Harry Readhead

It’s no secret that people are fascinated by crime. Nor is this a new phenomenon: writing in 1946, Orwell noted that murder gave a ‘great amount of pleasure to the public’, and proceeded to identify the common features of the gruesome and grisly crimes that gave the British most satisfaction. Psychologists, meanwhile, say that murder in particular is not only ‘a most fundamental taboo’ but ‘also, perhaps, a most fundamental human impulse’. This seems plausible. We all know those people who, stuck in a queue or sat in an interminable meeting, seem moments away from indulging that impulse. At any rate, lovers of the lurid and the macabre are spoiled for choice in the streaming age.

For the poor souls who paid to live-stream the Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek debate, the $15 ticket price must now seem like an act of grand larceny. In what was rather cringingly billed as the ‘debate of the century’—premature in 2019, if nothing else—the psychologist and bestselling author of 12 Rules for Lifeshared a stage in Toronto with the world’s most idiosyncratic philosopher and critic. The topic was ‘Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism’. Of course, neither Peterson nor Žižek are strangers to crowds.