Slavoj Žižek (Part I)

As you can see in the title, today I am going to talk about a very different topic. I am not continuing by now the story I was writing. Today I want to talk about an idea that I have heard in a Youtube video. This can be found embed at the bottom of the entry. The topic of what you can see here is a philosophical or sociological one. Slavoj Žižek poses the following question in the short clip: The world is advancing, or evolving, faster and faster during the last few centuries. Should we stop and think?

As you can see, this post is deeper than the previous entries. Anyway, as a first step towards reaching any conclusions, we must analyze a bit the figure of the Žižek, or, at least, we must try to recognize him as a known thinker of our time (he has interesting writings on theories about cinema). So he is not an unknown person. Because of that, I consider the statement I commented before about evolution a very interesting one. Why?

For me there is a sense of increase of the human development’s speed. That is obvious. Just think about our ancestors. They discovered how to use the fire in the year 350.000 B.C. while the first known wheel dates from the year 3000 B.C. However, nowadays we discover a lot of new things, especially technological ones, that are far more complicated but they are as used, if not as useful, as the wheel. At least you have to recognize the acceleration of our evolution.

However there are consequences of this development. You can’t imagine the Cold War without the risk of a nuclear attack. That is, the evolution has problems that are more evident the more you think of the recent years or centuries. There is a huge magnitude of consequences that we, as humans, are able to provoke with our recent discoveries.

For me, the first part of the Slavoj Žižek’s idea is true. But this is the most interesting part: Should we stop and think? Is it necessary to stop and meditate about what we are doing in order to avoid future dangers?