The Examined Life

Examined life is a documentary film, which shows top philosophers of our time to share their own view about a particular philosophical idea in the everyday world. I want to mainly focus on a philosopher called Slavoj Zizek, who specializes in cultural study as his ideology, shared his opinion about the world. He is called as one of the hippest philosopher by The Telegraph for his interesting way of thinking about basically everything, particularly about how would it feel like to be trapped inside an all-body condom. He is also a brilliant critic of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic and pop cultural topics. What makes his video interesting is because he really brings the audience to an actual site of what is really called an ecological catastrophe.

The first thing Slavoj Zizek points out is people’s perception of reality. Almost everyday, people throw something away to the garbage but all they know is that the trash guy is going to take it all away from our sight. Trash does disappear from their sight, but what people do not see is that it is not really gone, but it is being accumulated together, creating a mountainous problem. I have never been aware of this problem before I watched Zizek’s video, so I am really surprised about the outcome of people’s actions, which are thought was really normal, could bring such unimaginable amount of dump. Just in United States, average people produced approximately 4 pounds everyday. The biggest landfill, which is located in Las Vegas called Apex, carries 50 million tons of rotting trash. As more and more trash is produced, more landfills are also needed, which could destroy the natural resources, disturb animal’s ways of life, and also cause health problems. So this is how messed up our world is. That is why Slavoj Zizek describes the world as a catastrophe.

Zizek also connects ecological problem to ideology. Ideology is often being interpreted in a wrong way, which is often viewed as an imaginary concept of ideas. On the contrary, ideology really addresses real problems. One of the ideology mechanism is the “temptation of meaning”, which basically searching for a meaning to every incident that happens. For example, some people view AIDS disease as a punishment for living a sinful life. That is where ideology enters, which is when people have meaning to something.

The most interesting idea that Zizek brought up in the video was that there is no such thing as a balanced world. The idea that people always perceive is that the world was once a very beautiful place that is filled with everything perfect, but then human started to live, exploiting the resources, and developing new technologies that harm the nature and cause lots of environmental problems, including global warming, extinction, etc. However, Zizek stated that there is no such thing as a balanced world. The nature had already been in catastrophe, and the best thing is that people are allowed to benefit from it. For example, the most wanted natural resource is oil, which is often used for fuel. Oil itself is made from a natural catastrophe, including various unknown remnants from the past. One thing that we can do to the environment is to accept it and appreciate it the way it is.

My question to Zizek, if we continue to love the earth the way it is and keeps on taking advantage of it, wouldn’t we just hurt the environment? If we just enjoy it like we do now, how much time will we have left to enjoy the rest of it? The undeniable fact is that our world is injured right now, whether it is already impaired from the beginning or not does not really matter anymore. What people can do now is to support and actually take part to perform eco-friendly activities, such as recycling and conserving energy, which could save our planet.