The future used to look brighter. This newfangled retrotopia is the core of numerous new books. The Courage of Hopelessness is Slavoj Zizek’s jaundiced look at the mess we’ve put ourselves in politically, economically, socially and environmentally. We seem to have made no progress. Zizek thinks we’ve come full circle to the hairtrigger era of pre WWI. It’s an intense, highly thought through analysis from a left perspective. One expects no less from Zizek.

He has collected a bouquet of contradictions and paradoxes:
-In China, where the Communist Party is the guardian of capitalism, it is not only illegal to claim workers have the right to self organize, it is illegal to claim it is illegal for workers to self organize.
-In Israel, 60% say they don’t believe in God, but everyone agrees God gave them the land.
-One good thing about religious fundamentalists: they cannot tolerate each other.
-Ayatollah Khomeini was clear: “Islam is politics or it is nothing.”
- All over the western world the Right talks about “taking back” the country (from international trade agreements, the EU, the UN) in order to simply submit it to the tyranny of world markets.

There are chapters on globalization, religion, politics, and inevitably, Donald Trump. The net effect of it all is to put us in a state of near hopelessness. We create paradoxes, ramp up hypocrisy, escalate corruption and double down on grave errors. And it’s not going to change.

Zizek employs the artifice of turning things back on their perpetrators, so that Nazis become Israel’s biggest fans, Muslims and Jews operate the same beliefs, Democrats are the biggest defenders of free trade while Republicans favor protectionism by the government, and the European Left is actually the strongest defender of Muslim rights. It’s easy enough to do, but after a while it becomes just another exercise anyone can perform.

There’s a lot to argue with, too. Zizek thinks communism, which has never been tried successfully anywhere precisely because of the foibles he sees everywhere, is the best of all worlds. And he thinks Americans should have voted blank in 2016, which is not how things work. Low turnout and blank ballots give you results like Brexit, Maduro and Kenyatta Jr.

The world is not getting easier to live in. Every economic system is a threat to somebody. The struggles expand.

David Wineberg ( )