The greatest hypo­crites are those who advoc­ate open bor­ders: secretly, they know very well this will never hap­pen, for it would trig­ger an instant pop­u­list revolt in Europe. They play the Beau­ti­ful Soul, which feels super­ior to the cor­rup­ted world while secretly par­ti­cip­at­ing in it: they need this cor­rup­ted world as the only ter­rain where they can exert their moral superi­or­ity. The reason why these appeals to our empathy towards the poor refugees flow­ing into Europe are not enough was for­mu­lated a cen­tury ago by Oscar Wilde in the open­ing lines of The Soul of Man Under Social­ism. There, he poin­ted out that ‘it is much more easy to have sym­pathy with suf­fer­ing than it is to have sym­pathy with thought’. ..“Their rem­ed­ies do not cure the dis­ease: they merely pro­long it. Indeed, their rem­ed­ies are part of the dis­ease. They try to solve the prob­lem of poverty, for instance, by keep­ing the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amus­ing the poor. But this is not a solu­tion: it is an aggrav­a­tion of the dif­fi­culty. The proper aim is to try and recon­struct soci­ety on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altru­istic vir­tues have really pre­ven­ted the car­ry­ing out of this aim.” …The more we treat refugees as objects of human­it­arian help, and allow the situ­ation which com­pelled them to leave their coun­tries to pre­vail, the more they come to Europe, until ten­sions reach boil­ing point, not only in the refugees’ coun­tries of ori­gin but here as well.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK CITING OSCAR WILDE http://ift.tt/2eKoJHN