order but really what I’m trying to do is to find a justification for my expression of naked power and you can see the enjoyment in the crowd when that phrase about bloody violent revolution popped out it’s like yes yes it’s really that’s what you want and who is it exactly here that’s animated by the desire for power and so I mean is the is the driving force behind the insistence that all our social institutions are based on power the desire to justify power as a political weapon that is that is indubitably a significant part of the attraction though I think it takes its strength fundamentally morally from the perception that this mode of analysis can help us redress suffering you insist yeah you insisted earlier and I’ve I was speaking with someone else who made the same case very recently I can’t remember who it was but it’ll come to me you know that there’s no impulse to action without a drive toward the good but I’m not so sure about that I think that people can become hurt enough and bitter enough and resentful enough so that they are driven by the desire to make things worse that there isn’t a good oh certainly but that that’s I mean I know absolutely but I mean there is there’s a there’s a however misperceived there’s some end in the activity I’m not saying it’s it’s a good move and just be like because I’ve thought about Hitler in this regard too it’s like there’s this old psychoanalytic dictum that Jung I believe formulated I haven’t been able to find exactly where he he stated it unfortunately but the gist of it is that if you don’t understand the motivation for something you look at the outcome and you infer the motivation and so then I look at Hitler and he committed suicide in a bunker after berating Germany for failing to live up to his noble ideal left the entire country in flames left the entire continent in ruins in this massive conflagration he was always interested in the worship of fire I mean and so you know one interpretation would be that Hitler was attempting to produce you know a new world order another would be that he was aiming at committing suicide in the midst of Europe in flames and that was the outcome and I’m kind of likely to attribute that motivation you know you can think about it as a warped attempt to to pursue the good you know in in the form of let’s say an extreme nationalism and the binding of a tribe but to me it’s more shaking his fist at God in the sky and saying you know here’s here’s my revenge on the world you created and I don’t see a good I don’t see any drive to good in that except peripherally oh sure sure I’m not I’m not saying I’m certainly not saying that these things are actually good what I’m saying I know I know you’re not yeah yeah that the action that the action however uh uh perverse perceives even if it’s just the the perception of the furtherance of the self-sown will to power you know there’s what I’m saying is it’s moved by a perception of an end and that end may be completely cataclysmic uh I’m not I’m not not it wouldn’t frankly that’s why the whole work of education the whole work of of education of of parenting of of our social institutions aims at we hope enlightening or helping the individual to better perceive what is really good good and and so you know yeah ask you about that so I’ve been thinking psychologically again about Christianity and I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought but that predated but it looked to me like and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia and some of them were derived from Greece and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources but they all seem to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is and now I see these cathedrals these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor and produce a dome-like structure that represents the sky and you see christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force and you ask yourself well what exactly is that signifying and the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that’s associated with let’s say universal love and truth in speech that’s the logos is summed up in two phrases and if there’s no metaphysical reality there at all there’s still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human what imaginative effort cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to and I just don’t see that case being made very strongly and I can’t really understand why because isn’t it rather obvious that at least part of what christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal certainly I would say so and I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their of the proof of there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is well let’s let’s just approach this from a couple of different angles jordan you know the first is I mean one of the things that I profoundly believe is that you know these young people seeking you know deeper answers and you know to however much they may be flailing about you know it’s not their fault that many perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them will denigrate will tell them no none of this thing that none of these things that you’re seeking are really real I mean I think you know I’ve been talking thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture and it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture to live in relation to brutalist architecture it is as if you had a parent that said you know you’re nothing you’re nothing you’ll never amount to any of course there are terrible people terrible to say people actually there are people in these situations who live with with such dysfunctional uh uh lack of love and antagonism this is the way that the home life that they that some people terribly have but I’m using this as an example because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are there is no truth there is no beauty you are nothing except it it’s just a concrete annihilating force and and and and and you see this culture of repudiation I mean here in in not here you’re in Canada I’m in the states in savannah now but you know the Chateau Laurier I think I misspoke recently called it the the Frontenac which is in Quebec but in Ottawa you know the Chateau Laurier there’s been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-gothic building and it went through six rounds of approval to finally be to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural or review board whatever it was and I thought well it can’t be that bad you know it’s gone through that and I mean this structure is abhorrent it looks like a a cross between a uh a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary I mean it is just a it is a declaration that there that there is no higher order at all