When Hegel wrote: “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation," he announced the necessity of what Mao called the “Cultural Revolution” as the condition of a successful social revolution. Is this not what we have today: (the technological) revolution without a fundamental “revolution of mores [Revolution der Sitten]”? The basic tension is not so much the tension of reason versus feeling, but, rather, the tension of knowledge versus the disavowed belief embodied in external ritual—the situation often described in the terms of cynical reason whose formula,the reverse of Marx’s, was proposed decades ago by Peter Sloterdijk: “I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it. . . .” This formula, however, is not as unambiguous as it may appear—it should be supplemented with: “. . .because I don’t know what I believe.”
-Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 5
