Ciacco

Imagine we were to visit Dante’s Hell now and find there in the Third Circle today’s Ciacco, a gluttonous Western European who ignores the plight of migrants, focused as he is on continuing his consumption undisturbed. If we were to ask him, ‚But tell me, where are all those humanitarians who bent their minds on working good?‘, would he not snap back: ‚You will have to descend much deeper, their souls are much blacker than mine!‘ Why? Is this not a too cruel reaction? The point is that, self-critical as it may appear to be, the humanitarian reaction almost imperceptibly transforms a politico-economic problem into a moral one of ‚refugee crisis‘ and of ‚helping the victims‘. Instead of attacking the silent lower-class majority as racist and ignorant of the immigrants‘ plight, or, at best, as stupid victims of racist media propaganda, it should address their actual concerns, which express themselves in a racist way.

—Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness, (London: Penguin, 2018), 176.