TONY JONES: Good evening and welcome to this special edition of Q&A, live from the Sydney Opera House and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm Tony Jones and answering your questions tonight: legendary BBC foreign correspondent, Kate Adie; firebrand Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek; the author of The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson; Egyptian born democracy activist, Mona Eltahawy; and the foreign editor of The Australian Greg Sheridan. Please welcome our panel.

All right. Well, Q&A is live from 9.35 pm Eastern Time. It's simulcast on ABC News 24 and News Radio and you can join the Twitter conversation using the hash tag that's just appearing on your screen. Well, our panel tonight includes some quite dangerous thinkers, so let's go straight into peril with our first question from Stewart Lung.

SEXUAL ENERGY

STEWART LUNG: This question is related to sexuality. More and more people are openly embracing other forms of sexuality that are previously considered taboo, for example, polyamory. What is the panel's opinion of openly embracing these other forms of sexuality as an avenue of releasing previously suppressed sexual energy, hence improving the overall wellbeing of our society.

TONY JONES: Stewart, can I just keep you on your feet just for a moment.

STEWART LUNG: Sure.

TONY JONES: Because at least some of our audience are going to wonder what polyamory is. Could you just explain that for us?

STEWART LUNG: Well, the way I understand, polyamory is where you - you love more than one person, with honesty and integrity.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. Let's start with Kate Adie.

KATE ADIE: This time of night I have to consider this? We live, I hope, in more liberal societies, where we don't actually impose rules which were thought up by old men a long time ago. I think what you have to do is not think about, gosh, how many different ways you can have different relationships and conduct them. You have to think about what sort of person you are and what you mean to someone and what someone means to you and never betray. Don't ever go out to do something which will hurt so much. Just be a loving person and if that takes you into different relationships and you behave decently, I don't think we have too much to worry about.

TONY JONES: Slavoj Zizek?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I'm unfortunately - I would like to agree with you but my evil nature pushes me in the opposite direction.

KATE ADIE: You don't love me?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Sorry?

KATE ADIE: You don't love me.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Er - er- er...

KATE ADIE: Oh.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I take - I take the Fifth Amendment. I refuse to answer because the answer may incriminate me and so on.

TONY JONES: Also you are pledged to Lady Gaga, or so they say.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: This is a mystery. I am an old conservative who thinks everything that happened in pop music happened between '65 and '75. That's another story. But, listen, you know we are entering a strange era where hedonism, do you know this, is more and more the ruling ideology. Today, society doesn't pressure you onto sacrifice yourself to your country, but be authentic, be what you truly are and so on and so and my psychoanalytic friends are telling me that people today more and more feel guilty, not if they give way to their perverse desires but if you don't enjoy. We live in strange times where, if you are not able to enjoy sexuality or whatever you feel guilty. So I think and that is the paradox today. We live in permissive times. The result is not everybody is happy screwing around - words - dirty words are permitted, you told me - the result is on the opposite. There is more frigidity/impotence than ever and so on and so on.

JON RONSON: Isn't it true you advocate outsourcing sex so other people have sex on your behalf?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Oh, this was - no, I'm quite romantic, here. That there is, unfortunately a bad taste joke. What I am advocating quite seriously...

JON RONSON: I thought it sounded like a great idea.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: ...stop. Is love, naive Love. I claim I have nothing against sex without love but I think the structure like we usually say what is masturbation? You do it to yourself just with a partner you are dreaming about. But what if...

TONY JONES: A sort of mental outsourcing?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah, but we most of our real sex, I think, is masturbation with a real partner. You have real partner there but you just use the real partner to realise your dream. So is all sex like that? No, it's love, which is why today I claim this is very old-fashioned romantic idea, what is transgression is not sex. You can do it with animals, with dogs, cats, no problem. Falling in love is a problem. Which is why, as I mentioned yesterday, more and more you have this dating and marriage agencies advertising their services in this way: "We will enable you to be in love without falling in love. Without the fall. Everything will be safe and so on."

TONY JONES: Okay. Slavoj, I'm going to throw to Jon because you picked up the outsourcing point. Do you have your own view?

JON RONSON: Well, just because...

TONY JONES: I mean, the question was should non conventional forms of sexuality be embraced as a means of releasing previously suppressed sexual energy?

JON RONSON: God. I don't know. Can I just say that I'm glad to be in the centre of the panel because my ideological position is one of uncertainty.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Centre left you are. Social democratics who pretend they are on the left but...

JON RONSON: I was a business disappointed that polyamory was something so nice. I thought it was going to be something like slamming your penis in a filing cabinet. I'm in favour of that but ...

TONY JONES: That doesn't sound like as much fun as you make it.

JON RONSON: Well, you know, I'm with both Kate and Slavoj on the idea that naive love sounds like quite a good idea.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: And even a dangerous idea today.

JON RONSON: Do you think?

TONY JONES: Let's throw the dangerous idea to Mona. What do you think?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Okay. Well, I think as long as you have consenting adults who are choosing to live this way, but - and this is a huge but this is something both open to men and women, I'm all for it, because you'll find, and it is not just Islam, but religions like Mormonism, and others that do allow multiple marriages, the multiplicity is always given to the men and there is this bizarre idea that men's sex drive is somehow higher than women's and that's just total crap because women have just as much of a sex drive as men do and in many cases women's sex drive outpaces men's sex drive. But the way so many people are socialised is that no, no, no, the men have to enjoy as many women as possible because they have this insatiable sex drive, whereas women, you know, you are taught to be good, you're taught to be virginal, you're taught to be chaste. So in the case of societies where you're socialised like that, I think sex is a political act. Getting out there and getting over the sexual guilt that is put, especially on women in conservative societies, is a political act. So as long as what you're saying is open to all genders and men and women, if we are now just talking about men and women, are able to enjoy that kind of lifestyle equally, I'm all for it. But, unfortunately, a great deal of hypocrisy goes into this and women are told, accept that, you know, the three or four of you will share the one guy because he's just so insatiable and that's just bullshit. It's not true. It's something that just - it just massages men's egos and it's crap.

TONY JONES: Let me just quickly jump in there. Would polygamy be okay, in your view, if women were able to take multiple husbands?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah, if women could but the thing is they can't and so I - I want to ban polygamy as long as women can't. Are you gonna - are you gonna be my third husband? Are you to be my third husband, Zizek?

TONY JONES: He was tapping me on the shoulder, not you.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Both of you?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I just wanted to make - and please, don't stop me, I need a domina, a woman. No, quite seriously, don't be too much in love with - I think it's called polyandry, the other way round.

MONA ELTAHAWY: For women, yeah.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: You know, they have it in traditional Tibet and I can tell you the explanation is quite a vulgar Marxist one. You have a farmer who has four, five sons. The problem is how to prevent the farm being split. You marry to all of them to one women and it's strictly hierarchic. No. No. It's not you who says in the evening, "Tonight it's your turn."

MONA ELTAHAWY: He's not talking about that. But he's not talking about that. He's talking now about getting over these taboos. I understand and actually and that lifestyle is dying out now as societies like Tibet and India become more modernised and people don't live like that anymore.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah.

MONA ELTAHAWY: But he's talking about getting over taboos. and for me the biggest taboo is to cut this crap that pretends that men have higher sex drives than women. They don't.

TONY JONES: Okay, let's...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: But...

TONY JONES: I want to hear from the other end of the panel first, Greg Sheridan's been dying to get in on this.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Hello, Greg.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Why do you want to hear from the other...

GREG SHERIDAN: Tony, this is - this is...

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

GREG SHERIDAN: Look, sitting on the far left of the panel, as I am, this is a question which Irish Catholic boys often contemplate as they grow up and become News Limited journalists where, of course, we are labelled now by Bob Brown as the love media and everybody knows that we have a loving relationship, a polyamorous relationship, with our millions and millions of readers. But, look, I would just make one...

TONY JONES: I hate to think about what you are doing when you are writing your columns.

GREG SHERIDAN: I'm communing on a higher plane, Tony. In fact, the ABC asked if they could commission a series 'At Home With The Foreign Editor' and I said, no. I said there had to be limits. But look, I'd like to make one serious point. One of the madnesses of our society is it can never do anything in balance or in proportion. We are a society determined to take every stupid idea to its most extreme possible conclusion. So we are all of us reacting against the Victorian rules that, as kids, we read about in English novels and we spend our whole lives rebelling against these rules which haven't existed for 100 years and then we recognise no end point, no point of restraint, no point of commonsense and no point of balance. I would agree with Slavoj. I'm an old-fashioned romantic and I think if you just fall in love and stay in love, that's the best thing.

TONY JONES: Okay, I'm going to cut it off on that point of agreement because we can't spend all night talking about sex. We've got other subjects. You're watching Q&A, where you ask the questions. Our next question tonight comes from...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Are there other subjects?

PSYCHOPATHS IN POWER

TONY JONES: You'll get your chance. Joseph Ackland.

JOSEPH ACKLAND: Can psychopaths integrate into society or is society already full of psychopaths occupying the roles of our leading high flyers and power brokers?

JON RONSON: Oh, okay.

TONY JONES: Yeah, Jon, this is your specialty subject.

JON RONSON: Yeah, well, that - I mean, I should start with a statistic. The statistic is, according to Hare, the inventor of the checklist, 1 in 100 regular, walking around people is a psychopath. So there is - how many - there's 300 people in this room, so there's three psychopaths in this room.

GREG SHERIDAN: Are they all on the panel?

JON RONSON: Well, I'm rather hoping that they're not the ones sitting behind us because, you know, they'll have the advantage. So one in 10 regular people is a psychopath but 4% of CEOs are psychopaths. You're four times more likely to have a psychopath at the top than you are to have one as your subordinate because capitalism rewards psychopathy and this is the problem, is that the more ruthlessly - I spent time with a man who used to live here called Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who used to work with Kerry Packer, and he allowed me to do - he was a ruthless asset stripper and he allowed me to do the psychopathy checklist on him, so I went through it. I said, okay, grandiose sense of self worth, which would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself at the time. He said, "You've got to believe in you," and kind of went through the checklist and identified many of the items on the psychopath checklist as business positives that are rewarded in our capitalist system. So that's the problem. The problem isn't so much the kind of maverick, ruthless psychopaths in charge, it the system that rewards them and cheers them on and the more psychopathically people like Al Dunlap behave, the more the share prices shot up and you only have to look at the American health care system, for instance, to see that, you know, it's a system that echoes, the psychopath checklist. It's a real problem.

TONY JONES: Okay, we've got a question ...

JON RONSON: Psychopathy is the reason - it's the ...

PSYCHO MPs

TONY JONES: We've got a question that's come in via our Facebook page. It's from Rob Crasti and it's for Jon Ronson: "How can we recognise a psychopath in politics? Before we vote for a politician, what signs, behavioural and verbal, should worry us they may be a psychopath?"

JON RONSON: Okay. Well, it's a 20 point checklist. You've got grandiosity. You've got glibness, superficial charm. I mean, so far we're with all politicians, right. You've got lack of remorse and lack of empathy. Again, most politicians. Are you putting your hand up as a - somebody who's like fessing up to this?

TONY JONES: No. No. He wants to make a comment.

JON RONSON: Okay, so...

TONY JONES: And you can. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In fairness, Jon, I read the Hare psychopathy checklist before coming here tonight and I did want to ask you, in your considered opinion, is our Prime Minister a psychopath?

JON RONSON: You know, I'm not going to start. I think it's...

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, come on.

JON RONSON: I think it is unlikable to diagnose people without having met them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We can tee it up.

JON RONSON: So, I mean, that's the truthful answer. I think if you...

TONY JONES: Let's go for the extremes.

JON RONSON: Okay.

TONY JONES: What about Hitler and Stalin, psychopaths?

JON RONSON: Well, I think, you know, if you've got like - if you've got a kind of grotesque costume, a kind of uniform that's kind of garish, plus a penchant for genocide, that's a big clue. So if you get them onto the subject of empathy, what they hate is weakness. They hate weakness and so if you can get them to talk about how empathy really is a weakness, that's a big clue. However, I don't want people to get drunk with power. I don't want people to read either my book or the Hare checklist and become, like I did, a power crazed psychopath spotter, because that can turn you a little bit psychopathic. So be slightly wary of that.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from the rest of our panel. Kate, was going to jump in there.

KATE ADIE: What does it profit us to actually label people as psychopaths, to actually analyse and say they are psychopaths, partly because to me you seem to be describing the kind of ruthless bastards who get to the top in every kind of walk of life? And if you're going to label them and say these are psychopaths, what are you going to propose to do about it? Do they live in a pen somewhere, saying "Don't let them out"? Don't give them something to run?

GREG SHERIDAN: It's called Parliament House.

JON RONSON: No, you don't do that and, in fact, they are trying to do that in America. They are trying to - people who are coming up for parole are being scored on the psychopath checklist and if (indistinct)...

KATE ADIE: What about people sitting for President? I mean, you know (indistinct)...

JON RONSON: And, yeah, and Kate, so I totally agree with you. Labelling is clearly, in our society, a tyrannical and problematic thing.

KATE ADIE: Yeah.,

JON RONSON: However, psychopathy exists. It's a difficult situation there.

TONY JONES: And you say it can't be cured.

JON RONSON: And the evidence is that it can't be cured unless you get them very, very young and it's a very real thing.

KATE ADIE: Okay, once you've got them, what do you do with them?

JON RONSON: You know what...

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Slavoj. He might have an answer.

JON RONSON: No, I have an answer to that.

TONY JONES: Oh, okay. Go ahead.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I actually think there are much more - would you agree or not - a so called serious question - when we talk about people like Hitler and so on, listen, I read a book on the history of SS, SS German, and especially a chapter on Reinhard Heydrich. He organised , you know, Wannsee Conference, Holocaust and so on. What strikes me so much is that, you know what, this guy, if there ever was an evil guy, it's him. You know what he was doing in the evenings? He gathered with his SS friends and they...

TONY JONES: Playing Mozart?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Even better, Beethoven's string quartets and I think that's the really tragic, depressing thing. You cannot say, oh, they must have gotten it wrong or whatever. No, the tragic lesson of history is, and I can go on through like read a book which is the Bible for me, Brian Victoria, a Zen monk, it's called Zen at War. It demonstrates how the large majority of Zen Buddhist in Japan not only totally supported Japanese military expansionism but provided the properly Zen Buddhist justification for it. To amuse you very shortly, you know (indistinct) where we are young hippies, the glorious propagator in the hippy west of Buddhism, he not only fully supported Japanese invasion of China but he faced this problem: I have to kill you in war. He said, if I remain caught in the illusion of my ordinary reality, I perceive myself as an agent killing you. I may hate you, who knows, but it's difficult for me. Then, he says, if you go through a Buddhist enlightenment, you see that you have no self. You became a passive observer of your acts and I no longer perceive me stabbing a knife into your eye as my act but just, as he puts it, my knife is dancing around and in the cosmic dance of phenomena, your eye seems to stumble upon it (indistinct). Was he a psychopath or not? (Indistinct)

JON RONSON: That score is...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: You know (indistinct)...

TONY JONES: I am just putting my pen on this side.

JON RONSON: Yeah.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. No.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Jon.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No. No. Just one more, then I will stop.

TONY JONES: One more. Okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: The main definition of psychopath for me is also a person who is too identified with what he is like, for example (indistinct) my favourite dogmatic reference. He said something very nice. He said a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king. A madman is also a king who thinks that he is a king and I think this is why, I think, the The King's Speech - I wonder if you will agree, it's an extreme reactionary film. It tells the story of the...

TONY JONES: No, no, we know.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: He's a good, normal guy.

TONY JONES: It's a very long story.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No. No. No. (Indistinct)

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: (Indistinct) a sign of morality. He knows it's stupid to be a king and your Australian guy (indistinct) to become stupid enough to believe that he is really a king.

TONY JONES: Okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Okay.

TONY JONES: All right. All right. Jon.

JON RONSON: Okay.

TONY JONES: And we'll hear from the other side of the panel.

JON RONSON: Okay, I can answer the two questions very briefly. Yes, say that this person's eye got in the way of my knife is an indication of psychopathy because they do tend to blame the victim. And the answer to Kate's question is, you know, I completely sympathise with the notion that mental health labelling is a very, very difficult and, you know, in worst case tyrannical thing. However, psychopathy exists. It's a real condition and I think, you know, one shouldn't shy away from really understanding the crazy ways we behave when our brains go wrong. And what to do with them? The answer is, of course you don't lock them up. You don't end up like some villain in a Orwell novel. What you do is you just - you just be aware. You just be wary. You just don't let them fuck with you.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Greg Sheridan. You've dealt with an awful lot of Australian politicians. Have you ever noticed any that exhibit psychopathic tendencies?

GREG SHERIDAN: Tony, I have interviewed and written about a lot of psychopaths in my time, but let me give you the two ends of the spectrum. Normally when you interview a politician, you start with flattery and now matter how outrageous the flattery, it's never enough. You say, Kevin, Tony, whoever, "You're the greatest orator since Cicero," and the response is "Why do you think he was so great?" you know. But I interviewed once Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, and I started with my flattery, "You've changed the course of the river of Indian human life with your economic reforms." His response was, "If you're going to talk rubbish like that, leave now. If you want to talk about economic policy you can stay". Now, the other end of the spectrum, I spent an evening once with Saif Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi's most famous son.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: The doctor from (indistinct).

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah, (indistinct) and great artist and, you know, hole in one seven times, swam, you know, 100 miles in eight minutes and so on. And during the course of the interview, I said, "What's it like being Colonel Gaddafi's son?" He said to me, well, you know, "Our dad doesn't realise that we're just normal Libyan kids. We like to ski in Switzerland, shop in Paris, just like every other normal Libyan" and I thought "There's a guy who doesn't have much empathy". So I'm glad Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister and Saif Gaddafi is not.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well...

KATE ADIE: I...

TONY JONES: No, let's hear from Mona, because, look, there have been an awful lot of psychopaths in the dictatorships of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, the Assad father and son, Gaddafi's just been named.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yes. I did not meet Saddam Hussein. I attended news conferences with senior and junior Assad but I want to share my Gaddafi story, which I travelled around the world with and it has more to do with sex than psychopathy, but why not, we'll combine both questions and it ties in exactly with this, our father, not so much the sons, but the guards and not the female guards of Gaddafi, and I call it nipplegate. Because I was attending a news conference in Libya in 1996 when it was actually a colleague - a former colleague worked - she actually still works for the BBC. We saw Gaddafi standing on the podium, standing by myself, so me and my friend from the BBC went to ask him some questions and he said, "Yes. Yes. You can ask us." And he's standing on the podium at a news conference, impromptu news conference and then all of a sudden the psychopaths from the Ministry of Information, now, these are the minders who follow you around we were talking about China earlier these are the minders who follow you around in Libya - well, tried to push me out and someone tried to grab my tape recorder, so I bit his hand and this is all being filmed in the news conference. And then one of the male bodyguards, and again this is an indication of just how when at psychopath is at the top it trickles down. I mean, the economy in Libya didn't trickle down but the madness certainly did and so the guard is standing there with his AK 4 and he's trying to push me out and I push him back. He pushes me. I push him back and then he twisted my nipple in the middle of the news conference. Just like that. Titty twister, I think it is called. I'm sitting there going, "What the fuck? Oh, my God". And so I turned to Muammar Gaddafi who, in Egypt, we call Brother Colonel, because he took over from the King. He got rid of the King in a coup. He was a captain. He promoted himself to colonel, not to general, so his ego wasn't that crazy but just to colonel and in Egypt we call him Brother Colonel (SPEAKS EGYPTIAN). So I'm like "Look, what he is doing to me" and Gaddafi and I make eye contact for about five seconds. And I thought, you know, "He's going to jump in with his Arab pride and chivalry and say how dare you violate the honour of my Arab sister" and he just looks at me and then just continues like nothing is happening. And I thought, these people are fucking lunatics. And so I push the guy and I kick him and it goes on and on and then the news conference finishes. My press badge has disappeared, so I thought, okay, this madness was because they want to get rid of my press badge. Then this Algerian journalist comes up to me and he's like, "Mona, are you okay? Are you okay?" I go, "Do you see what he did to me?" He goes "They were saying just shoot her. Just shoot her". So I share this story because, again, when the mad - when the psychopathy is up there and it's not checked, it goes not just into the sons but it goes into everybody. It poisons the water.

JON RONSON: Exactly.

KATE ADIE: Well, hang on. Hang on. It's not so much psychopathy. Having interviewed Gaddafi a number of times, I decided, like a number of my colleagues...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Did he twist your nipple as well, Kate?

KATE ADIE: He didn't. I worked out he wasn't really bright enough to actually belong to your pantheon of psychopaths. What actually keeps a lot of people who are in power there, what trickles down is not a psychopathic attitude, it's fear. There is, in all people who attain a certain amount of power over others, it then a creek. It then spreads and everybody gets more and more scared. All the little minions around him just quaked. I once saw a number of ministers in front of him. He came into the room. One of them was so scared that he shook so much he fell over in sheer fear. It's not that they become psychopaths It's that a lot of very powerful people maintain their style, their power, because they actually threaten other people. They don't change their character, they just make them scared.

TONY JONES: I am going to interrupt there because let's move on to the moment where that fear seems to have evaporated in the Middle East. We've got a few questions. This is Q&A. It's live and interactive. Our next question comes from Farid Farid.

ARAB SPRING OR WINTER?

FARID FARID: This is to Professor Zizek. You've been compared most recently in an Al Jazeera op ed, maybe unfavourably, to Muammar Gaddafi for being out of touch and sticking to an old ideological world view when faced with the rapid changes undergone in the Arab uprisings. What is your view now of what's happening in the Middle East and do you think what is commonly called as the Arab spring has turned into an Arab winter of discontent?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: First, I would like to know the precise nature of that - in what sense was I compared with Gaddafi? My only link with Gaddafi is my friend's enemies from Libyan School of Economics, one's called London School of Economics, where attacking me as being totalitarian but, my God, I mean they were getting all the money from Gaddafi and so on.

TONY JONES: I think it was sort of an analogy by Al Jazeera saying you were as out of touch as Gaddafi really that's...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Out of touch with what? My public reaction to Arab Spring was a text published by the Guardian on Tahrir Square miracle and so on, where I absolutely emphasised what I think is crucial. The Western, okay, hypocrisy, everybody knows this, but what type of hypocrisy? This was my metaphor. The official desire of the West all the time was, oh, my God, the only way to mobilise Arab people is through religion, anti-Semitism, fanaticism and so on, if only there were to be some secular, purely democratic uprising. Now that we got it, we are afraid. Like what's going on? New dangers and so on, and I compared this in my tasteless nature, since we talk about sex, with did you see Francois Truffaut's film Day For Night? Well, it's a sad story. A young boy wants to sleep with a street girl. Finally they are alone and he tells her "Okay, now we are alone by a lake. Let's do it quickly," and so on. "Oh, I am dreaming for years to screw you" and the girl simply says "Okay, why not?" and starts to unbutton her trousers and he is in a total panic. Like, how, do you mean just like that or whatever? Aren't we a little bit like that, towards Egypt, I mean? You know why? Because they did what we demanded from them and the result is shock. So the tragedy is another one. My hope is with Tahrir Square. My hope is with Musabi. I was deeply involved supporting Musabi in Iran. Why? Because Musabi precisely was the way I see it and I know very well the situation there. He is definitely not the (indistinct) corruption but he is also not a so called pro-Western liberal and so on. He's something authentically third way, which is why we, in the West, get such difficulty to place where does he belong, Musabi. For some people it's the same as (indistinct). It doesn't matter. For so again, all my admiration goes to Tahrir Square and my whole point was precisely "Don't assimilate it into a simple pro-Western uprising" and so on and so on.

TONY JONES: Okay, let's hear from Mona.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, Zizek, you know why - you know why the West - so called West - is having such a hard time with this, because for such a long time they only saw the people from the Middle East and North Africa, where I come from, as either psychopaths or dictators or lunatic fundamentalists and the rest of us who were in the middle and we kept saying, look, hello, there's a whole bunch of us here that are neither...

TONY JONES: Why do you say the west is having a hard time with this when...

MONA ELTAHAWY: I'll tell you why.

TONY JONES: ...another way of looking at it would be that many in the West are sighing with relief that democracy is finally coming to these companies.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Let me tell you...

TONY JONES: I'm not necessarily talking about the leaders that back the dictators but people.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yes. Let me tell you what happens when I give these talks in various American campuses. I get questions like, "What in the Egyptian fabric prepares you for freedom?" like we're some kind of fucking barbarians who don't know how to live our own lives and the reason that we have been unable to live our own lives in our countries is because these very people who elected these very governments stood in our way and they knew it and I want to talk about the leaders though, because the United States right now, just four or five days ago, they called our Supreme Council of Mubaraks, which are the 19 military men who currently run Egypt, all Mubarak's friends, Hillary Clinton called them a force of stability and continuity, just what she used to call Mubarak. The United States is about to sell Bahrain $53 million of weapons, to do what: Kill its own people. And the United States says we're doing this because Bahrain is a force of continuity and stability. And American people do not - I mean not just American people but the whole point of my lecture here yesterday, for anyone who attended - for those who didn't attend it was called "Hypocrisy rhymes with Democracy" - right here in Australia too, you guys are having a hard time because you guys also are scared of the Muslim men with beards because you guys do not see the nuances of where I come from. It's not just in America.

TONY JONES: Let me throw that to Greg Sheridan to see if he agrees with you?

GREG SHERIDAN: Well, you know, I don't want to be a party pooper here and spoil the good fun but we actually have to take each of these countries separately and the situations are very complicated and they're very contested. We don't know how to feel about the Arab Spring yet, because we don't know how it is going to work out. One thing that we don't discuss very often is that the Egyptian economy...

TONY JONES: We do support democracy thought, don't we?

GREG SHERIDAN: Of course.

TONY JONES: I mean, that's - so we know about that.

GREG SHERIDAN: Of course. Of course, yeah.

TONY JONES: We know that much, don't we?

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah, of course. But the mere fact that somebody votes you doesn't make you a good guy. A lot of people voted for Adolf Hitler. Doesn't make him a good guy and one thing we don't discuss in Egypt, for example...

TONY JONES: So, well, let me just ask you very briefly, would you rather see Mubarak still there because of the stability he represents?

GREG SHERIDAN: No. No. No. Of course not. No. No. No. No. Certainly not.

TONY JONES: No.

GREG SHERIDAN: No, and I - and there's a lot to be encouraged about about the Arab spring and wonderful people, liberals, friends of mine are involved in it and working their guts out. But two points I want to make to you, Tony. One is that the Egyptian economy is absolutely on the rack and eventually every political system, whether it's democracy or something else, has to deliver something to its people. One of the things it has to deliver is bread. The second point I'd make is that the situation in Egypt and in all those North African countries is fiercely contested and some of the people I'm privileged to know, who are great people who are involved in the contest, and some of the people in the contest have very evil ideologies. The people who...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Who? Who has the evil ideology?

GREG SHERIDAN: Well, I think the Muslim Brotherhood, according to my friend Tarek Heggy, is unreformed. It's moderation is fake. It's temporary and tactical and it's internally split. I understand there are a lot of nuances. You can't do it all in a short TV program but there are a lot of diehard serious Islamists there filled with extremist ideology.

MONA ELTAHAWY: But let's talk about the Muslim Brotherhood getting into Parliament, which they will, because they will be voted in because they are Egyptian and they represent a good number of Egyptians. They don't represent me. I am not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. I would vote for someone else. But let's talk about the Muslim Brotherhood getting...

GREG SHERIDAN: Well, according to them you're not never allowed to be President because you are a woman.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Hold on. Hold on. And that's wrong and if they don't change that platform and that platform - that point in their platform is coming under a great deal of attack by young members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But let's talk about the Muslim Brotherhood entering parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood will then have to deliver to the people who voted for them. The Muslim Brotherhood and whoever else is in the Egyptian Parliament will have to fix roads, will have to fix subway lines, will have to fix the curriculum, i.e. they will have to be politicians. What concerns me, as an Egyptian who is secular and liberal and not going to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, is that we have a constitution that guarantees I can vote them in and vote them out, so you can't just sit there and say the Muslim Brotherhood is evil. No, the Muslim Brotherhood will be evil if they don't deliver on what the constituents want them to deliver. So I urge you not to just let this evil ideology...

GREG SHERIDAN: I hope that democracy works that way. I hope that democracy works that way.

TONY JONES: I'm going to interrupt this dialogue over here just to bring in this side.

KATE ADIE: I do think - I do think that we have a contemporary habit of expecting democracy to spring instantly. If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, it's going to take a long time, particularly in Afghanistan and I think we expect it. We expect next week somebody to get parliamentary elections. We expect people to sort out political parties ala western states. It's not going to happen like that. We took 800 years in Britain to get from a king running everything, with the religious people right next to him laying down the law, to a form of parliamentary democracy. It took us 800 years.

TONY JONES: Hang on, we've got a couple of people in the audience with their hands up...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Can I...

TONY JONES: Actually you will but I want to hear from our audience as well. So a quick comment from both of these two people with their hands up, starting with you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, Mr Sheridan, communism in its purist form is about spreading the wealth around and whoever people are, they may be able to concede there have been some bad Labor Prime Ministers in this country but whenever (indistinct)

TONY JONES: Okay, I'm sorry you are - I'm going to interrupt - I'm going to interrupt you because you're actually off topic. No, sorry, you're off topic. Let's go to this person.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think democracy could work better if there was a separation between religion and state.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah, okay, Slavoj.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah, first, if I may just return to the previous question. It's a very important point. Where I nonetheless disagree and I think I will say something terribly politically correct now, it just may be slight racist overturns is this idea of, oh, but Arabs need hundreds of years. Sorry, Afghanistan, as I said yesterday, 40 years ago was a very tolerant multicultural country. Afghanistan is not an old traditional country, which now we slowly have to bring to civilisation. When I was young I was in Afghanistan as a child. I saw in Herat, the other city (indistinct) Afghanistan, as you know, 40 years ago shared a relatively enlightened pro-Western monarch, had a strong local communist party and so on. The way Afghanistan was caught into world politics made it fundamentalist. It is not there a primitive country that we have to civilise. We screwed it up.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Zizek. Zizek. I want to say something else to what you were saying, Greg, and it touches on what you're saying, religion and politics. You know, you talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, let's took about the Christian Brotherhood of the United States because I always tell my American friends we might have the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt but there is a Christian Brotherhood in the United States and the Christian Brotherhood in the United States, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has actually had an impact on foreign policy because George Bush apparently heard God tell him to invade Iraq and in the name of this...

GREG SHERIDAN: Where did George Bush ever say that? That's ridiculous.

MONA ELTAHAWY: You want me to get that for you from the news conference?

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah, you show me the quote.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I will. I will. I will email it to you.

GREG SHERIDAN: That is complete rubbish.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I will send it to you by Twitter. No, it's actually true.

GREG SHERIDAN: George W Bush never said that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: He did. He did.

GREG SHERIDAN: You made it up.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, I did not make it up.

GREG SHERIDAN: There's something in your coffee.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, actually, no. I wish.

TONY JONES: Hang on. Hang on. Jon wants to get in here.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Wait. Wait. Wait. Let me finish. Let me finish.

TONY JONES: On his behalf, I'm going to say, please let Jon come in.

JON RONSON: No, can I just say that, just to support what Mona said, George Bush not only said that, but he had his...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Thank you.

TONY JONES: He had a presidential prayer team who would meet every week and pray for...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. And the Christian Brotherhood of the United States...

GREG SHERIDAN: You can mock George W Bush for saying prayers ...

JON RONSON: I'm not. But - no, no. This isn't mocking.

GREG SHERIDAN: ...but that's not same as saying...

MONA ELTAHAWY: It's not about prayers he said - didn't he say, "God told me to liberate Iraq"?

GREG SHERIDAN: ...that God told him to invade Iraq?

JON RONSON: Yeah, this is...

MONA ELTAHAWY: He did. He did. And not just that...

TONY JONES: And this is the...

GREG SHERIDAN: No, he didn't. No. No. No. That's completely crazy. That's...

MONA ELTAHAWY: And beyond that, the Christian Coalition in the United States has consistently had an impact on US foreign policy vis-Ã -vis Israel, on US foreign policy generally. You have a Christian Coalition in the United States that has power, even though I live in a country that supposedly has separation between religion and state. So don't breach to the Middle East and North Africa about separating religion and state when you have a Christian fundamentalist president who says, "I'm invading a country because God told me to give them freedom."

TONY JONES: Okay. Okay.

GREG SHERIDAN: No, that's complete rubbish.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

GREG SHERIDAN: That's complete rubbish. Complete rubbish.

TONY JONES: Hold on. Hold on.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Sorry, but in...

GREG SHERIDAN: He never said that. He never said that and nowhere in any of his justifications for the actions of Iraq or any of John Howard's justifications is there anything like that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I can't speak for John Howard. I don't know how fundamentalist he is...

GREG SHERIDAN: That's just complete baloney.

MONA ELTAHAWY: ...but I'll get you Bush.

TONY JONES: Okay, I'm going to change tack.

GREG SHERIDAN: Just absolute rubbish.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No. No. No. Sorry. Sorry.

TONY JONES: No, I'm sorry, I'm in charge here.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No. No. But...

TONY JONES: I'm sorry. Let's move along. Our next question comes from Eleanor Doyle Markwick.

WIKILEAKS AND ASSANGE

ELEANOR DOYLE This question is again for Slavoj. You're a supporter of - I apologise, Tony. You're a supporter of Julian Assange. I too support his push for open transparent government; however, I don't believe the anonymity and safety of dissidents should be sacrificed to the cause. Do you agree or are redacted documents, like sex with a condom, just not as good?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Okay, let me...

TONY JONES: Okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It is a long story, yes, but let me be very...

TONY JONES: Just go to the summary.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Yeah. But just, okay, I will start with, you know what...

TONY JONES: No. No. No. No. We're...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No, when you said God and so on, sorry, but the standard argument with all my mega sympathy for Israel, but it worries me how the western civilisation can pretend to be secular and so on and then the answer I get from American politicians, it can be put in a more refined way, like it is cultural. My God, one of the guys (indistinct)...

TONY JONES: Slavoj, no, I'm going to interrupt you.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: ...said - said Israel, God gave them the country. Sorry, in the state of Israel (indistinct)...

TONY JONES: We're not talking about God now. We're talking about Julian Assange.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Okay. Okay.

TONY JONES: Some people...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I will go back to Assange.

TONY JONES: Some people may think they are the same thing.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: What to say about that condom stuff and so on. Listen, I know the story in detail because I have friends in Sweden. I think this is a ridiculous excess of political correctness which will backfire on the women because it is a fake thing.

TONY JONES: No. No. No. No. No.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: She asked about condoms?

TONY JONES: No, that was - no. No. No.

MONA ELTAHAWY: It was an - sorry. I'm sorry but that was an analogy. She was simply saying that the lack of protection for the dissidents who actually were named in the cables, exposed by WikiLeaks...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Protection. The theme is protection.

MONA ELTAHAWY: ...meant that they didn't have the sort of protection you might have with a condom if you were having sex. It's an analogy.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me go quickly then. You know what's for me the - why do I support Assange? First, I think that, on the contrary, what he did with documents was extremely restrained, double checking and so on. Where did this crazy idea come that he's just throwing them out? But something else is important.

TONY JONES: Well, it came right from the very beginning actually when the first tranche of Afghan military documents were released and people who were informants were named. So people who had been talking to the American and Australian military were named in the documents. Their names were not redacted.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Then, okay, let's not go into detail. We can go there but...

TONY JONES: Well, they're important these details.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Well, no, no, no, no, no, because I would contest this in detail. I know in detail the story.

TONY JONES: Okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: What fascinated me in Afghanistan or Northern Iraq, it's crucial, is that shot, shot from a camera from a helicopter, where you can clearly see - I don't know who are, maybe Taliban, I don't care - but some soldiers clearly explicitly wanting to surrender to the Americans. The helicopter pilot phones back what do? Basically he get the message, "Shoot them. We take no prisoners" and so on. So, okay, but another point...

TONY JONES: Sorry, that was in Iraq, so they weren't Taliban.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But let me get to my point finally. The point about Assange is not what we learn. Did we really learn anything new globally? No, it just what we expected. It's, you know, life is hypocritical in the sense that there are things that are going on but we allow those in power to pretend to act as if they don't go on. That's why it is important. It is not what we learned. It's that those in power cannot pretend to act as if this is not going on.

TONY JONES: Yeah. Slavoj, No, just - just...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: And I think this far outweighs all the problems.

TONY JONES: Yeah, we've got to find an end to a sentence at some point.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Yeah.

TONY JONES: Just We will go to Jon.

JON RONSON: Slavoj, in saying let's not go detail, what you did with a wave of your hand was dismiss somebody who puts ideology over human life and human safety. It was despicable what Assange did to send out these documents and he was asked, wasn't he, at one point "Well, what about the safety of the people that you named?" and he said, "Well, if they work for - I mean, I believe this is true. He said, well, if they work for the government, then they're fair game". I mean that's - to put ideology over life is a terrible thing and, you know, is this not what we are all doing here? Are we not just kind of reaching, you know, because of this kind of fetishisation of extreme ideological positions on television and in politics and so on? You know it's, you know, the more respected somebody is, it relates to how ideological, how extreme their position is and, you know, this is a problem in our world, uncertainty and doubt.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

TONY JONES: No. No. All right, but I just want to hear this...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: (Indistinct)

TONY JONES: Fair enough.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I think the (indistinct) of life that you are using here is pure ideology.

TONY JONES: Okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I don't have time to explain it but...

TONY JONES: No, fair enough. I want to hear from Kate.

KATE ADIE: Well, as a journalist, I think I begin to wonder and looking at all that Assange did is, first of all, what governments do and that very few of us actively think about how much governments keep secret and what they do in their name and what they do to protect people who do things which they do not want public and whether that desire not to have it public is right or wrong. We are all, in democracies, lazy about this. Vast numbers of countries have all kinds of laws which say "Whatever the government does can be kept secret for years and years and years" and we go "Mmmm". And we don't think 'Why?' And I think we're lazy about deciding what should be secret, what your government should keep from you, as an ordinary citizen, and what it should do to protect, if we agree, those people who might be vulnerable, whom the government thinks should stay out of the public eye. We're lazy about it. We just say "Oh, yeah, the government doesn't tell us". Well, if in a democracy, we should be inquiring. We should know where those decisions are made. We have...

TONY JONES: I'm going to go across to Mona and you can perhaps give us an assessment of whether WikiLeaks played a significant role in the Arab Spring?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Right. I'm so glad you asked me this. You mean the WikiLeaks Revolution? Not. Nothing - nothing pisses people off in the Middle East more than hearing these revolutions and uprisings were WikiLeaks revolutions, for many reasons. Primarily, in a country like Tunisia and even in Egypt, none of the major media outlets especially those state controlled, were allowed to publish cablegate, so we were reading about these things outside of the region. So the scenario didn't go Muhammad Bouazizi picked up the newspaper in Sidi Bouzid, thought "Oh, my God, my regime is so corrupt, I'm going to go out there and overthrow them." It didn't work like that. And, second of all, the people in the region, just like you were saying, Zizek, they all knew of the stuff. They all knew - they were dying for the international community to say something. They pleaded - all these activists used to plead with the various Western governments that propped up the dictators to stop propping them up because they were so corrupt. So they knew all of this.

TONY JONES: Mona, can I just interrupt there, because Assange makes the argument because of cablegate, because of all this material being out there, that the Western governments were not able to intervene to prop up those dictatorships during the Arab Spring? That's his argument.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Oh, they continued to. My God, did you see - did you see how long it took for the US Administration, for example, to actually get on the right side and say the right thing? They fumbled around for days and to this day they continue to say the Supreme Military Council of Mubaraks, as I call them, is a force of stability and continuity. If anything, cablegate and what WikiLeaks has been revealing is the need - there should be a revolution in DC. There should be a revolution here. The revolution belongs outside because basically what's happening is the supposedly democratically elected governments are hypocrites and if you didn't know before, now you know. What are you going to do about it? That's the revolution.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

TONY JONES: Yeah, let's hear from...

KATE ADIE: We've all got lazy about it. That is what it is.

GREG SHERIDAN: I actually think...

KATE ADIE: In are so many democracies now, we take having a vote for granted.

GREG SHERIDAN: I actually think the less...

TONY JONES: Okay. All right.

KATE ADIE: We just don't get off our butts and do anything.

TONY JONES: I'm just going to hear from Greg down the end.

GREG SHERIDAN: I think the political lesson out of WikiLeaks is something quite different and you'll be astonished to hear, Mona, that I may disagree with you on this point.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I'm shocked.

GREG SHERIDAN: I know you are. I know you are but, you know, that's we aim to - we aim to please, we in the love media, but I think the big lesson out of WikiLeaks is that democracies tell the truth and dictatorships tell lies.

MONA ELTAHAWY: What? What? How? How?

GREG SHERIDAN: What was fascinating out of WikiLeaks - well, if you'll let me, I'll explain. What was fascinating out of WikiLeaks was Mahmoud Abbas begging Israel to take action against the Hamas, the Saudis begging the Americans to take action against the Iranians and in the broader sense, everything the Americans and the Australian governments was telling us was broadly true. You remember, Tony, on this program, John Pilger said I should be scared about the WikiLeaks mother-load because it would have all this terrible stuff. I finally found myself in a cable the other day. I was so thrilled but I can't get into the paper because it was quoting a published column that I wrote.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. Okay.

GREG SHERIDAN: And we - we journalists have nothing to fear from WikiLeaks.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Tony, Tony, Tony.

TONY JONES: Yeah, okay, very briefly, because we've got another question at least, we need to come to, and we've got very little time to do that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I cannot believe that you spew such nonsense as democracies tell the truth. How, based on what WikiLeaks showed, are you able to actually say that with a straight face? What WikiLeaks showed us is that these governments knew what was happening but they were so hypocritical and they did nothing and said nothing and continued to sell weapons...

GREG SHERIDAN: No, that's not true.

MONA ELTAHAWY: ...and continued to have business deals with these bastards. What are you talking about?

GREG SHERIDAN: Almost - almost everything - almost everything that we've found in WikiLeaks as Slavoj said, we already knew. Almost everything we found we already knew. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, everybody else.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. That's what Mr Zizek said. So very briefly, Jon, you want to get in.

JON RONSON: Yeah, well, I mean, talking about cables that come out, the students in the Arab Spring who went into the security buildings and took out the papers that hadn't been shredded, it was full of British companies offering, in secret deals, to tell equipment to Mubarak. Buying equipment through email and so on. So to say...

GREG SHERIDAN: But British companies aren't the British government and I wouldn't defend the Brits. I'm an Irishman for God's sake.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Sorry. We've got another question. You won't be disappointed. This is Q&A live from the Festival of Very Dangerous Ideas. Our next question comes from Oliver Damian.

CAPITALISM AND EVOLUTION

OLIVER DAMIAN: My question is to the panel. If the selfish and blind pursuit of genes to propagate is what drove single cells to evolve into complex life forms, which includes us, can we say that the blind pursuit of profit is what drives civilisation forward and we should not stop it just because we don't like what we see now given that the future cannot be fully imagined by someone on a lower level of evolution.

TONY JONES: Slavoj?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It may be too philosophical question but just a brief point. You know we don't have time for theory now, I know, but, you know, people usually claim capitalism is egotist just profit seeking. No, I claim that what all good Marxist anthologists know Capitalism is implicitly, in a perverted way, religiously ethical. It's capital must circulate, even if we all drop dead and so on, like it's - you have a metaphysical entity which has priority over our most immediate utilitarian concerns. So, for me, what we need against capitalist greed is not some Christian morality but good, old fashioned utilitarian egotism.

TONY JONES: Are you calling for the return of Marxism, aren't you? I mean...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: That's another complicated question but nonetheless to answer idiot stuff.

TONY JONES: Not so complicated.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: You know I will give you a prediction...

TONY JONES: No. No.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Very short. Very short, really.

TONY JONES: Yep, okay.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: What - to the gentleman's question before, what will happen? What will happen probably, 90%, not 100, is in Egypt a pact between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood.

MONA ELTAHAWY: It's already happening, Zizek. It's already happening.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. The deal will be you, Muslim Brotherhood, get more or less ideological hegemony. We keep our corruption. And I guarantee you this pact will be blessed by the United States as force of (indistinct).

TONY JONES: The question was...

MONA ELTAHAWY: It pays 40% of the Egyptian Army budget. It continues to bless it.

TONY JONES: To all of you, yeah, it's good to be able to continue the previous question but we've had another question. You said it was philosophical and it is. It's actually about the nature of capitalism and whether it's actually the best way forward. Let's hear from Kate.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I only claim it's just the structure of religion.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Kate Adie.

KATE ADIE: One of the things politicians so frequently talk about is that there must be more growth. More jobs means better incomes for people, means a house, means having a nicer life in a material sense and there is quite a lot of thought nowadays perhaps, coming from some quarters, about, well, is growth the thing we mean? When we go over the green fields, we eat all the field, we suck the goodness from the land so it is hard to do anything. We do ever more in the way of smart travel and at greater speed and I think there is a good argument but not a popular one and when - it's one of the things which we are all embracing: wouldn't it be wonderful if we just grew our own vegetables and we didn't get into the car and use all of this petrol and we didn't need new clothes every so often. It's a wonderful idea, except for me. But the idea of growth, per se, I think does need to be questioned, not at the cost of not letting people who are hungry stay hungry and there's the difficult thing in this world. But I do think we need to think about how we could live life and be happier and warm, comfortable and full of food without endlessly building more, destroying the environment and living at a greater speed.

TONY JONES: Let's go to Jon.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I agree with you only on one point. I don't think people want to be (indistinct)

TONY JONES: Slavoj, your name is not Jon. This is Jon.

JON RONSON: Yeah, no, Kate is absolutely right. Capitalism isn't the problem, growth is the problem. When you have companies I know you're going to hate this but when you have companies that take psychopathy as a business model, like the American health insurance industry, where they'll try everything they can to deny claims - I told the story a couple of weeks ago of a little girl who died of leukaemia because her health insurance company found a loophole and denied her the claim, that's the problem. Now, you know, is capitalism to blame for that? No, what the problem in that is this kind of lust for - for growth.

KATE ADIE: And there's a classic one in the pharmacology companies and the pharmaceutical companies in the medicalisation of the human conditions. You need a bill. You do this, you do that and you get a pill. It costs money.

JON RONSON: Well, you know that the manual of mental disorders used to be a pamphlet 65 pages. It's not 886 pages. Now, it's got...

GREG SHERIDAN: But my problem is I don't think evolution explains all of life so it shouldn't explain all (indistinct).

JON RONSON: And you realise that the Pharmaceutical Institute of American is actually creating disorders, such as (indistinct)...

MONA ELTAHAWY: Tony...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: (Indistinct)

TONY JONES: Can I just ask you, Slavoj, I will take the risk and ask you a question.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Your own risk. Your own risk, yeah.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, I mean, do you really see a return to communism, Marxism, as the answer?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No.

TONY JONES: Because...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No. No. As I said yesterday...

TONY JONES: Don't be afraid, join us. Come back. You've had your anti-Communist fun. It's time to get serious again.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Okay, I can tell you more jokes.

TONY JONES: Who said that?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: But what I'm simply saying is that we are obviously approaching today some serious problems, ecology and so on. I don't think, in the long term, these problems can be solved within the liberal capitalist democratic frame. I am the first to admit, my gosh I'm sorry to inform you, but I was a kind of a dissident. I was five years unemployed. I was not allowed to teach. So all I'm saying is that the problems are still here which are the problems of commons - the problems of communism. As I said yesterday, communism is obviously not an answer, the 20th century Communism. But sorry to tell you, the problems are here. They will not run away.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Tony. Tony.

TONY JONES: Yeah, Mona.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I'd like to answer your question actually, by answering it along with two other questions. So it's going to be your question, WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring, quote, unquote, because...

TONY JONES: As long as it's quick.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I will try to talk very fast. If you follow the hash tag "Occupy movement" that is spreading across the United States, it started in New York on Wall Street as a reaction against corporate greed and also some people were saying too much money invested in politics. How was it inspired? It was inspired by seeing people across the Middle East and North Africa rising up against their various regimes and chanting things like "Bread, freedom and social justice". They're not calling for communism but they're calling for a system in which everybody - everybody feels a part of and they're not. In the United States we have more than 40 million people uninsured. I spent five years of my life recently, because I began as a freelancer, uninsured, in a country where you break a leg, go to hospital and you're bankrupt. So it's spreading across the US because people recognise this. And I went to the Wall Street thing and it was encapsulated for me, the first day of the protest, where you had kids on the street saying "Where' my bail out?" and you had these rich men in suits and women in fancy clothes sipping champagne at Ciprianis and taunting the people on the street and you're thinking this is wrong. This is where it's wrong.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. John. Briefly we'll have to wrap up.

JON RONSON: Can I just say that a psychologist called Philip Tetlock recently completed a 20 year study where he studied people like us, sort of pundits on telephone, people who had kind of strong opinions and he asked them 28,000 predictions over a 20 year period. Anyone it turned out that a flick of a coin would have been more accurate, so I just think we should bear that in mind when we (indistinct).

TONY JONES: Okay, that's quite a good - okay, we don't have time to flip the coin. Sadly, that's all we have time for. Please thank the Sydney Opera House and our wonderful panel of dangerous thinkers: Kate Adie, Slavoj Zizek, Jon Ronson, Mona Eltahawy and Greg Sheridan.

Okay. On October 17, we'll be presenting Q&A in Darwin, so if you can be there on that night, go to our website and register to join the audience. Next week on Q&A we head back to politics with the Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten; the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop; celebrated novelist and essayist Richard Flanagan; the lawyer who led the discrimination action against Andrew Bolt, Ron Merkel QC; and News Limited journalist and author Caroline Overington. Until then, goodnight.