Pro Bolivia

There is a peculiar species of modern commentary that sounds intelligent, references big ideas, and sprinkles names like Freud or Marx — yet ultimately says very little. It performs intelligence rather than exercising it. I call this the Mickey Mouse Opinion (MMO): a view inflated by the illusion of depth but built on shallow or recycled reasoning, often amplified by the prestige of its author rather than the strength of its argument.

I first coined the phrase half-jokingly, to describe the kind of opinion that seems informed by five TikTok clips, a few slogans about capitalism or patriarchy, and a heroic confidence that one’s insight is both radical and universal. Yet the MMO is not confined to the uneducated or the unserious. Some of its finest examples come from public intellectuals who have made careers out of theatrical profundity.

A case in point is Slavoj Žižek’s recent essay in UnHerd, “The Family Values of the Radical Left”. Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher famous for blending Marxism with psychoanalysis, uses two films — Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep (2012) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s new One Battle After Another — to reflect on the fate of the Left. But as is often the case with Žižek, the films serve mostly as backdrops for his favourite obsessions: the false comfort of family values, the ambiguity of violence, and the endless psycho-sexual drama of revolutionaries.

His argument, stripped of its Lacanian ornamentation, is simple enough. Redford’s film, he says, preaches maturity — it tells ex-radicals to “grow up,” accept family responsibility, and re-enter society. Anderson’s film, by contrast, presents a wild, chaotic version of rebellion, full of car chases, sex, and revolutionary nuns, but ultimately it too fails because its activism integrates rather than challenges capitalism. The true revolutionary task, Žižek concludes, would be to sabotage the digital power of corporations rather than play at underground militancy.

This, we are told, is the radical insight. Yet once the rhetorical smoke clears, the essay’s substance shrinks to a familiar formula: every rebellion either grows up and sells out, or spins out and collapses. It is a thesis that could be generated by a moderately sophisticated chatbot trained on Marxist film theory.

The MMO reveals itself not in what Žižek observes but in how he observes. He confuses cleverness for clarity, reducing complex works of art to ideological templates. Every female character becomes a metaphor for castration; every moral dilemma a disguised defence of capitalism; every contradiction proof that the system cannot be mapped. It is an interpretive ouroboros — a method that feeds endlessly on itself.

What makes the MMO especially resilient is that it sounds brave. To the casual reader, Žižek appears to be attacking both Left and Right, moralists and nihilists alike. In reality, this rhetorical zig-zag functions as insulation: he can never be wrong, because he always occupies the third position, the meta-critique. When the Left grows tired of him, he claims to be misunderstood; when the Right quotes him, he claims irony. The MMO thrives precisely in this fog of unfalsifiability.

Why, then, do publications keep amplifying such essays? Because the MMO is click-intellectualism — a form of cultural performance that flatters readers into feeling serious. It invites them to share in the illusion that by decoding a film through Marx and Lacan, they are participating in a grand philosophical project. In reality, it is a consumer product like any other, dressed in theory instead of advertising. Žižek is, in that sense, the perfect critic for our time: an anti-capitalist who produces ideological luxury goods for the capitalist marketplace.

But the deeper issue is not Žižek himself; it is the hierarchy of value we assign to different kinds of opinion. We have learned to privilege complexity over clarity, provocation over grounding, and ideological flair over empirical understanding. The result is a culture where MMOs — confident, verbose, and detached — dominate public discourse, while grounded opinions rooted in common sense or real experience struggle to be heard.

If one million people watch a film, there will be one million interpretations. None of them are definitive, and most will contain a grain of truth. But in our intellectual economy, one interpretation, dressed in theoretical language and published under a famous name, suddenly becomes “the” interpretation. Its weight is disproportionate to its substance — the value of one divided by a million, yet treated as gospel.

The antidote to the MMO is not anti-intellectualism, but intellectual honesty. It is the humility to admit what we don’t know, the discipline to research before asserting, and the courage to speak plainly without hiding behind jargon. Serious criticism should expand the conversation, not colonise it.

In the end, Žižek’s essay unintentionally demonstrates the very thing he claims to critique: a system where performance replaces conviction, where rebellion becomes style. He tells us that we need “weathermen to know which way the wind blows,” but offers no compass beyond his own cleverness. The rest of us, meanwhile, might do better by stepping outside the theoretical storm and trusting our own senses.