The Importance of Ideology

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"When you treat ideology as a discourse with a pretension at truth and you combat it at that level you lose," he says. "You will have to concede that all Jews are not good of course they are not." The true problem is not whether what the Nazis were saying about the Jews was true or not, but rather how people should deal with their own prejudices against each other according to his theory.

Radical philosopher, polymath, film star, cult icon, and author of over 30 books, Slavoj Žižek is one of the most controversial and leading contemporary public intellectuals, simultaneously acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ and denounced as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’. In this special lecture for Intelligence Squared from July 2011, Žižek argues that global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis and that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the five stages of grief – ideological denial, explosions of anger, attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and finally acceptance of change. Referencing everything from Kafka, the "Hollywood Marxism" of Avatar, the Arab Spring and WikiLeaks, he presents a roadmap for finding a way beyond the madness.

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