Slavoj Žižek is getting better and better as a public intellectual. This should scare us. Here's why. Žižek's old problem is that he critiques aimless consumerism while himself being a stupendous consumerist product. In the past, his radicalism has too often been vacuous. Pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair, Žižek's commentary has become more incisive. But this is not the main reason he is getting better. As a civilisation that's stuck, in Gramsci's words, between an old world that's dying and a new world that can't be born, we are inarticulate about our own predicament. We find it scary to talk about the causes of the crisis of trust and alienation from politics we see all around us. Unfortunately, our public intellectuals are in the same predicament. Many liberal intellectuals have become entrepreneurs for normalisation - they're inarticulate about how Reagan, Clinton, and Obama inadvertently helped cause Trump. Many left intellectuals have become entrepreneurs for narrow identity politics. Many right intellectuals have become entrepreneurs for authoritarian politics. Meanwhile, Žižek has joined a small minority of public intellectuals who can still acknowledge basic truths about our predicament. In a BBC Newsnight interview this month, Žižek argued that - (1) Trump is a symptom, not the underlying problem. (2) The left has abandoned its commitment to a universal political vision. (3) The breakdown of democracy and the global order is not temporary. (4) Trump and Putin together represent a new political-economic ideology. (5) We lack the capacity for collective action to address three great challenges: environmental catastrophe, global war, and artificial intelligence. (6) We are needlessly making a bad situation worse by failing to act boldly and snap out of denial. These thoughts are not extraordinary. They are routine. It is genuinely shocking that Žižek can sound radical by naming realities any educated adult should be able to recognise. Žižek's growing usefulness is a disturbing feature of our times. Above all, it reminds us that a central difficulty of our historical predicament is that it has caused us to be unable to talk about it.