Free Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek

existing constellation—and today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, whatwe always already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly—to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our “natural state” is one of inert hedonism, of what Alain Badiou calls the “human animal.” The underlying paradox here is that the more we live as “free individuals with no Master,” the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities—we have to be compelled or disturbed into freedom by a Master.
    There was a trace of this authentic Master’s call even in Obama’s slogan from his first presidential campaign: “Yes, we can!” A new possibility was thereby opened up. But, one might object, did not Hitler also do something formally similar? Was his message to the German people not “Yes, we can …”—kill the Jews, crush democracy, attack other nations? A closer analysis immediately brings out the difference: far from being an authentic Master, Hitler was a populist demagogue who carefully played upon people’s obscure desires. It may seem that in doing so he followed Steve Jobs’ infamous motto: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” However, in spite of all there is to criticize about Jobs, in his own understanding of the motto he was close to being an authentic Master. When asked how much research Apple undertakes into what its customers want, he snapped back: “None. It’s not the customers’ job to know what they want … we figure out what we want.” (In India, thousands of impoverished intellectual workers are employed in what are ironically called “like-farms,” where they are miserably paid to spend the whole day in front of a computer screenendlessly clicking “like” buttons on pages requesting visitors to “like” or “dislike” a specific product. In this way, a product can be made to appear very popular and so seduce ignorant prospective customers into buying it, or at least checking it out, following the logic of “there must be something in it if so many customers are so satisfied!”—so much for the reliability of customer reactions …) Note the surprising turn of this argumentation: after denying that customers know what they want, Jobs doesn’t go on with the expected reversal—“it is therefore our task (the task of creative capitalists) to figure out what they want and ‘show it to them’ on the market.” Instead, he says: “we figure out what
we
want.” This is how a true Master works: he doesn’t try to guess what people want; he simply obeys his own desire and leaves it up to others to decide if they want to follow him. In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his desire, from refusing to compromise on it. Therein lies the difference between a true Master and, say, the Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people themselves) what people really want (what is really good for them), and is then ready to enforce it on them even against their will.
    Just as I was finishing this letter, I learned that Nelson Mandela died—was he an authentic master? In the last two decades of his life, Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multi-party democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now,with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed