What is freedom today? Slavoj Žižek | Comment Is Free - YouTube

What is freedom today?

In order to be actually free to do what I want, I certainly would like to have the state

and other bodies taking care of things not only without my choice, but even without me

knowing about them.

On the other hand, are we aware to what extent when we freely choose, our choices are pre-determined.

This is why I think the last revelations by Wikileaks are so important. They are about

TISA. A mega important trade agreement – an agreement about the free flow of finances

and information – which is something that will predetermine the contours of world economy

for decades to come. And not only are negotiations secret but we have learned that even the agreements

itself, if it will be accepted, will remain secret for five years. The most dangerous

forum of non-freedom is the non-freedom which is not even perceived as such.

Then there is another forum of freedom, which I think has a disastrous impact and we shouldn’t

underestimate it.

I met at some point in Belgrade in the late 90s when Milosevic was still in power, some probably ethnic cleansers

– nationalists. I’m even ashamed now for doing this but I got into conversation with

them and they gave me a wonderful, short lesson on how nationalism, fundamentalism works.

They told me no, it is not what we hear from you western intellectuals, that we live in

a risk society, everything is open so we nationalists are afraid of this freedom and so we escape

from it into old, fundamentalist ethnic and religious certainties.

They told me no, we experience your Western, liberal world as overregulated. You are all

the time bombarded by messages of be politically correct, don’t be a racist, be careful of

what you eat, discipline yourself and son and so on. And as they told me openly, I want to eat whatevery I want, smoke

I want to steal what I want, I want to beat women, rape them and

so on. And becoming a nationalist, doing some ethnic cleansing, gives me this terrifying

freedom.

This is why I was not surprised when I heard that in the area of Iraq and Syria controlled

by, it is not just religious fundamentalism. There are also gang rapes, tortures, freelance

killings and so on.

You see, this is the problem of fundamentalism – it is not just there is no freedom, there

also is some kind of false freedom, the explosion of this obscene freedom.

For me, the highest form of freedom is love. Here I am a pathetic, old romantic.

Love basically means that you totally dedicate yourself to one other person. You renounce

one of the key freedoms of choice to exchange sexual partners and so on.

Now comes my surprise: this freedom is now gradually taken from us.

I think our idea today is love without the fall. And you know I found some dating agency

which plays on this. They say we will render possible to you to find yourself in love without

the fall.

No! I think the only free love is the fall.

You walk along the street, you slip on a banana peel, a lady

helps you and maybe it will be the love of your life.

But you cannot predict it. Without this fall, love is not love.

So the lesson is true freedom means looking into and questioning the presuppositions of

everything that is given to us by our hegemonic ideology and by ideology I don’t mean here

some explicit teaching but simply the way in our daily lives we experience our reality

to question everything including the notion of freedom itself.

There's a lot wrong with the world at the moment, isn't there? Can we agree on that?

Let's not get into the specifics of what for God's sake!