Pizza & tolerance

Think about the ritual of recycling the pizza box. Painfully scrape the melted cheese that is somehow more like glue stuck to cardboard, fold it down, maybe even separate it between bins. You feel the small friction of virtue, a quiet “yeah, this one’s for you Mother Earth“ as you place it into the recycling-bin-shrine alongside the cereal boxes and Amazon packaging.

But quietly, almost without noticing, this is supplemented by the image of someone else who does not bother. Your neighbour Steve. Steve who simply eats the pizza and throws the box wherever, who enjoys without the moral overhead, who gets the pleasure without the guilt. Fucking Steve.

For Žižek, this figure has a name: the subject supposed to enjoy. They are the one who appears to be exempt from the obligations that structure your life. They take without contributing. They live without the weight you carry. Steve is a freeloader of sorts.

The thing is, this figure is almost always imaginary. You do not actually know that Steve is not recycling. You have not surveyed the street or gone through anyone’s bins. And if you did, well, who is the real psycho now.

The subject supposed to enjoy is a fantasy, a necessary supplement to the image you hold of yourself as the one who does the right thing. Without them, your virtue has no contrast, no definition, no audience. You need Steve in order to know who you are.

This fantasy sits at the heart of most discriminatory and racist logic. The subject supposed to enjoy is imagined as the one who benefits from social institutions without subscribing to their values, who takes from the system without putting in. And it is not just about pizza boxes. This is the classic structure of anti-immigrant sentiment: they use what we built, they enjoy what we maintain, but they do not belong to the community of belief that makes it meaningful. The subject supposed to enjoy is therefore always paired with the subject supposed to believe. The more seriously you take your obligations, your recycling, your taxes, your prayers, the more vivid and threatening the figure of the one who enjoys without obligation becomes. Each figure produces and requires the other.

This is also the engine behind what we might loosely call the politics of resentment. The austerity narrative always needs a visible figure who is getting something for nothing. The welfare scrounger, the benefit cheat, the one gaming the system while you play by the rules. What is interesting is that this figure tends to absorb a disproportionate amount of political energy relative to their actual economic significance. The fury directed at the imagined scrounger is rarely proportionate to the cost of the scrounging. It is proportionate to the psychic function the figure serves: they are the one who enjoys in your place, who lives the unlicensed life you have foreclosed for yourself by being responsible.

Žižek’s point is that tolerance itself can be structured by this same logic. We tolerate the other on the condition that they do not enjoy too much, that they do not get too loud, too present, too unapologetically themselves. I do not mind them as long as they do not... is never really a statement about what they do. It is a statement about the fantasy of their enjoyment and how much of it you can bear to witness. Real tolerance would mean being indifferent to the other’s enjoyment. What passes for tolerance in practice is often just the management of envy.

So what do you do with this. The next time you feel a flicker of irritation at someone who appears to be getting away with something, pause and ask: what exactly do I think they are getting away with, and why does it bother me. Often the answer is not really about them at all. It is about the sacrifices you have made, the pleasures you have deferred, the version of yourself you quietly locked away in order to be the responsible one. The subject supposed to enjoy is a mirror. What you see in them is usually something you have refused in yourself. So the question shifts: not what are they getting away with, but what did you stop yourself from wanting, and when, and why.