Free Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek

accounts for today’s relative passivity in many industrialized countries: too little security and contentedness, or too much?
    SŽ: This is a very good question. But I’m still a pessimist. One thing that I don’t believe is the simple causality whereby people living in a really bad situation end up by exploding. No, I think it’s much more complicated. If you look at all successful revolutions, they usually happen when power is already weakening. Let’s take a great anti-communist uprising that occurred in 1956 in Hungary. When Imre Nagy was prime minister, liberalization was already taking place. Also, look at the French Revolution. The king was already losing power by 1785 and they overthrew him when they started to perceive his position as unjustified. Here the shift was purely ideological . Revolutions sometimes do happen, maybe in times of chaos. But they usually happen when there’s neither a war nor chaos. Revolutions happen under two conditions: in times of poverty, and when justice breaks down. Yet the two are not necessarily connected. Usually in order to realize that your situation is unjust, you must at least experience a certain ideological freedom . Because the first step toward freedom is to become aware of your situation – the situation of injustice and unfairness.
    Let’s look at how feminism started. The feminist movement began not with an attempt to liberate women but with women becoming aware that what they traditionally experienced as a normal situation – being limited to the family and serving their husbands – was not a natural hierarchy but rather a violation of justice. So under what conditions does the revolution occur? The first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom.
    This is how we approach the revolutionary situation – as in Egypt now. We have, as you know, all these ideologies of development, globalization, and so on. In the case of globalization, it is very dangerous in a way for capitalism. Imagine an Indian farmer. When he was starving there, totally isolated, why should he rebel? Now he is in contact with the world, seeing what is happening around the world, and he knows what economic development looks like. Not only this, but the official ideology of development – saying that we all should have an equal opportunity – creates expectations. Even in Egypt, if you look at it closely, the correct analysis wasn’t that Mubarak was an absolute dictator. I spoke with some people there and learned that there was a small group of people who were allowed to criticize the regime a little bit, and some were not.
    So, again, with regard to safety, I think, in order to articulate your rage, you should feel minimally safe . Because, if you don’t have a feeling of minimal safety, you will not risk showing your rage. This is the way I see the strategy, which was very dirty, that the Mubarak regime took a few days before the revolution. They basically withdrew the police and stopped the trains, because they wanted to create a totally insecure environment – but of course it didn’t work, because people showed enough solidarity.
    And it’s a very typical process that all enemies of democracy, like the conservatives in the United States, focus on. They often say that Egypt is approaching chaos. But, here, things are much more paradoxical. Revolutionary changes don’t happen when things are at their worst. Take North Korea, for example. What they need is a minimal openness; people becoming aware of their situation and then the government starting to compromise a little bit. This is why they know they have to remain isolated. Here I also agree with those American liberals who claim that Reagan and Bush were the idiots who kept Castro in power. I entirely believe the statements of liberals who claim that when the United States was saying “You all go to Cuba, it’s a wonderful country,” hundreds of thousands of