In reading the numerous thoughtful comments yesterday in SneakySnu's diary reporting the sad news of Vaclav Havel's passing, I added a few excerpts from Havel's seminal dissident essay "The Power of the Powerless" (written 1978, published in English as the titular essay of this volume a few years later) (then, too, in this volume with cheap used copies available). Given the incredible importance of this essay, both in its immediate political context and as a contribution to the literature on principled non-violent civil disobedience (in the tradition of Thoreau, the later Tolstoy, Gandhi, and MLK), I think it is very much worth examining in its own right as we remember Havel's legacy. [See also pico's terrific diary on Havel's literary career.]
At the center of this lengthy essay (excerpts of which can be found online here), Havel posits the figure of a "manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop," a greengrocer, living in the absurdly repressive era of late socialist Central/Eastern Europe. And at the crux of this exploration is the question of conformity vs. quiet rebellion, the dilemma of how (and when, and why) to exercise individual will in a system that strives to crush all and any dissidence from public norms.
The vast expanse of late Communism, from Berlin to Vladivostok, was a stultifying place to live. Gone, for the most part, were the naked excesses of the Stalinist terror, but forced conformity and political repression were the norm, especially after Brezhnev ordered Warsaw Pact troops in to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968. In "Power to the Powerless," Havel calls the then-contemporary regimes of Central/Eastern Europe "post-totalitarian," adding
I am fully aware that this is perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think of a better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix "post" that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understand it.
What Havel has in mind is the utter cynicism with which the ideological structures of Marxism-Leninism are deployed, the completely blank falseness that characterizes public discourse, and the morbid charade that the entire population of Czechoslovakia (and its neighbors) are forced to engage in every minute of their public lives.
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 [...]. 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.
The key to making this fantastically farcical system work is to force the entire population to play a role, however small, in perpetuating its structures.
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.
Enter the Greengrocer. Like tens of thousands of his fellow citizens, the Greengrocer is called on to play a bit role in this mass absurd public dramatic performance (it is not an accident that Havel's fame prior to entering directly into politics was as an absurd playwright). Specifically, he is directed to put a sign in his window, "among the onions and carrots" with the ubiquitous slogan, "Workers of the world, unite!"
Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? [...]
[snip]
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.
It is through the very fact that the Greengrocer is forced to participate in this enforced conformity that this pernicious system gains its power. That is to say, what Havel is attempting to demonstrate is that the "post-totalitarian" regimes of Eastern Europe depended not merely on the threat of force, but on the implicit -- and oftentimes explicit -- involvement of the entire population in the monitoring and replication of its absurd falsehoods. In having actively to live these lies, everyone, not just those in power, are implicated in their perpetuation.
But the insidious strength of this system is simultaneously its inherent weakness, even its fatal flaw. Which is to say that the minute the greengrocer refuses to play his role in this absurd tragicomedy, the entire edifice begins to unravel.
Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie.
Of course he will be cajoled into rethinking his quiet rebellion, and eventually (if he refuses to rethink) punished severely, but the damage to the system, however minuscule it may seem, will have been accomplished -- because the system depends on absolute conformity, so that even a single withdrawal may leave a mark. And if the baker next door to the greengrocer should notice, and follow suit; and then the tailor next to him ...
The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety. . . .
While Havel's efforts were directed against a uniquely and profoundly repressive system with its own remarkably specific traits, the message (both tactful and philosophical) to those wishing to resist even much lesser injustices is nonetheless immediately apparent: so often the system on which those injustices depend is perpetuated to a greater or lesser extent by a collective inability or unwillingness to speak out against them. While, as Havel himself would have been the first to admit, "Living in Truth" does not lead to the immediate downfall of this system (in the case of Czechoslovakia and the other Central/Eastern European nations, it would take another decade and a new leader in Moscow who declined this time to send in the tanks), it does begin the process of its delegitimization.
-- Stu