Good Evening Friends,

We continue with our merest summary of a thunbnail sketch of the tip of the iceberg of the ideas of Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. It could hardly be otherwise in a blog. After all, he has had a long career of involvement in radical left politics and has written more than fifty books on history, religion, philosophy, political theory, and the like, and he appears to continue to be going strong. We are interested in his theory of belief.

We said last time that we would try to apply them to the so-called sociopath and crime and punishment. I said that I wanted to use the formula: fear = greed = violence. I want to say something about violence today. Actually, Dr. Zizek had written a book called "Violence," which, unfortunately I have not had the chance to read yet. So I am unfamiliar with how he develop his thesis about violence, but I will deal with violence as an attack on belief.

Violence of all kinds, physical, emotional, financial (in the form of fraud), is an attack on belief. When a man walks down the street at ten o'clock at night and is mugged, his belief that an honest man can walk down the street without being preyed upon by criminal "scum." We feel even more violated because our virtue has clearly not shielded us from harm.

When a woman "cheats" on her husband, she has committed violence against him. She has attacked not only his, but their shared belief in the integrity of their love. Indeed (barring situations in which the husband may be physically and/or verbally abusive to her, or otherwise married her under false pretenses, or something like that) she has committed an assault against LOVE itself.

Last time I ended by posing this question: If a husband is In-Love with his wife and she is merely, hopefully at least, In-Desire with him, as we have defined these terms ad nauseum, and she cheats on him with another man with whom she is truly and actually In-Love, as we have rigorously defined the concept, has she honored love or dishonored it?

I just said that she has definitely committed violence against him, his belief in the integrity of their love. It is their (his and her) shared belief in their interity of their love that has come under assault. Remember, we said before that individuals do not have to personally hold beliefs in order for them to function.

We can say that the husband personally believed in their love (he was In-Love with his wife), and the wife did not personally "believe" in their love as he did (he was In-Desire with her husband). But by marrying him she participated in the construction of the systemic belief in love governing their relationship.

She had agreed to act as if she were In-Love with him, for whatever reason. Let us assume that this couple have no children. We don't want to bring simple guilt into this. She "loves" her husband, of course. It could also be that she is not aware that she is not In-Love with her husband - until her true heart's desire inflames her heart, in the form of some handsome nature photographer or something.

As I mentioned before, I do think there is still some confusion about the difference between love and desire. Narcissus was not confused, however. He was, in my opinion, monastically clear about it.

On the other hand, maybe the woman did understand that her feelings for her husband are not at quite the same pitch as her husband's for her. Then why did she marry him? Perhaps because of the statistical rarity, as I had previously suggested, of the mutuality of the In-Love state in every cohabitating couple. If everybody waited for those with whom they are precisely In-Love with (and I am not talking about a mystical "ONE YOU WERE MADE FOR!"), then we as a species might almost never reproduce - again for reasons I mentioned before: war, starvation, dislocations, unemployment, industrial accidents, effects of climate change, and so on.

But since the aligment of two hearts is so rare, shouldn't she leave her husband for the other man? Isn't she almost duty-bound to do so "in the name of love?"

If I believed that love was something that exists outside of the human species as an "objective" reality handed down to us and modeled for us by "God," then I might say yes. But since I believe that what we call "love" arose as a unique component of our evolution and an apparently necessary emotion for our survival, I think of it as more fragile than I would if I thought it was an objective force like gravity.

Because I believe this is so, the belief in Love seems critical. In short, I think that if we were to atomistically focus on billions of personal feelings and wants and whims apart from a shared (if not personally felt) belief in love, it would be difficult to have a stable society.

to be continued.