The Power of the Powerless

There is not and in fact cannot be any such thing as “legitimate” authority, whether that authority is chosen by elections, lots, birth, examining goat entrails, or pulling swords out of lakes.  And until humans collectively get that through their thick simian skulls, we are doomed to suffer an endless succession of evil rulers stomping on human freedom and dignity until they at last succeed in wiping us all out.  –  “Illegitimate”

Absolutely no one, regardless of how fancy his title, how many degrees he has, or how many votes he receives in a popularity contest, can be trusted with power over others, yet somehow nearly everyone pretends otherwise when the contest winner is the one they voted for.  Furthermore, absolutely no law which criminalizes adult consensual behavior of any kind can have even the slightest moral weight, regardless of its pedigree, justification, or popularity, and it is not only the right but the duty of free people to disobey such evil laws.  And I don’t mean “civil disobedience” in which a protester volunteers to be brutalized, abducted, and saddled with a lifelong criminal record by a malevolent state, nor do I mean “protesting” by shouting slogans until the thuggish enforcers of such a state gas them, beat them, shoot them in the face, or allow facial recognition software to identify them so their lives can be destroyed later at the state’s leisure.  Rather, the approach I recommend is the one which at last brought down the Iron Curtain, the one Vaclav Havel called “living in truth“:

[In] his famous political essay…“The Power of the Powerless”…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…

“The Power of the Powerless” is not a short essay; it’s 51 pages in all.  But when I first came upon it nearly 13 years ago I found it so important I spent hours laboriously editing a poor OCR copy so as to provide  a clean copy for my readers.  And I still think it’s that important, despite its now-dated historical references.  If you’re upset by recent political developments, please take the time to read it; if it speaks to you, download it and share it widely all over the internet.  Neither the world nor politics is rational, but individual humans can be. And they owe neither allegiance nor obedience to moral imbeciles who believe fancy words give them ownership rights over other humans.