Choosing our Fate (2)

Slavoj Žižek

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1934

[...] we put the blame on fate when we miss an opportunity – which opportunity? The opportunity not simply to act freely and use given possibilities, but the opportunity to change what we perceive as our fate, to choose a different fate.

This insight is of special importance today, when the crises humanity is facing cannot but appear as part of an inexorable fate pushing us closer and closer to an apocalyptic point: ecological breakdown, biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives… At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point, “the end of time is near”. Here is Ed Ayres’s description: “We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming … that ‘something’ is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.” At the geological and biological level, Ayres enumerates four “spikes” (accelerated developments) asymptotically approaching a zero-point at which the quantitative expansion will reach its point of exhaustion and will have to change into a different quality: (1) population growth, (2) consumption of resources, (3) carbon gas emissions, (4) the mass extinction of species. In order to cope with this threat, our collective ideology is mobilizing mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception amounting to as direct will to ignorance: “a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.”

What, then, can we do in such a predicament? Recall the Arab story about the appointment in Samara: a servant on an errand in the busy market of Baghdad meets Death ther. Terrified by Death’s gaze, he runs home to his master and asks for a horse he can ride to Samara where Death will not find him. The good master not only provides the servant with a horse, but goes himself to the market, looks for Death and reproaches him for scaring his servant. Death replies: “But I didn’t want to scare your servant. I was just surprised that he was here when I have an appointment with him in Samara tonight…” What if the message of this story is not that a man’s demise is impossible to avoid, that trying to twist free of it will only tighten its grip, but rather its exact opposite: that if one accepts fate as inevitable one can break its grasp? Imagine that upon encountering Death in the market the servant had said: “What’s your problem? If you have something to do with me, do it, otherwise beat it!” Perplexed, Death would have mumbled something like: ”But… we were supposed to meet in Samara, I cannot kill you here!”
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