Ignorance, as I am coming to realize, is defined by the bad faith of seeking to feel like one has solid ground beneath their feet. I mean choose your medicine: doxa (popular opinion), religion, atheism, the scientific method, art, sobriety, addiction, Capitalism, Marxism, etc.,etc… We see as much Zizek’s distinction between the fool and the knave. The fool is the court jester that seeks to undermine power’s authority. This was typified by the joke concerning the Tartar who met a Russian couple on the road and told the husband that not only was he going to rape his wife, but he was going to force him to hold the Tartar’s balls while he violated the peasant’s wife so that they didn’t get dirty on the dirt road. After the deed was done, and the Tartar was riding away, the husband laughed. When the wife asked how he could laugh, he responded, triumphantly, that he had got the Tartar since he did let his balls drag in the dirt –the strategy of the fool. And we see as much through media and the leftist expressions of it. In this sense, Maher’s Real Time and Stewarts The Daily Show is a little like the little piece of Jouissance the peasant husband had stolen from the Tartar.
And we see as much in those who would adapt the radical purely for sake of the radical. They think they are standing on solid ground by pointing to the illusion of solid ground involved in mainstream beliefs. But isn’t the solid ground of their contrarian position just as delusional?
The other side of the equation is the knave who seeks their solid ground in the status quo. Zizek illustrates this though another joke. A man goes into a bar and finds that every time he orders a drink, a monkey skitters down the bar and washes his balls in the man’s drink. Eventually, the man, out of frustration, asks the gypsy who is going about the bar playing his violin and taking requests why the monkey is doing it to which the gypsy, the knave, answered in the affirmative, started strumming his violin, and sang “why is the monkey washing his balls in my drink?” Is this not the same mocking of any complaints against Capitalism that we see in Fox News and Rush Limbaugh? It is as if we should simply accept our fates and any refusal to do so is merely a sign of weakness that warrant chastisement by the players in the given power structure.
It is this dynamic that has allowed pro-Capitalist drones to affirm their (a) rationality through a kind of rock star diva nonchalance. Take, for instance, Mary Matalin’s response to Maher’s points, on real time, about global warming being a man made phenomenon with a casual point:
“I hope you don’t expect me to ride a bike to work.”
Ultimately, it is about confirming precarious notions through the grounding of popularity. And don’t we see the same dynamic at work in what we do on these boards? Don’t we seek to reinforce our beliefs (the solid ground) through how many others we get to respond (how long our strings become) or, on Face book, how many likes we happen to get?