RSA Animate- Slavoj Zizek on “Soft Apocalyptic Vision”

I love these. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues against the ethics of charitable giving, which I don’t fully agree with, but the method of communication of these videos is fantastic. If all dry economic philosophy talks were this fun, we’d be much more savvy. I can’t find the artist’s name anywhere (who, I think, is the real unsung hero of the pieces), but they’re all pretty great, and keep getting better. Zizek’s argument about an impending world-wide cultural “zero point” is simply ‘declared’ and barely touched upon, but I think it’s salient- in many ways, we as a planet are heading towards a point where old answers don’t seem to be enough. This, to me, is a point for optimism, not fear- using the phrase “turning point” versus “apocalyptic vision” would be my choice.

But then again, I’m not a big Roland Emmerich fan. I think anyone who uses the idea of the world ending to scare up box office seems a bit ethically dubious, to me.

Imagine this as a sort of note-taking- what if students all learned “comix” as a second-language, as a device for retention. I read somewhere that the Army uses comics to illustrate a number of sensitive training points, as comics (and, I would assume, this form of dense-animation-comics hybrid) apparently engages both the right and left side of the brains, leading to faster neural connections (that last part is my own b.s. hypothesis- disregard as necessary).

Either way, these are great, keep ’em coming, RSA.