Good Evening Friends and Happy Thanksgiving!

I trust you are reading this well after you have recovered from your turkey-induced coma. Some of you may have been lucky enough to have been granted or to have secured an extended holiday weekend for yourself. Not I unfortunately but those are the brakes, as the song says.

Friends, I'd like to interrupt our conceptual project to ruminate a little about how ideology (or belief) functons today (as probably as ever).

There is a marvelous Slovenian philosopher called Slavoj Zizek, whose work primarily concerns the nature of belief. What does it mean for someone to say "I believe..." something. There are many videos clips of addresses he has given on the Internet, of course. I first heard of him on a news program called DemocracyNow! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

But I would refer you specifically to a campus address he gave which is available at Authors@Google: and the name, again, is Slavoj Zizek. By way of introduction I should begin as he seems to usually begin - with a story about the quantum physicist Niels Bohr.

It seems that one day a friend, also a scientist, visited Bohr at his country home. Above the entrance the friend observed a horse shoe (in Europe, Zizek informs us that this is a charm to keep evil spirits out of the house). The friend and fellow scientist, somewhat surprised, asked Dr. Bohr if he believed in the power of the horse shoe. Niels Bohr responded to this by saying "No, but I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it."

This, says Zizek, is how ideology functions today - in two ways.

1) Democracy. Zizek says that we act as if democracy [still] works when it doesn't. I know there are activist on the Left, of a certain age, who would certainly say that American democracy doesn't work as well as it used to, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union.

I know from the Internet that this is an important sub-theme in the public addresses of noted scholars and activists, Dr. Michael Parenti and particularly Tariq Ali. We can say that the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society continuum stretching from the late 1930s up to the mid 1970s, was perhaps the period when American political and economic democracy - such as it was - was at its highest level.

In a speech concerning his book, Bush in Babylon, I heard Tariq Ali say that it seems that with the demise of the Soviet Union democracy in America is on the decline - almost as if the American system had to hold up a brave face for propaganda purposes against the Soviet Union. With the dissolution of that empire went the need for the American system to over-exert itself in proving its superiority to the Russian system.

Mr. Ali is also a novelist and filmmaker and he remembers a glorious time when a truly wide spectrum of opinion and perspective was available to the public, in news, the arts, and politics. The western capitalist powers, in general, would allow provacative leftist content of all kinds to be shown on television, which, today, one can barely get the resources and clearances together to show in a documentary film format.

In a speech called Terrorism, Globalization, and Capitalism, Michael Parenti offered a wonderful phrase capturing this post-Soviet period as it relates to American (and western) liberal democracy. "It's no longer capitalism with a human face. It's capitalism in your face."

Because there was a period when American political and economic democracy worked relatively well - by mainstream standards - it was attended by worldwide pro-U.S. propaganda during the entire saga of the Cold War, of course, the system continues this nationalist advocacy in this post-Soviet period, even as the justification for it in terms of real democratic content has dimished over the last twenty years. What I'm saying is that the system continues this pro-U.S. advocacy in the face of decreased justification through the power of inertia, and we, the population as a whole, seem to agree.

We return to Slavoj Zizek's thesis and express it in economic terms: over the last 20-30 years the democratic wage has not kept pace with the inflation, yes, inflation of pro-U.S. propaganda.

You may recall a story I often relate from John Bradshaw's Family Secrets, about the woman and the ham, and how this shows that actions (certainly belief in their necessity and efficacy) continue down through the generations even after they have been detached from their original cause. It's essentially the same thing.

2) Cap and Trade ideology. Individuals do not have to believe. We can ascribe belief to others on our behalf. "Interpassivity." This is the even more interesting of Zizek's analysis on the nature of belief.

You, as an individual do not have to believe in certain things. As long as their are abstract folks out there to whom you can ascribe such a belief to, the system of belief functions. Zizek, in that Google video clip talks about canned laughter on television, Santa Claus, and God.

A. The purpose of canned laughter, says Zizek, is not to cause us to laugh as the Pavlovians would have it. Rather it is to relieve us of the responsibility of laughing. The television has laughed for us and at the end of the program we feel a sense of release as though we have laughed at a half hour program of Friends or some such. Even though you may not feel like laughing at the time, the television does it and through this you stay in touch, in a way, with your sense of humor, I would say. In a way, I would say, canned laughter has the strange dual purpose of honing one's sense of humor at times when he or she is incapable or unwilling to exercise it actively by taking the trouble to laugh.

B. Zizek says that parents will only claim to pretend to believe in Santa Claus for the sake of the children, to assure them that there is magic in the world, I suppose. And he says that children, if you ask them, will say that they pretend to believe in Santa Claus in order not to disappoint their parents and so forth. We might also add parenthetically that perhaps the children know their parents expect them to believe. Its as if neither group, the parents nor the children want to acknowledge belief though both groups attribute it to the other. It's like that old game of hot potato. Still, the system of belief functions.

C. God. According to information Slavoj Zizek saw, Israel is probably the most atheistic country in the world, paradoxically, with polls showing that at least sixty percent of Israeli Jews say that they do not believe in God. It seems that the first prime minister of Israel, Golda Maier, was asked: Do you believe in God? Her answer was "I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God."

I will continue with this tomorrow. I can say that these ideas have made me modify my ideas on love. We will also apply the structure of belief to criminology in looking at the so-called sociopath.

Until next time, then.

wingedcentaur