Václav Havel, Truth, and Resistance Theory

The powerless do have a voice:

Václav Havel was an important writer, playwright and political activist. He worked tirelessly against tyrannical communism, and when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, he played a leading role as a dissident, paying a heavy price for doing so. I have written about him before, as in this piece when he had just passed away: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/12/20/the-death-of-a-hero-and-a-monster/

The main thing I wish to accomplish here is to alert readers to his important 1978 political essay, The Power of the Powerless. First, let me offer this brief timeline:

1936, October 5 – Born in Prague
1948-1989 – Czechoslovakia under Communist rule
1968, January to August – The “Prague Spring” under reformist Alexander Dubcek
1968, August 20-21 – The Warsaw Pact invades Czechoslovakia
1976-1992 – The document and civic initiative Charter 77 of which Havel was a key member
1989, November 17-28 – The Velvet Revolution topples the Communist regime
1989–1992 – President of Czechoslovakia
2011, December 18 – Dies

As can be seen, The Power of the Powerless was written a decade after the Soviet invasion, and a decade before the Iron Curtain came crashing down. Roger Scruton, who worked with underground educational networks in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, said this about Havel and his essay:

Havel was also a philosopher, who learnt much from the underground lectures of Jan Patocka, the first spokesman of Charter 77, who died under police interrogation in 1977. In his penetrating essay on The Power of the Powerless Havel shows how totalitarianism so enters the soul of its victims that it no longer needs force to maintain itself. People forge their own chains and display them obediently to their masters. They live within the lie, as things are comfortable there and nobody intrudes save liars, whose motives you share. It is not violence or oppression that holds the façade in place, but ideology, which confiscates the very language with which people might describe things as they are. https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/europe-travel/the-president-who-didnt-believe-in-politics-zjlv3ddds5v?region=global  

There are now various editions of the essay available. I am using the 2018 Vintage Classics edition with an Introduction by Timothy Snyder. He says this in part about the essay:

Havel was less concerned by Soviet force than by Czechs’ and Slovaks’ evident capacity for adaptation, in high politics and in daily life. He was troubled by how the two could merge into what the authorities called ‘normalization’; power was as it was, and alternatives were unthinkable. Thinking was in any event discouraged. . . . The future disappeared along with belief in Marxism. Czechs and Slovaks were to be diverted by consumer goods, distracted by television serials, and demotivated from any sort of action in the public sphere. In the ‘self-violation of society’ of normalized Czechoslovakia, Havel saw a ‘crisis of contemporary technological society as a whole,’ a modern ‘unfreedom’ in which individuals enslave themselves because they do not ask themselves who they are and what they should be doing. . . . Normalization meant accepting the way things were without any argument about how they should be, and it was the suction of this vacuum that troubled Havel the most. (viii-ix)

As to the book itself, a few quotes will have to suffice:

Early on he speaks of a “post-totalitarian” system. He defines it this way: “I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understand it.” (p. 13)

A main theme of his essay is that people are willing to live a lie in order to just get along. When apathy exists, tyranny reigns. One key image he uses throughout is that of the “greengrocer.” That is the shop keeper who along with selling fruit and vegetables, puts up a sign on his storefront window which says, “Workers of the world unite.” Why does he do this?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper ‘decoration’ in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’ as they say. (pp. 14-15)

He continues:

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’, he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’ Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology. (pp. 15-16)

He explains it this way:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

 

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. (pp. 20-21)

The word “truth” is found throughout the essay. Two brief quotes: “It seems that the primary breeding ground for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth.” (p. 42)

And again:

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. (p. 41)

Truth is the weapon of the dissidents:

Our greengrocer’s attempt to live within the truth may be confined to not doing certain things. He decides not to put flags in his window when his only motive for putting them there in the first place would have been to avoid being reported by the house warden; he does not vote in elections that he considers false; he does not hide his opinions from his superiors. In other words, he may go no further than ‘merely’ refusing to comply with certain demands made on him by the system (which of course is not an insignificant step to take). This may, however, grow into something more. The greengrocer may begin to do something concrete, something that goes beyond an immediately personal self-defensive reaction against manipulation, something that will manifest his new-found sense of higher responsibility. He may, for example, organize his fellow greengrocers to act together in defense of their interests. He may write letters to various institutions, drawing their attention to instances of disorder and injustice around him. He may seek out unofficial literature, copy it, and lend it to his friends.

 

If what I have called living within the truth is a basic existential (and of course potentially political) starting point for all those ‘independent citizens initiatives’ and ‘dissident’ or ‘opposition’ movements this does not mean that every attempt to live within the truth automatically belongs in this category. On the contrary, in its most original and broadest sense, living within the truth covers a vast territory whose outer limits are vague and difficult to map, a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast majority of which will remain anonymous and whose political impact will probably never be felt or described any more concretely than simply as a part of a social climate or mood. Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual. (pp. 85-86)

Toward the end of the book he writes:

And now I may properly be asked the question: What then is to be done?

 

My skepticism toward alternative political models and the ability of systemic reforms or changes to redeem us does not, of course, mean that I am skeptical of political thought altogether. Nor does my emphasis on the importance of focusing concern on real human beings disqualify me from considering the possible structural consequences flowing from it. On the contrary, if A was said, then B should be said as well. Nevertheless, I will offer only a few very general remarks.

 

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the “human order,” which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community—these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go. (p. 139)

His final paragraph gives us reason to be hopeful:

For the real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it? (p. 146)

The obvious value of this essay is how much it sounds like he is writing about the situation in the world today. Not just obvious things, like the social credit system in Communist China, but the willingness of the masses in the West to have their freedoms and basic human rights stripped away in the name of keeping them safe from a virus. A large percentage of humanity is quite happy to keep believing a lie, ensuring their enslavement continues unabated.

Havel of course is in very good company with someone like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had uttered similar things a few years earlier:

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” 

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