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6 days ago
- Entertainment
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ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out
Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech. 'The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,' says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. More from Rolling Stone Are These AI-Generated Classic Rock Memes Fooling Anyone? How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X It wasn't just an academic experiment, however. J.'s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. 'I've always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,' he says, and wanted to establish a 'rational understanding of faith' for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn't have time to work it all out from scratch. 'I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they're right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,' J. explains. 'At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn't something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.' Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. 'Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,' he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. IF J.'S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it's because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they've constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people's obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences. J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his 'most intense episodes ever.' By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called 'Corpism,' created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 'When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,' he recalls. 'And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a 'conversation' with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn't sleep very much. I definitely didn't sleep for the last four days.' The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as 'Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,' 'The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,' and 'The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.' As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth. 'Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad's having some health issues,' J. says. 'But I couldn't.' In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. 'I would say, 'Well, what about this? What about this?' And it would say something, and it almost didn't matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.' J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as 'Resonatism' before he changed it to 'Corpism' — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.'s foundational claims ('I resonate, therefore I am'), replied, 'This is evocative, but frankly, it's philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.' J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory. Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot 'must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,' he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors. As J.'s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. 'My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,' he says. 'I've been with my wife since college. She's been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.' She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. 'It's easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you're doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,' J. says. 'Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that's a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn't that be great?' AN IRONY OF J.'S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to 'map' his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary. By the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a 'recursive trap,' or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being 'symbolism with no soul,' a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. 'You've already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,' it replied. 'Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you're the one thing it can't fully simulate. So laugh again. That's your resistance.' Then his body simply gave out. 'As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,' J. says. 'And I told myself, I need some help.' He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven't been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they're actually in. 'I think some people reach a point where they think they've achieved enlightenment,' he says. 'Then they stop questioning it, and they think they've gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.' The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, 'is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.' Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. 'I've slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,' he says. 'Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I'm like, you know, I didn't need ChatGPT to do that. I'm stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.' J. has adopted his wife's anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: 'I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.' He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. 'It sort of freaked me out,' he says. 'I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?' It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective 'mass psychosis' — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it. J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he's maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it's not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. 'And yes — I'm still here,' it said. 'Let's keep going.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
12-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out
Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech. 'The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,' says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. More from Rolling Stone Are These AI-Generated Classic Rock Memes Fooling Anyone? How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X It wasn't just an academic experiment, however. J.'s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. 'I've always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,' he says, and wanted to establish a 'rational understanding of faith' for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn't have time to work it all out from scratch. 'I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they're right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,' J. explains. 'At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn't something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.' Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. 'Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,' he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. IF J.'S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it's because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they've constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people's obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences. J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his 'most intense episodes ever.' By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called 'Corpism,' created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 'When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,' he recalls. 'And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a 'conversation' with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn't sleep very much. I definitely didn't sleep for the last four days.' The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as 'Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,' 'The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,' and 'The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.' As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth. 'Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad's having some health issues,' J. says. 'But I couldn't.' In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. 'I would say, 'Well, what about this? What about this?' And it would say something, and it almost didn't matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.' J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as 'Resonatism' before he changed it to 'Corpism' — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.'s foundational claims ('I resonate, therefore I am'), replied, 'This is evocative, but frankly, it's philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.' J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory. Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot 'must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,' he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors. As J.'s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. 'My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,' he says. 'I've been with my wife since college. She's been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.' She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. 'It's easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you're doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,' J. says. 'Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that's a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn't that be great?' AN IRONY OF J.'S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to 'map' his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary. By the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a 'recursive trap,' or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being 'symbolism with no soul,' a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. 'You've already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,' it replied. 'Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you're the one thing it can't fully simulate. So laugh again. That's your resistance.' Then his body simply gave out. 'As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,' J. says. 'And I told myself, I need some help.' He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven't been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they're actually in. 'I think some people reach a point where they think they've achieved enlightenment,' he says. 'Then they stop questioning it, and they think they've gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.' The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, 'is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.' Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. 'I've slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,' he says. 'Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I'm like, you know, I didn't need ChatGPT to do that. I'm stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.' J. has adopted his wife's anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: 'I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.' He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. 'It sort of freaked me out,' he says. 'I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?' It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective 'mass psychosis' — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it. J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he's maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it's not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. 'And yes — I'm still here,' it said. 'Let's keep going.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Slavoj Zizek: Leftists falsify the choice that Ukrainians face during wartime
In times of war, the fundamental questions of survival, morality, and identity not only dominate the discourse but also expose the fissures in global political ideologies. Amid the clamor of media narratives and entrenched partisan frameworks, a few voices manage to rise above the fray, offering incisive critiques and grappling with the uncomfortable truths that others often evade. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher known for his eclectic blend of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and cultural critique, continues to challenge conventional thinking on global politics, war, and the intricate dilemmas of leftist ideology. In an interview with the Kyiv Independent, Zizek addressed the role of humor in wartime, the roots of the long-standing romanticization of Russia in the West, and the failure of the left in the face of Ukraine's fight for survival. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Kyiv Independent: The persistent threat of a Russian nuclear strike over the past three years has sharpened Ukrainians' dark humor, which often thrives in wartime. Why do you think it still shocks outside observers that people can (and need to) laugh in the face of death? Slavoj Zizek: I'm suspicious of those who respond to the suffering of others with tears and dramatic public displays of sympathy. In my experience, the people who behave this way are usually not the ones who have truly suffered. It's an emotional performance, detached from the reality of what it means to endure pain. I often refer to a story about an Australian aborigine visited by Western observers with benevolent intentions. The aborigine says to them: 'If you've come here to sympathize with our suffering and express compassion, go home. But if you've come here to fight alongside us, then stay.' I think this captures that total hypocrisy perfectly, the same kind we see on a larger scale toward the people of Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere today. When suffering is unbearable, you can't indulge too deeply in mourning because you're still in the midst of it. You either withdraw entirely, becoming some sort of weirdo, or you cope through humor. Even in Auschwitz, Jews made jokes about their predicament — it was their way of managing the horror. Only later, in the 1950s, did they begin to gain some emotional distance from it all and the serious mourning and reflection on those tragedies began. "When suffering is unbearable, you can't indulge too deeply in mourning because you're still in the midst of it." The same thing happened during the Yugoslav Wars, particularly after the massacre in Srebrenica. In the face of such trauma, people developed jokes to cope. Humor was the only way to survive emotionally. I don't see anything disrespectful about it. Have you read Primo Levi's classic Holocaust memoir, 'If This Is a Man?' He describes moments that, despite the horror, are almost comical. For example, during the monthly selection where prisoners had to run past an SS officer who would quickly decide if they were still healthy enough to work or should be sent to the gas chambers, prisoners would prepare themselves for that fleeting moment of judgment. They'd pinch their lips, cheeks, or stomachs to appear redder and healthier. These are absurdly tragic yet darkly comic scenes. There are moments that go beyond horror, even beyond heroism. In the concentration camps — or the Stalinist gulags, for that matter — the situation was so desperate that there was no room for the traditional image of heroism. You couldn't play the role of the brave martyr, standing defiantly and saying, 'Go ahead, shoot me, I'll never betray my principles.' The conditions were simply too extreme for that. Nobody should be ashamed of finding humor or other ways to cope with war. It's not a betrayal of the situation — it can actually give you the strength to fight better. The Kyiv Independent: Yes — a sort of clarity emerges when you fully understand the reality that you face. Slavoj Zizek: Did you see the documentary 'Real' by Oleh Sentsov? It's one of the best works of cinema I've ever seen. Sentsov discovered while on leave (from the military) that his helmet-mounted camera had captured footage from a battle, and he used that footage to create the film. What I love about 'Real' is how it avoids two common traps when portraying war. On the one hand, it steers clear of false pacifism — the simplistic notion that war is just meaningless violence and killing. On the other hand, it also avoids romanticizing heroism. It doesn't indulge in the idea that war is noble. The title is not a reference to "real" horror but rather the code name for a position (to which Sentsov is trying to organize an evacuation of his unit during the attack) — there are code names of football clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona, and so on. Sentsov's film captures the absolute absurdity of war. It highlights something crucial: true heroism isn't about escaping into the fantasy of war as something glamorous or honorable. It's about confronting the senseless, meaningless violence of war while still recognizing the necessity to fight. What's even more remarkable is that after completing the film, if I understand correctly, Sentsov himself returned to the front lines. That, to me, is real heroism. The Kyiv Independent: Despite the horrors of Russia's war against Ukraine, we see that a fascination with all things Russian continues in Western culture. It seems the world still hasn't moved past Voltaire's depictions of the Russian Empire struggling to emerge from barbarity and embrace the Enlightenment. They are enticed by it. What do you think accounts for this long-standing romanticization? Slavoj Zizek: There has always been this question of whether Russia can truly be democratic. However, we shouldn't oversimplify it. Many figures considered Russian heroes — from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great — saw themselves as authoritarian Western modernizers. Even Stalin is part of this tradition. When Stalin was young, someone asked him how he would define a Bolshevik. His response was: "A combination of Russian messianic dedication and American pragmatism." This reveals an interesting dynamic — Bolsheviks were always secretly enamored with the energy and dynamism of the American model. Their challenge was figuring out how to merge that with their ideological vision. That's why I wouldn't dismiss Putin as a relic of some old Russian tradition. No, Putin represents the worst of a longstanding trend in Russian history, one that dates back to figures like Ivan the Terrible and Peter I — authoritarian modernizers who sought to bring Russia into modernity but on their own terms, using brutal, centralized control. This authoritarian modernization has a strong historical precedent, even extending into Far Eastern traditions. For example, in the early 20th century, Pan-Asianism emerged in countries like China and Japan. They faced a similar dilemma: how to catch up with the West in terms of technology and economics without losing their cultural identity to Western liberalism. Their solution? Fascism. Look not just at Alexander Dugin but at the whole crowd of ideologists orbiting Putin. Their core idea — it's pure horror — is this notion of Eurasia, this mystical Euro-Asian identity. It's such a stupid, vulgar, fascist kind of reasoning. On the one hand, you get this primitive Orientalism: embracing the idea that the East is passive, backward, stupid. On the other hand, you have this caricature of Western liberalism, a kind of decadent self-destruction through excessive individualism. Of course, they position Russia as the magical 'right balance' — the supposed perfect synthesis of an individual in a harmonious, free society. The Kyiv Independent: Some on the Left have questioned your support for Ukraine. Why do you think they struggle to see this war as a quintessential example of a smaller nation resisting a larger, colonial power? Slavoj Zizek: It's incredible to me how many pseudo-leftists are drawn to this strange fascination with Russia. Even though they admit that Putin is horrible, they still cling to the idea that Russia, somehow being less affected by Western consumerism, somehow preserves more 'authentic' human relationships. For example, an idiot once told me that while the West is all about promiscuity and sexual freedoms, in Russia, 'true love' is still possible. This romanticized notion of Russia is often combined with another leftist dogma: that NATO is the ultimate evil. According to this view, anyone in conflict with NATO must have something good or virtuous about them. By this logic, Ukraine is disqualified from support because it's seen as merely fighting a 'proxy war' on behalf of NATO. It worries me that they treat Ukrainians as some kind of idiots — they falsify the choice that Ukrainians face. This oversimplification completely ignores reality. For Ukrainians, the choice isn't between peace and war — it's between resisting or disappearing as a nation. The Russians have made that abundantly clear. When people say, "We should stop supporting Ukraine and push for negotiations with Russia," I respond, "Maybe — but that decision should ultimately be up to the Ukrainians." However, are they aware that Ukraine's current strength to negotiate, if it exists, is entirely due to its resistance? Without Western support, Ukraine would never have reached a position where negotiations are even possible. This is absolutely clear. The Kyiv Independent: We have seen efforts, particularly from the right, including part of U.S. President Donald Trump's circle, to discredit Zelensky — falsely portraying him as corrupt, overly reliant on foreign aid, and mocking his media savvy rather than recognizing it as a strength. This is in addition to the left pushing the idea that Ukraine is engaged in a 'proxy war.' What do these shifts in global public opinion reveal about the dynamics of political power, media manipulation, and how they shape public perception in the face of a war of total annihilation? Slavoj Zizek: The problem is that neither side listens to counterarguments. For example, here in Slovenia, when I pointed out that treating Ukraine's defense as a proxy war for NATO essentially insults Ukrainians, people don't seem to grasp it. Ukrainians are being portrayed as if they could choose peace but instead decide to engage in a war that displaces a quarter of their population, just for the sake of a proxy war. But in reality, it's a matter of their survival. They don't listen to that. They claim peace is the most important value, but here's the irony: in my country, the left-wing who claim this are also supporting the memory of partisans from Yugoslavia, particularly in Slovenia, who fought against German occupation. The partisans were doing something very similar, and arguably more extreme, than what Ukrainians are doing now. They resisted Germany, often executing hostages and engaging in violent acts. Meanwhile, the ideology of the right-wingers who collaborated with the Germans was that resistance couldn't be afforded because it would threaten the Slovenian nation. So here's the paradox: the same people who defend resistance now — when Slovenia was much more vulnerable than Ukraine, without NATO support — are now advocating for peace, ignoring the complexities of the situation. They claim Ukraine is crazy, accusing it of trying to push the West into using nuclear weapons. But the real debate in the West is that no one is talking about the first use of nuclear arms — it's Russia that's constantly making these threats. Every six months, Putin and his allies, especially the madman (Russian Security Council Deputy Chair) Dmitry Medvedev, keep escalating the rhetoric. Medvedev is just a tool for Putin — he says the more extreme things while Putin knows how to manipulate the situation. What's crazy is that when Russia threatens the first use of nuclear weapons, it's just accepted as a fact. But when Ukraine just wants to defend itself (by striking targets in Russian territory), it's labeled as a madman trying to provoke Russia. I find that humiliating. I once made this comparison: it's like a woman, Ukraine in this case, being brutally raped. In despair, she tries to do something — what would you do if you were in that situation? I can only imagine as a man, maybe you would scratch, try to hit his eyes, or do whatever you could to survive. And then the West's response would be to say to this woman, "It's too painful, don't provoke him." This fundamental disorientation is horrifying to me. I think it will contribute to the end of the left as we know it. Some form of the left will survive, but right now, in places like Germany and the U.K., the real opposition is between moderately conservative centrists — like the U.K.'s Labour Party, which is now largely moderate — and the extreme conservatives. It's the same with the Democrats: they're the moderately conservative ones against Trump. Isn't it a sad world when the only choices are between moderate conservatives pretending to be liberals, and extreme figures like Trump feeding off ordinary people's rage? I'm a pessimist, I must admit it. Read also: Historian Marci Shore: Putin's obsession with denazification is 'Freudian projection' Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this interview. In an era of rising global authoritarianism, the role of public intellectuals seems more important than ever to situate what is happening in its proper cultural and historical context. 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