On Zizek

 

Okay so Zizek has this whole thing where he says to be truely atheist one has to go through Christianity and like... it's not just edgy philosophical posturing. There's actually a lowkey Europe centered bias baked into this claim. Even when he frames it as some deep philosophical insight rather than just cultural bias, the whole argument quietly puts Christianity on a pedestal. It treats the death of the Christian God as THE central event that everyone everywhere needs to process to reach real athiesm. Which is weird. And kind of exclusionary and non-universalist when you think about it. Heres what really gets me. Many non christian traditions already articulate ways of living without a creator God, without some transcendent authority figure handing down morality, without cosmic guarentees that everything means something. And they do it way more straightforwardly than Christianity ever has. Buddhism is literally centered on impermanence and suffering without any divine babysitter. Daoism gives you ethics without commands or laws or some grand teleological endpoint. Certain Hindu philosophical schools just dissolve the ego and any concept of ultimate personal authority entirely. A lot of Indigenous worldviews build ethics around relational responsibility instead of obey the sky daddy or else. None of these require the absolutley wild interpretive gymnastics Zizek does to make Christianity somehow arrive at athiesm. So why does he insist Christianity is uniquely positioned to produce true atheism when other traditions are already way closer to that destination? It's not because those traditions are philosophically weak or whatever. It's because Zizek's entire intellectual project grows out of a very specific European story. Hegel, Christian theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and centuries of post Christian cultural hangover.

From inside that bubble, Christianity looks like the main event, the Big Other has to die publicly and dramaticaly for freedom and responsibility to emerge. But thats a regional trauma, not the universal human condition. Zizek just treats it like it is. Because of this framing, Zizek ends up forcing a super selective reading onto Christianity itself. He's not asking what Christianity has actually meant to believers throughout history or how it functions in real religious practise. He's asking what it can be made to mean within his hegelian lacanian framework. The crucifixion becomes the symbolic death of the Big Other. Christ's abandonment proves God is internally divided. The Holy Spirit gets rebranded as collective human responsibility. It's clever, sure, and definitely provocative. But it's also clearly instrumental. Christianity is just philosophical raw material getting bent into whatever shape he needs. And here's the really frustrating part. There's this performative contradiction at the heart of it all. Christianity supposedly abolishes all priviledged positions and destroys divine authority from within, right? But then Zizek elevates Christianity itself into this uniquely privileged worldview, the one tradition everyone must conceptually pass through, even just to leave it behind. That literally recreates the exact cultural heirarchy his reading claims to dismantle. If you're coming from a Buddhist, Daoist, Indigenous, or any non-European background, this has to sound like thinly veiled cultural supremacy, even if thats not what he intends. Look, I'm not saying Zizek is useless or being intellectually dishonest.

His work is genuinely brillant at diagnosing what's broken in western societies, especially post-Christian ones where belief in God collapsed but everyone just replaced it with new Big Others, History, Progress, the Market, the Nation, whatever. His Christian atheism functions as sharp internal critique, a way for Western thought to process the death of its own God without secretly rebuilding new ones. As a local analytical tool, it's actually pretty insightful. But as a universal framework for atheism or ethics? It doesn't travel far. It demands everyone pass through this specificaly Christian conceptual doorway even when their traditions never entered that room in the first place. A genuinely pluralistic, global approach wouldnt need to crown one religious tradition as the supreme route to atheism. It could just recognize that different cultures have developed different ways of confronting meaninglessness, suffering, and responsibility, sometimes with way less metaphysical drama and way more directness. Zizek's still valuable as a critic of Western ideology, dont get me wrong.

Ok, so I will try to interpret Zizek's interpretation in my own way. I think Zizek is saying that the best way to be an atheist is not to directly come at that position, but rather to first believe in the father figure, an idea that assures you your place and your role in the universe, and then not believe in him once you understand how the world works and pull the ideological rug under your feet. This makes total sense to me; how can a person experience the full essence of being an atheist if he hasn't already had the belief in the first place, if he hasn't had the difficult confrontation? Easy atheism with vulgar logic is dull, while hard atheism due to the inception of agnosticism is interesting. I will give my example to make it engaging.

I didn't believe in god as a child because I was still in the childhood phase when such a question doesn't even occur to you. If your mother says he exists then it must exist for you. If someone had bought me a toy for believing he doesn't exist then I would, at that moment, give up believing in god. I thought it was just what you believe in or not believe in. But what does someone mean by believing? I had no clue. I hadn't socialized myself with the intellectual part of a religion, i.e. god. I saw cartoons about various gods and found them amusing as any child would. I heard stories and took them for entertainment. And a year before I hit puberty I was into Greek mythology. I read it because the fantastical stories seemed interesting. It was my manga.

I was also very much into science and wanted to be an engineer. So I also picked up on trashing believers. I was putting on the whole set of clothes if I had to be into science. But still I had no clue what god is. So it was easy for me to not believe in him. This innocent ignorance is what I am talking about. But once I was 13 years old I got a sudden existential depression when, all of a sudden, a question occurred to me in a serious way for the first time. My place and role in this world? Feeling a void inside you. A sudden rush of metaphysical anxiety and confusion. People ask you what is making you depressed, but you don't have the language to articulate it at that age. This drove me to a point that it was unbearable for me to stay awake. I was constantly bursting into tears at any time.

My mom was unsettled by this and called my uncle to talk to me, because I wouldn't talk to my mom about it. I told her she isn't getting what is in my head. So I felt some kind of peace with my uncle also because my father was and has been absent in my life and I didn't think he understood me at all, also because of our language barrier. But my uncle assessed my condition promptly and started a spiritual conversation with me and talked about in which stories I felt most comfort. So I went to the traditional stories with morals and virtue, and not the Greek mythology with obscenity. So there was this one god out of many that appealed to me the most and then we later dived into the religion as a whole, and from then on I went down the rabbit hole finding my place and role in it to comfort myself. In retrospect I think it was to cope but at that time it was like I was in a quest for objective truth. I also think, by my uncle's history of depression and belief in faith but also contradicting that by saying he does and doesn't believe in god, he was also coping and offered me a cope.

I was very intellectually religious in my own heterodox way and was always reading the mythology, which I considered history of course. I became very much consumed by it and everything in my life had to be related to it. I wasn't a practicing religious but more philosophical. My morals and principles were shaped by my own interpretations of the mythology. If someone gave his interpretation which I found to be dumb and not consistent with the whole mythology then I rejected it. So my thinking wasn't orthodox but was very regressive in other ways. I knew in my heart that women should be free to work outside home if they wish to. But for my religion I clinched my fist and accepted that god had given the woman the duty to be the manager of the home. Even though I didn't like it in the back of my mind, I accepted it just for the consistency with the whole world view I had made around that father figure, which by now had transformed to a friend figure. I also came to believe that science could not explain certain things that only spirituality/religion could. I was very seriously into it. There were times when my religious mom was worried for me because I was talking about becoming an ascetic once I hit 75 years old and was talking some absurd shit. So for 4 years I was like this.

Later I thought that god had made this world to see us grow. So we had to know the reality of the universe and to do that we need to find him through all sorts of ways; there was scientific and spiritual method. So I became interested in physics and wanted to know the fundamentals of reality. I also loved physics because I loved doing science and math in general just for the sake of it. So I shifted my dream from an engineer to a physicist. It was the summer of 2020 during the pandemic and I was 17 years old. I was thinking about what to do during my summer break and decided to order the 3 books by Yuval Noah Harari. They were constantly creeping into my world through my nerdy friend reading Sapiens in 2016, an art teacher I found reading it in 2017, and another book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, I found in the UCLA library in 2019 during my exchange program in California, my computer teacher reading Homo Deus in 2019, then finally Sapiens again from a YouTuber in 2020. I was stubborn not to read them until then. The kinda person who doesn't do shit until he feels it in the heart.

I was not only very religious at that time but had also drunk the numerology and astrology kool-aid. It is funny because these were the same things I used to make fun of out of the absurdity of the logic before turning 13 but now thought that they were not properly understood by science and that science has no means to disprove them. I thought science was ignorant lol. But Harari's books burst my bubble and forced me to question my beliefs. The evolutionary story was different from what I had learned in my classroom. It planted a seed in me, a seed of doubt. Maybe we humans really are storytellers and the religions we have built are nothing more than a story in our evolutionary journey. Our species' history narrated like that and also speculating the dystopian future and by the acceptance of the probability of it at that moment left me asking myself: all of what I believed in must be a cope. Because the next thing that is coming, this cope is not cope enough. For such a soulless dystopian reality you need a different cope.

By then I was emotionally more stable to accept agnosticism and hold two contradictory facts in my mind. So for the question of whether God exists, now for me it was like: this cannot be experimentally tested, so logically, one must remain agnostic about it. If there’s no way to test whether a god can influence you, then the most sensible thing to do is not believe in it unless there’s proof. Imagine I give you a locked box and tell you that there might be a billion dollars inside, but you can only open it when you’re drowning in debt. How would you live your life? You could go on believing the money is there, fantasizing about what you’ll do with it and enjoying the feel-good chemicals in your brain. Or maybe down yourself in debt only to realize there was no money in the box. Or you could make a backup plan in case there’s no money inside. The second choice is more realistic and forces you to be independent of the money in the box. If you later find out the money was there all along, great that's cherry on the cake, but blind belief won’t get you far. When something isn’t scientifically testable, you have to think critically about which choice makes the most sense and is the most advantageous.

Agnosticism is a very unstable state. I could deal with the duality but had to practice one or the other. So I chose to be an atheist for my advantageous position. I don't want the uncertainty of being destroyed again. It is better to be destroyed right now than in any other uncertain time. I can handle the contradiction but not the uncertainty. So this was my new cope to face the new Harari future, which I had no idea of before. After that I had to actively relearn my position in this world by looking outside my religion and started going through history and other disciplines, which only solidified my disbelief in god. I knew there still were things science can't explain because they are not falsifiable. But I thought such things should be of no concern to me because they don't affect me directly. This attitude distanced me away from spirituality, astrology and numerology shit too.

I was also not the Richard Dawkins kind of militant atheist because I was agnostic. I just didn't care if others believe in a god or not. I don't for now. Maybe in the future who knows but today I feel like he doesn't exist. It was also as if I was living under a rock. To be fair to me I think it was understandable because I have been in a boarding school since I was 6 years old and we just had 3 months of holidays to meet our parents and internet access inside the school was limited. It was a military boarding school. Even though I'm Gen Z, I am not it also.

That said, most people are actually agnostic in practice. They keep their religious beliefs mainly because of the privileges they enjoy from them. Luckily they aren’t dumb. Many don’t actually believe in a god but support religion because they think it keeps people acting orderly. These people don’t trust institutions alone to maintain social order, because the power systems are unstable and people need local community to withstand anarchy; they don’t believe most people would actively participate in accordance to justice and morality in the existing secular political order as they are supposed to. So their real argument is about security, whether people can be trusted to make good decisions or if they need rigid structures to prevent them from anarchy. But it was clear to me that it actually holds you back from reaching your full intellectual capacity as an individual seeking to experience reality from a meta view. But I can see it as a hedge against total collapse of society, if the current political order falls and we’re stuck with a short unstable period, it helps keep people united in their communities. Even though it’s a superficial artificial system and all in the back of their head know it is fake, it can still give society just enough structure to push back against extreme disorder and moral decline.

Coming back to me giving up god for the moment because he is disadvantageous to my position right now, I no longer believe in it, and then later it really seeped in me that he probably doesn't seriously exist as I was doing a meta analysis of history and also understanding the political utility of religion and seeing it more as a political tool than a liberating force. What’s funny to me is how the very moment I stopped believing in God, the whole foundation of my belief system just collapsed. Once the base was gone, I couldn’t take the rest seriously anymore. Hell, I wasn’t even afraid of ghosts no more,  none of it no longer made sense to me. Logically, why believe in all those things if I didn’t even believe in God anymore? So I had to build my own morals and principles. That meant moving beyond the appetizer and actually looking at the full menu, leaving my religion and engaging with other disciplines that try to understand reality in different ways and learning from them to create my own morals, principles and a new consistent coping ideology. You can find it here Nihilist Humanism. Honestly, everything in the article is basically common sense, so the question is: what do we actually need religion for? I’d say we need it as a hedge. We still need moral frameworks, religious ones included, not as dogma, but as sources to draw from. Not just religions, but myths, stories, and traditions in general. They give us lessons we can interpret and argue over. You don’t build morals from scratch. You build them by rigorously choosing from what already exists and debating it. Religious myths are like movies: you consume them for the experience and walk away with some vague insights. Their value is intellectual and cultural, not literal. If we want to substitute religion, then we need to rebuild what it actually provided, i.e., community. That’s the part that really matters, and that’s exactly what the article gets right. 

I think this is what Zizek means by you actively destroying the big other by losing your faith with your own rationale. Christianity is interesting to Zizek because in his eyes it is the only religion which first acknowledges the existence of god and consciously gives up this belief. In my interpretation, it is, maybe I'm biased, only the people who were once believers and now aren't who are the true atheists. The ones who didn't go through that hard confrontational phase in their life (western buddhism here in Zizek's analogy), but already had the atheist rationale inbuilt so as ignorant of such a delightful revolutionary experience, are not true atheists for Zizek. So this was my effort to understand his christian atheism in a universalist perspective for people who are not familiar with christianity and don't relate to it.

Unless you’ve experienced belief in a Big Other, a father/friend figure God, and then gone through the loss of that belief, you can’t genuinely empathize with theists. That kind of abandonment is formative. A genuine atheist, in my view, is an agnostic atheist, not the Richard Dawkins style New Atheist who uses vulgar logic to arrive at his conclusion and win arguments and ends up creating a tribalistic environement with no compassion to understand the other side.

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Bonus:

Look I think Chibber's basically right that class materialism explains working class behavior way better than the ideology first stuff Zizek does. Most workers aren't confused about their situation. Your average taxi driver or warehouse worker knows exactly what they're dealing with. They need the paycheck, organizing could get them fired, management holds all the cards, and they can't afford to lose income. You don't need psychoanalysis for that. It's not false consciousness, it's just people making rational calculations about real constraints they face, especially when unions are weak and the power imbalance is massive.

Where Zizek's stuff actually works is with the educated middle class and PMC types. That's where you see all the moral performance, symbolic politics, guilt trips, and irony. People who are relatively comfortable need coping narratives to justify their position and desires in the system, and that's exactly what lacanian ideology critique is good at dissecting. Makes sense why Zizek's audience is mostly academics, grad students, media people, and extremely online leftists rather than regular workers. These aspirational radicals can be reached with socialist coded "propaganda" like Tony of 1Dime's videos. 

So continental theory is useful as critique. It's great for calling out liberal contradictions, shattering middle class self images, pulling PMC people away from standard woke liberalism and online leftists away from Stalism, Maoism, Anarchism. But it's not an organizing theory. It doesn't tell you how to make organizing less risky, build lasting worker organizations, or actually shift power dynamics in workplaces. It's better at analyzing desire and discourse than dealing with unions, strikes, or leverage points.

The real problem is when ideology critique becomes the dominant framework, especially in academic or PMC heavy left spaces. Then class analysis gets sidelined for symbolic radicalism. Politics becomes all about discourse, representation, callouts, and theory debates while material questions about power and organization get ignored. You end up with a left(frankfurt school influenced) that's really good at sounding radical on twitter and really bad at winning concrete gains. 

That's why returning to class centered materialism matters. Wood, Brenner, Chibber, Wright, Liu, they start from how capitalism actually structures people's lives and ask what kind of organization could realistically overcome those structures. Culture and ideology still matter, but as tools, not the foundation. Without that base, socialism just stays PMC discourse instead of becoming actual mass politics. 

I believe the precarious working class person, when he is forced to make sense of the system that is fucking him, is himself taking on a new lens or set of reasoning (ideology) to make sense of his precarious state. He knows his ideology is correct. He isn't abandoning his ideology. Instead, he is forced to act differently in the world by the enforcer state. So even if they believe in the ideology that they are being fucked by the system, they are not deluded. Every one of us has our own set of reasoning (ideology) to make sense of our position in the system and rationalize it. But it doesn't necessarily mean we are deluded. Either all of us are deluded because we are prone to ideology, or there is a spectrum of delusion, where the worker lies in the least deluded zone. Whereas workers who are relatively not precarious are more deluded by bad ideology because they need to rationalize their relative comfort in the system to suppress their guilt or justify their desires.

Zizek's definition of ideology is when people believe their set of reasoning (ideology) to be true but nonetheless contradict it. For him, ideology isn't the set of reasoning or rationalizing but its practices and rituals we keep doing, even when we don’t fully believe in them. So for him, ideology is the contradiction and not the set of rationalization on the worker's part. In Bohr's story, Bohr contradicts himself by believing in a belief based argument that the horseshoe works even if you don't believe that it works. He is already buying into the horseshoe's utility bullshit. Whereas the precarious working class person contradicts his set of reasoning because there are logical constraints forced by the state. If he tries to resist, there are negative consequences for those actions which may put him in a way worse position that he wants to avoid, and he finds himself in a dead end. Bohr isn't forced into his contradiction. He simply, unreasonably, accepts the contradiction. Bohr is the educated middle class subject perfect for psychoanalysis. Whereas the precarious worker, who is much closer to the good ideology, isn't.

See, good and bad ideology for me here doesn't mean morally. It is about whether their ideology leads to more delusion or less. Because in the end, all of us are slaves to some kind of ideology. But in my categorization, it is whether the ideology is bad and makes you into a pawn to reproduce the exploitative system, or it is good and makes us see how exploitative the system is and not ignore it. The people living in the gutter are closest to experiencing this good ideology first hand, whereas the people living relatively up in their towers don't see exploitation to the very same level. And the more up you go to the ivory tower, the less exploitation you see or want to ignore or rationalize by your bad ideology.

I am generalizing here for my argument. I know not every precarious worker is the same. There are other sets of reasoning (ideologies) like religion or local culture that would make him accept his precariousness and be deluded.

Now, coming to your Trotskyist "crisis of leadership", I don't buy this concept of workers being ready for revolution but simply waiting for leadership. This is totally delusional. It is very much the material constraints that are holding the workers back from organizing and not an absence of a serious revolutionary party. Even if you have one, the system will come down hard cracking on it. The workers, fortunately, are reasonable enough to know it. Again, this Trotskyist fantasy is also an educated middle class bad ideology (now here bad in the sense it doesn't do anything materially to organize the workers but is waiting for a fantastical revolutionary party), which psychoanalysis is very good at handling.

If Zizek thinks the workers are in a bind and are waiting on a political form or leadership that can actually change the situation, then it is also him who needs psychoanalysis to treat his psychosis. Yes, the workers need leadership, but it doesn't mean that they are waiting for when it will arrive and they will become revolutionary. No, they are in such a precarious situation that all they expect from their leaders is to improve their immediate conditions. Whoever they find genuinely promises it to them, they will vote for him. They don't care about the socialist fantasy. They just understand their immediate. Assuming they know beyond their immediate is idealization of them, which a lot of socialists are victims of.

Yes, we need Zizek, but to treat the psychosis of the middle class and way up. But for the precarious workers, you just need to do what Zohran is doing, making their lives better and win them over, then stay in power and enact your socialist agendas in the future. It is a slow game, only for the most resilient.

and of course the very notion of “good/bad ideology”, I made up to explain my point here, is itself ideological. But it is helpful.

Yeah, I mean psychoanalysis does work in working class contexts when you're dealing with nationalism, racism, the whole hard work pays off fantasy, religious stuff, whatever. It shows that workers aren't immune to bad ideology either. But those are things people pick up trying to make sense of bigger, more abstract complexities that aren't part of their immediate reality which can be falsified or proven by their own common sense. When it comes to immediate material interests for precarious workers, like whether they can pay rent next month or if they'll get fired for speaking up, psychoanalysis doesn't really help much. 

The less precarious workers are, the more susceptible they get to bad ideology. That's when we need Zizek.

PS- I think most people have a "will to dignity". They don’t want to see themselves as victims, but as people with agency, no matter how rough things get. The woke left strips that away by patronizing them and that’s exactly why the working class can’t stand them.