"For Žižek, anxiety emerges from the encounter with the Real, from the contradictions embedded in ideology, and from the impossibility of fully reconciling knowledge and social reality. Subjects may act “cynically” or engage in fetishistic disavowal to maintain symbolic order. Anxiety is structural, political, and social as much as it is existential. Ernest Becker’s lens is existential-psychological; Žižek’s lens is structural-ideological. Anxiety is ontologically central for Becker, whereas for Žižek it is a function of the symbolic order and ideological mediation".