Aging & Wisdom Quote by Slavoj Zizek

Zizek is doing what he does best: weaponizing contrarianism as a diagnostic tool. The phrase "abstractly anti-capitalist" is a sly self-indictment and a provocation at once. He admits the posture can become aesthetic, a kind of theoretical lifestyle brand, then immediately tries to cash it out into a concrete irritation: the left's selective outrage.

The target isn't capitalism as such but a familiar moral economy inside Western left politics: if the United States is the default villain, critique becomes a ritual rather than an analysis. By tossing in "Chinese neo-colonialism", Zizek punctures a comforting map of power where anti-imperialism is basically anti-Americanism. It's less a defense of the US than a demand that critique scale with reality. In a multipolar world, the old script flatters itself by staying simple.

"Why are the left silent about that?" is not an innocent question; it's a trapdoor. It implies the silence is motivated: nostalgia for Cold War binaries, fear of feeding right-wing narratives, or dependence on a moral identity built around one central antagonist. Zizek's dig at "old leftists" adds generational contempt, suggesting that what once read as solidarity now looks like habit.

The final "Good!" is the punchline and the tell. Annoyance is his metric of success because it signals he's hit the soft tissue: not disagreement over facts, but discomfort with losing a monopoly on righteousness. The subtext is that a left that can't criticize non-Western power without flinching isn't radical; it's provincial.