His current intellectual preoccupation is with the role of the state in western societies – the subject matter of his NYU lecture. His thesis is that over the past 40 years, western democracies have forgotten the positive virtues of collective action. "What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms," he says. "We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, what can the state do that is good?"
At the end of the lecture he was struck by how many young people came up to him expressing amazement at ideas they had never heard before. "This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else."
this probably pretty accurately describes also the position of zizek. needless to say, i am trying to be exquisitely poised on the opposite side of the see-saw. and i don't think our problem is too much individualism. the opposition between self-serving capitalism and the state is a false opposition (or else we're truly screwed).
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