Episode #199 ... A conservative communist's take on global capitalism and desire. (Zizek, Marx, Lacan)

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. Apologize for the short delay on the episode. As some of you know, I was expecting a son to be born in May, but he decided to come six weeks early a few days ago. So we've been in and out of the NICU all week. Thank you for your patience. Good news is the next three Mondays in a row, we're dropping episodes, so you can look forward to that, I guess. I'm just gonna get started on this one. Quick heads up though. This is a bit of a longer episode. I tried to cut it down, but I really wanted to take some additional care with some of these ideas today. I always try to be respectful of your time and the ideas. Look, I promise if you stick with it, it'll all come together by the end of the episode. So last time we talked about how there's this common way people will talk about politics. They'll say, you know, that person over there is on the left. This person over here is on the right. And we talk about how do a lot of philosophers these days, how that's ultimately too simple a way to think about it if you ever want to understand the complexity of the ways people look at things. People's views don't often fall into a neat binary like that. It's become more and more common for people to be conservative on some issues, progressive on others. And more than that, these days, it's become more common to be talking about global issues that have so many moving parts to them that it can be pretty tough to just label somebody strictly left or right if they're not a complete cartoon of a person. I mean, don't get me wrong. On one hand, there's always uncle Murray, red faced, strumming his guitar, going off on the leftist at Thanksgiving dinner. Classic uncle Murray behavior. And, of course, there's always people out there that are putting the finishing touches on their most recent passive activism protest sign, putting extra glitter on it this time so that it really changes some people's minds. There's no shortage of people out there that are fine with dismissing uncle Murray's entire existence as well. There's certainly people, I mean, that are fully captured ideologues on one side or the other of this. But outside of their visibility on whatever algorithm gives you your information about the world, is it even useful to reduce everyone's world views down into a neat little binary like left and right? Lot of smart people these days say no. But if we resist that temptation to just reduce the complexity of the situation down, like we also talked about last episode, the terms left and right can still be useful in some cases as flexible indicators of evolving political ideals that lie underneath. Well, what do you mean by that, Stephen West? …