Slavoj Žižek: What's Wrong with Fundamentalism?

The logic is here the same as that of Anne Frank who, in her diaries, expresses belief in the ultimate goodness of man in spite of the horrors accomplished by men against Jews in World War II: what renders such an assertion of belief (in the essential goodness of Man; in the truly human character of the Soviet regime) sublime, is the very gap between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, i.e. the active will to disavow the actual state of things. Perhaps therein resides the most elementary meta-physical gesture: in this refusal to accept the real in its idiocy, to disavow it and to search for Another World behind it. The big Other is thus the order of lie, of lying sincerely. And it is in this sense that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity": even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence, their full engagement in the symbolic ritual, while "the worst," the mob, engage in (racist, religious, sexist...) fanaticism? Is this opposition not a good description of today's split between tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of "passionate intensity"?¹

The Žižek quote above reminds me of an article I once read about reasons why liberalist and conservative thoughts have such a gap (or maybe "split" in lacanese). The article was written by a professor of social sciences in US. The name of the professor now escapes me and I cannot find the link to the article. But, the basic logic or attraction of conservative ideology as I remember it (read: religious/political fundamentalism of any kind, which we have a fare share in Finland too, we do not need to go into american evangelicals) is that it gives very clear answers to basic human questions. I think in lacanese this means: how should we manage our enjoyment? While conservative thinking is very precise in this the liberal opposition does have very weak answers. Regarding this an example: finnish television recently aired a debate which precisely illustrates this. The debate between pro-daycare activist Jarkko Tontti, and children-should-be-taken-care-by-their-mother partisan Nina Mikkonen turned to be a farce between aggressive conservative Mikkonen "speaking from her heart" and cool Tontti, who backed his side with supporting scientific studies. Precisely this brings us to a point, or two points actually. First is that precise answers backed with strong emotion, (never mind how dubious the ideological background; i.e. who is speaking when we talk about the "best of the children"?) make a strong case against the liberal we-can-change-our-mind-if-scientific-studies-point-to-other-direction position. The second point can be found in the next quote of Žižek.

At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meet Pascal: "Fake it until you make it.." However, this causality of the habit is more complex than it may appear: far from offering an explanation of how beliefs emerge, it itself calls for an explanation. The first thing to specify is that Pascal's "Kneel down and you will believe!" has to be understood as involving a kind of self-referential causality: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!" The second thing is that, in the "normal" cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another, onto a "subject supposed to believe," so that the true logic is: "Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!" One has to take this literally and even risk a kind of inversion of Pascal's formula: "You believe too much, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw immediacy? Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR BELIEF - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!" That is to say, what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one's own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one's belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? To believe - to believe "directly," without the externalizing mediation of a ritual - is a heavy, oppressing, traumatic burden, which, through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring it onto an Other...¹

So the more you make clear that you believe in your cause (kneel down, act as you believe...), the more you make others believe on behalf of you. This is visible in muslim religion (if you behave like a believer, pray on the designated hours and take part in other rituals you are a true believer) and in christian cults too. There is no third way.

"...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity." W.B Yeats²

¹ WITH OR WITHOUT PASSION What's Wrong with Fundamentalism?
² Quoted in the beginning of the same article by Žižek.