[Political] ideology…is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life…it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. – Václav Havel
Václav Havel, the playwright turned politician who was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first of the Czech Republic, died three weeks ago on December 18th. The next day, Anne Applebaum published an article on Slate about how one of Havel’s writings, an essay named “The Power of the Powerless”, was probably his most important gift to the world outside his own country:
…Havel not only opposed the Communist regime, he articulated a theory of opposition. His plays – as turgid, alas, as the Communist bureaucrats they are meant to satirize – will not survive, except as curiosities. But his famous political essay — “The Power of the Powerless” — will live forever. Its appeal is universal. I have given Havel’s essay to Iranian friends, and I once discussed it with would-be dissidents in pre-revolutionary Tunis. In both places it seemed — seems — relevant.
In this essay, Havel didn’t talk about marches or demonstrations. Instead, he asked the inhabitants of totalitarian countries to “live in truth”: That is, to go about their daily lives as if the regime did not exist, to the extent that was possible…By the late 1980s, “living in truth” was widely practiced across central Europe. The first time I went to Poland in 1987, I stayed with friends. According to the law, I was supposed to register my presence in a private home with the police. “We don’t do that,” my friends told me. “We don’t believe the police have the right to know who stays with us.” I didn’t register — and because thousands of other people didn’t either, that law became unenforceable.
But Havel proposed more than mere civil disobedience. He also argued in favor of what we would now call civil society, urging the inhabitants of totalitarian states to found small institutions — musical groups, sporting groups, literary groups — which would develop the ”independent life of society,” and prevent their members from being totally controlled from above. This too was widely practiced, in Prague’s famous underground philosophy seminars, in the illegal printing presses all across the communist world, in Poland’s independent “Flying University,” and, most successfully, in Poland’s independent trade unions…
I was unfamiliar with the essay, but read it and found it even more powerful than Applebaum lets on. Like so many in the West who have not been directly impacted by the growing police-state here, she fails to see that Havel’s words do not only apply to countries we in the West label “totalitarian”, but to our own society as well. He points out that in all modern societies – soi-disant “democracies” included – government becomes a bureaucratic machine which runs by itself toward an inevitable end; his advice about “living in truth” is therefore just as important to Americans as it was to people in the former Soviet bloc. And though the essay contains numerous references to specifics of 20th century Eastern European history with which my readers may be unfamiliar, this may actually enhance your appreciation of the piece rather than distracting from it, because it will help keep you from being seduced by the tempting and comfortable delusion that your country “isn’t like that”. Mentally replacing Havel’s references with contemporary American ones will help you to see his points: for example, substitute “possession of leaves from a common weed” for “possession of banned books”, “buying or selling sex” for “playing rock music” and “Support our Troops” for “Workers of the World, Unite!”
The copy provided in the Slate article had clearly been run through an optical character reader and was thus infested with weird errors of the sort which inevitably result from that not-yet-perfect technology, so I proofread it to correct these errors in order to provide y’all with a clean PDF copy. It’s not short; 51 pages in all, so it may take you an hour or two. But it’s not a difficult read and it is, I think, an important one; if you agree pass the link on or download the PDF yourself for email dissemination. Havel’s philosophy, especially his advice to ignore the lies which support oppression and just live like free, rational people, needs to be spread as widely through the West as it once was through the Soviet Empire.
One Year Ago Today
“Holiday Leftovers” comments on “promoting prostitution”, divorce blackmail, a clueless CNN article, really cheap whores, the right to own and control one’s body, the good sense displayed by Dutch women and history repeating itself in shortsighted criticism of civil rights activism.
Thanks, Maggie, for providing Vaclav Havel’s essay.
From the same:
Rather than a strategic agglomeration of formalized organizations, it is better to have organizations springing up ad hoc, infused with enthusiasm for a particular purpose and disappearing when that purpose has been achieved. The leaders’ authority ought to derive from their personalities and be personally tested in their particular surroundings, and not from their position in any nomenclature.*
This is one of the points that de Tocqueville made Democracy in America where he observed that while Americans did not have large institutions of government, they had an abundance of co-operative endeavors that seemed to spring from the ground when needed and disappeared whence they came when their purpose was served. (This is a paraphrase as my copy of Democracy is still in storage.)
This is also akin to Jefferson’s point about “a natural aristocracy” who would do what needed to be done and then return, as “Cincinnatus to his plow” without augmenting the political power structure to the detriment of individual liberty. The cultural reference of Cincinnatus was a powerful one among the founders; George Washington was referred to as the “Cincinanntus of the Americas” for his willing relinquishment of power where he refused the offer of monarchy and established a republic whereas Julius Caesar accepted one and destroyed the Roman Republic.
What Vaclav Havel is doing here is undercutting the basis of totalitarianism at the individual level. While we use the term in the US I don’t think most of us have a visceral understanding of what it means. The mere organizing of small cultural groups is an act of defiance in a state where all organization is top-down. In acting so, such individuals repudiate the idea that they are the state’s property and must wait on its pleasure. For such a mentality is anathema to the totalitarian and must be suppressed.
Frederich von Hayek, in a footnote to Economic Control and Totalitarianism (Chapter 6 in The Road to Serfdom) notes the following:
It is no accident that in the totalitarian countries, be it Russia or Germany or Italy, the question of how to organize the people’s leisure has become a problem of planning. The Germans have even invented for this problem the horrible and self-contradictory name of Freizeitgestaltung (literally: the shaping of the use made of the people’s free time), as if it were still “free time” when it has to be spent in the way ordained by authority.
And it is no accident that the budding totalitarians in our midst have worked to make spontaneous organizing and ad hoc groups next to impossible particularly in the realm of politics. A politician in Colorado has admitted that it is impossible to get involved in political advocacy without first consulting a lawyer, and he likes it that way. Of course, they always have noble sounding reasons like “transparency” and “getting the money out of politics” but has anyone noted that since the passage of the Watergate laws that transparency and a reduction in political spending have decidedly not been the outcome?
ad hoc institutions come when needed and go when they are not. A few especially significant ones may survive to become part of the power structure. But what the present legal requirements foster is creating permanent power structures because when one is forced to expend time and money complying with the law, it is much harder to let such a creation diminish when its purpose is done. Instead, it remains in existence and accretes power to itself, entering the competition for power at the hands of the state, diminishing the sphere of action left open to free individuals and generally eroding individual liberty.
You can get together with friends and bitch about the political establishment. You might do potluck or pitch in to help the person organizing the party. But if you decide to publish your group’s bitch list or otherwise engage in political advocacy and you spent more than $50.00 on that party, suddenly you are subject to campaign finance and disclosure laws. And if someone doesn’t like what you have to say, you may find yourself defending a lawsuit on the basis that you violated the law. And you can bet that the more effective your advocacy, the more likely that there is a lawsuit with your name on it.
Political advocacy by ad hoc committees in the US today is as much an act of civil disobedience as the cultural groups Vaclav Havel advocated in the old Soviet Bloc. And, fortunately, for now, without as dire a consequence.
*I’m assuming that this is a direct translation of the Soviet term, Nomenklatura, and might be better understood by US readers as administration or bureaucracy
Well-said, Andrew! My expression for an organization (such as feminism, organized religions and labor unions) which has outlived its usefulness and now merely exists to gain power for its leadership is, “a solution in search of a problem”.
You’re correct about that word; it was “nomenklatura” in the text, but since it was neither capitalized nor italicized I assumed it was one of the many, many misspellings and typos I had to correct.
Thank you for providing his essay and doing the work in cleaning it up.
Every once in a while I come across people, who while being ostensibly a statist, and no doubt are statists, express an analysis of the reality of government that is straight out of the anarchist’s philosophy book, the illusion of government, and the real power of statism is horizontal social conformity, and not vertical power – which is the backup measure when social pressures fail to keep people in line.
Why do I get the feeling that our former librarian and gourmand of the written word kind of enjoyed doing this? 🙂
Well…it’s the same kind of enjoyment one gets from popping a pimple or getting an ingrown toenail out. 🙂
>This is one of the points that de Tocqueville made Democracy in America where he observed that while Americans did not have large institutions of government, they had an abundance of co-operative endeavors that seemed to spring from the ground when needed and disappeared whence they came when their purpose was served.
This is what I heard referred to some years back as “ground level socialism.” When I say I’m a socialist, I don’t mean I favor the large, top down government institutions that Havel fought against, far from it. I support a very ground level socialism that seeks to prevent power from pooling at the top of the pyramid.
The thing is, we have more of an opportunity for this sort of social organization today, more than ever. Our nearly instant person to person world wide facilitate this in ways our predecessors never dreamed of. Look at the recent Arab spring events.
What prevents us from having freedom is the “boss in our head.”, the internalized need for a hierarchy.
Even though you choose to describe yourself as a “socialist” and I as a “libertarian” or “classical liberal”, I think we’re much closer in our beliefs than it might seem. I, too, am in favor of “ground-level socialism” (i.e. extended families, natural or artificial) and any other structures which people freely organize themselves and can choose or reject membership in as they please. In my thinking, ANY organization imposed at the point of a gun is inherently evil.
I think one of our biggest terminological differences is in the use of the word “capitalism”; I use it to mean the system in which each individual is free to retain the right to own and control the fruits of his own labor, including the right to form contracts to dispose of that labor and capital as he sees fit; you, on the other hand, use it to refer to our current fascist system in which big-money interests are empowered by government with unfair advantages against individuals and “mom and pop” businesses via unnecessary regulation, licensing, deals and bailouts (in exchange for their political support, of course). I’m against that, too: in my mind our current system is far closer to feudalism than true capitalism; fealty is exchanged for grants of power and those at the top stay at the top while those at the bottom are kept there by laws, cronyism and force of arms.
I’d say your assessment is a fair go.
My only question might be this- I’m fine with capitalism as far as “each individual is free to retain the right to own and control the fruits of his own labor, including the right to form contracts to dispose of that labor and capital as he sees fit”. But what happens when economic activity expands beyond that? I’d say any business over a certain (very small) size ought to be a co-op or employee owned. What do you say?
I see large scale capitalism as incompatible with freedom and liberty.
I disagree with you there; I don’t think there is any reason to artificially limit the size of companies. The problems arise not from the size of a corporation itself, but from the undue influence government grants to such corporations. Eliminate the advantages governments grant to the “big boys”, including the subtle ones (like regulations so complex only companies who can afford full-time legal staff can deal with them), and I predict 90% of the problems associated with them would disappear.
With size comes power. When a company becomes large enough, it distorts the economic fabric of an area, and when that much power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, there’s even more problems. And when a company becomes global, beyond the regulations of any one nation, then what?
Besides, I don’t see eliminating the advantages government grants as likely. Once a company gets big enough, they’re going to demand those advantages.
That’s what constitutions are for. Governments aren’t supposed to give into anyone’s demands for power, either inside or outside the government. I can’t recall who said it, but there’s a quote which defines real government not as a mechanism for power, but for limiting power.
And that’s worked so well.
Alas, the U.S. Constitution contained far too much elasticity and allowed too much room for interpretation. The Founding Fathers knew it would happen; for example, John Adams wrote “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” They were just trying to keep it from descending into tyranny for as long as possible, and it took almost a century for the process to start and over two centuries for it to finish, so I guess they did O.K. considering what they had to work with. However, the idea that power in one group can be controlled by giving another group more power is absurd on its face. The only way to fix it is to take that power away from EVERYONE.
Worked as well as anything else has.
Thank you for this. I’ve DLed it to Laura’s computer, and will be taking it home tomorrow on the old flash drive. I’ll start digging into it this coming week.
Have you heard of a documentary called How to Start a Revolution?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1956516/
I think that I want to see this, and to read this .pdf you so thoughtfully cleaned up and provided for us, and that it wouldn’t hurt for a lot of other people to do the same.
[…] states, which means a large fraction of the world) to start practicing what Vaclav Havel called “living in truth”: in other words ignoring the lies and proclamations of tyrants and just living like free […]
Here’s the real snag. We have an *instinctive need to belong to the tribe*. It’s hardwired.
The smallest tribe is, of course, a couple. So we begin to account for the needs, wants and mores of the other person.
We have at some point, the desire to have offspring (in many cases) because, well, them pesky drives again. So now we have kids, which we are incentivised to protect, by instinct again.
So, given that you care about at least one other person, there’s a lever for the unscrupulous. And in the modern, vast, citified world, theres a lot of em about, and they don’t give a rats ass about you-and-yours. They will literally rape and kill them if they see fit. Or ignore their wellbeing most of the time.
Dark in here, innit?
So, given that our world is (censorship not withstanding) digitally connected if you have a westernized lifestyle and enough money to afford it (note that) and becoming increasingly regulated, how do you resist these forces of authority?
Most people employ the “keep low and they won’t notice” approach if they are “living in the water margins of Liang Shan Po”… until the authority makes whatever they want to do illegal.
Here in the UK, right now, we’ve got a current political class bankrolled by the current wealthy class, a govenment that’s “elected” by less than 25% of the electorate with *no meaningful opposition* in the electoral assembly that were voted there by the 75% that didnt vote government. But regardless, it’s the hidden masters, the wealth class, that enabled the political class.
It’s like the USA with slightly less blatantcy. But not much. I bet we have university age people doing sex work to fund their higher education. The economic arguments for them are compelling, alone.
Hell, today I would not be able to afford the Science Degree education that enabled my personal success. I’m not a business person, but I have managed to be a joint homeowner, debt free, by the age of 44. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.
My niece, now? The way things are going, she’s *buggered* under this setup. Even though shes probably going to be smarter than me, she’ll start her university years with £Ks of debt, and it will just get worse.
I’ll be frank, if she chooses sex work (based on what I see here, it looks more and more inevitable, and more socially denigrated, and possibly criminalised) I will totally understand why, while being terrified at what *society* will do to a bright young woman with a miserable set of choices.
😢