Living Within the Truth: Vaclav Havel & The Power of the Powerless

A Catholic Thinker
February 24, 2014 by Tod Worner

Authors note: I originally published this essay in 2012, but brought it back in the face of the recent
oppression in the Ukraine by a power-hungry Russian-backed government. The enduring lesson of
Vaclav Havels immortalized essay, The Power of the Powerless, is that the ineradicable antidote to
naked power or power veiled in ideology is, quite simply, to live within the truth. As Winston
Churchill once said, The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but
in the end, there it is. Indeedthere it is.

A spectre is haunting eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called
dissent.

It was 1978 when these words were first penned. A forty-two year old Czech playwright, Vaclav Havel,
living in a ruthless Communist society felt he had little choice but to write. Havel, a man with suspect
bourgeois roots and subversive political tendencies had previously proven himself to be an
uncooperative citizen in Communist-run Czechoslovakia. In his youth, Havel had been denied
various educational opportunities due to his familys intellectual and bourgeois upbringing, so instead
he would find himself writing internationally-acclaimed plays. In spite of clear fears and frustrations,
Havel was making a life for himself.

But in 1968, all of this would change. This year would see an eight month Czechoslovakian experiment
of liberalization of travel, media, and speech (also known as the Prague Spring) crushed by the Soviet
Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. During that time, Vaclav Havel would lend his voice to the resistance
on Radio Free Czechoslovakia further solidifying his reputation as an enemy of the state. Subsequently,
a draconian enforcement of Communist ideology through police-state tactics and civil rights
deprivation would lead to Havels plays being banned and his travel curtailed. Defiant, Havel would
illegally publish and distribute new plays and, most famously, collaborate with 250 others on the
composition of Charter 77, a blistering attack on the repressive nature of the Czech Communist
regime. Dubbed renegades, traitors, and agents of imperialism, the Communist government escalated
efforts to persecute any involved in this work of subversion. Vaclav Havel, having proved to be a bright,
unbending leader of a group of dissidents in Communist Czech society, soon found himself pursued,
harassed, and ultimately arrested and imprisoned. But just prior to his arrest, Havel found that the
perilous life he was leading helped him in ways he hadnt anticipated it sharply concentrated his
mind. As his (and his countrymens) freedoms became increasingly encroached upon, a paradoxical
truth became apparent. In a militant and mighty system erected on a bedrock of lies, the greatest
weapon to confront it came not in the form of armies and guns, but in something quite clear and
simple: the truth. And so Vaclav Havel began to write.

The Power of the Powerless is perhaps the most famous essay Vaclav Havel would ever write.
Furthermore, it is one of the most well-known and instrumental pieces of dissident literature in the
Cold War. Passed initially through underground channels in Eastern Europe, it would provide hope
and solidarity to dissident movements in numerous Communist-bloc countries. More importantly, it
would provide an education to the Free World about life in a Communist despotism that would rival
the works of Orwell, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn. The timing of this essay would also be fortuitous
following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns Harvard Commencement Address (A World Split Apart) by several
months, and preceding Pope John Paul IIs visit to Poland and the emergence of the Polish Solidarity
movement by less than two years.

The enduring question to be asked, however, about The Power of the Powerless is What does this
essay say and why does it matter?. Vaclav Havel told people what it was really like living in a
Communist system. In the tradition of Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Kolakowski and Kennan, Havel shined a
bright light in the dark corners, physically shook the rotting edifice and weaved a compelling narrative
so that all people whether intellectual Communist fellow-travelers or worldly firebrand dissidents
would recognize the intellectual bankruptcy and moral turpitude of the Communist enterprise. And he
did it brilliantly.

Havel described the Communist system as an anomalous dictatorship. Unlike most dictatorships
which are local, lacking true historical roots, and legitimized largely by military power, the Communist
dictatorship behaved like a secularized religion. It covered a broad area of diverse cultures, professed
to be rooted in historical socialist movements with philosophical godfathers like Marx and Engels and,
while conventional and nuclear weaponry posed as ultimate trump cards, it was often social pressures
and indoctrination that enabled order to be maintained. As Havel would write:

[Communism] 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. In an
era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people
are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means,
this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it
offers an immediate available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly
everything becomes clear once more, life take 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 ones own reason, conscience, and
responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and
conscience to a higher authority. The principle here is that the center of power is
identical with the center of truth.

Undoubtedly, with control of civil and military power as well as the levers of economic production, the
Communist system was clearly coercive. But an eerie complicity a willingness of many to
emotionally, spiritually and ideologically buy-in or believe in the system distinguishes Communist
dictatorship from others where buy-in is simply cynically ingratiating oneself to the power structure
in exchange for goods and services. This system was different. Havel writes,

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion
of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with
them It enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position
and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves It is a
 veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their
trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.

The Communist system, while promising to serve the people, ruthlessly demands the people
serve it. While professing to protect the collective dignity of the people, it casually destroys the dignity
of the individual in the name of the collective. These lies, the bald-faced hypocrisies, are accompanied
by so many others, as Havel recounts:

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 or her 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 use 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.

It is here that Vaclav Havel makes one of his most compelling points about living within the
Communist system:

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.

Two points permeate Havels writing on the Communist system and its inhabitants. First, the regime is
intent, at all costs, to craft a metaphysics, an ideology, a pseudo-reality to fill in any and all cracks of
doubt or dissent by its subjects. If people are orderly because they are fearful, a circumstance is created
which is unstable and ultimately unsustainable because fear breeds resentment and resentment
breeds revolt. Instead, by crafting a world of lies, appearances, rituals and philosophico-spiritual
language, a regime can lull its underlings at worst and convert them at best to the cause. And what, is
the cause? Power indisputably and unflinchingly secure in the hands of the regime.

The second point Havel makes is the utter necessity for each individuals complicity with the system
each individuals willingness to live within the lie. For each citizen to comply actively or passively
is to endorse the system, to contribute to the pseudo-reality of lies crafted by the regime, to pressure
fellow citizens to fall in line, to push the frontiers of the dictatorship one person further against the
truth of the free world. In doing so, the citizen has become both victim and accomplice. He loses his
dignity. He has been used. He is empty and rendered less than human. That is, unless he opts to live
within the truth.

To live within the truth is to defy the unreality in big ways, or in small. Havels example of a
green-grocer organizing an underground group, or simply not putting a propaganda poster in his
window is excellent. There is no shortage of fear (or brutal consequence) under these regimes and
Havel admits this with sympathy. At the same time, he reinforces that fissures in the edifice of lies can
come in big forms or small and no small act of living within the truth is without its impact on the
oppressive regime. Havel reinforces the threat of living within the truth:

By breaking the rules of the game, [the citizen living within the truth] 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
coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of
line DENIES IT IN PRINCIPLE AND THREATENS IT IN ITS ENTIRETYIf the main
pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat
to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything
else.

In Havels eyes, to live within the truth requires a few things. First, a recognition of the hidden
sphere within us and between us that will never be fed, fulfilled or sustained by an external system,
ideology, or abstraction. This sphere is a soul to be filled with faith, truth, and beauty. Second, a
recognition that the edifice of society is the individual and the essence of the individual is a dignity that
is inextinguishable. Finally, courage to object in ways big and small to a regimes dehumanizing
pseudo-realities that diminish human dignity in any way. To live within the truth is to empower the
individual in even the most oppressive of circumstances. It is the power of the powerless.

Vaclav Havel and his fellow dissidents underwent withering trials to arrive at the wisdom evident in
their lives and works. The lessons learned were hard-earned. Let us hope that these lessons are not
easily forgotten.

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

Requiescat in pace.