The Power of the Powerless

Vaclav Havel on how truth is stronger than ideology

In his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” Czech dissident Vaclav Havel lays out a strategy for confronting the apparently invincible power of a scientifically managed global empire. In his day, the empire in question was the USSR, while the United States led the “free world.” But Havel explains that the sociological and moral roots of Soviet totalitarianism are just as present in the West, with an intrinsic tendency to develop into a similar system of rigid and inhuman control:

Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?

The past two decades have seen these “latent tendencies” come to fruition with astonishing speed. Havel’s list of systemic lies enforced by Soviet ideology can now be applied to the United States with disconcerting accuracy:

[G]overnment 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.

In light of these developments, the political thought of the dissenting intellectuals of the Soviet Union becomes more than a matter of historical curiosity. The experiences and reflections of these authors provide a valuable deposit of wisdom, helping us avoid the pitfalls of blind conformity, caustic cynicism, anarchic rebellion, etc.. Havel’s response to the challenge of totalitarianism can be summed up in his pregnant phrase: “living in the truth.” He argues that the simple (but heroic) decision to consistently order your life in view of reality carries an astonishingly vast transformative potential.

The basic reason for this is that the battle between truth and falsehood is not a Manichaean struggle between two equal and opposite powers. Truth is something with real, positive content, while falsehood is merely its negation:

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. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.

From this vantage point, Havel draws out two practical conclusions.

The first is that living according to the truth is valuable in itself, regardless of one’s political fortunes or quantitative impact. It makes sense to work for the true good of one’s family, one’s colleagues, and one’s immediate community, in the absence of external rewards, and even at the risk of persecution. The good is worth doing for its own sake, and it is precisely the perseverance in seeing and doing good that keeps us human. Authentic resistance to the System arises as an unintended consequence of one’s commitment to truth and goodness:

You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

But if resistance becomes an end in itself — the fruit of an ideological decision based on an abstract critique — it quickly loses its power to effect real change:

If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new variation of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself. A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.

The second consequence of the asymmetry between truth and falsehood is that the survival of the System depends on the illusion of authentic service to humanity. For this reason, ideology and propaganda are central components of a totalitarian regime. The apparently disproportionate violence exercised by the regime against politically impotent individuals who simply try to “live in the truth” is perfectly justified from the regime’s point of view. These individuals expose the emptiness of the ideology by contrast with their authenticity, and thus threaten the stability of the entire structure. In this way, the decision to renounce the explicitly political struggle and focus on the concrete good of one’s immediate neighbors¹ can end up bringing about real change:

[A]s long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. … In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If 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.

This dependence on the illusion of justice also means that the System has to successfully implement at least some part of the service it claims to render. As a social institution, the System is composed of living human organisms, with definite material needs for their survival (alongside a whole cascade of relative necessities corresponding to a given state of social organization). If it fails to meet those needs, it destroys itself. And meeting those needs is only possible thanks to people within the regime who continue to be receptive and responsive at least to the evident observable truth of the material environment. For this reason, when someone who lives in the truth also has a high level of relevant technical expertise, that person often becomes indispensable to the regime, despite the danger he poses to the ideology. Little by little, the experience of working with someone like this can awaken a large fraction of the organization, creating a critical mass of people who genuinely and effectively care about the ends the organization nominally serves. This effectiveness will often provoke ridicule, envy and fear from established interests, leading to expulsion and social ostracization. But sometimes, the undeniable material necessity of such competent work will provide sufficient protection, and provide a basis for transforming the institution from the inside²:

The effective range of this special power [of truth] cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force).

But how is this power of truth to be activated on a sufficiently large scale? Havel thinks it will require a widespread awakening to a radically new (or rather, radically old) way of seeing and interacting with the world:

Various thinkers and movements feel that this as yet unknown way out might be most generally characterized as a broad “existential revolution:” I share this view, and I also share the opinion that a solution cannot be sought in some technological sleight of hand, that is, in some external proposal for change, or in a revolution that is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, or even merely political. These are all areas where the consequences of an existential revolution can and must be felt; but their most intrinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest sense of the word. It is only from that basis that it can become a generally ethical—and, of course, ultimately a political—reconstitution of society.

Like Guardini’s call for heroic virtue, this solution initially seems totally unrealistic. But Havel thinks that it is already happening. It is our own pride and narrowness of vision that prevent us from seeing the hidden revolution percolating quietly through millions of ordinary people:

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?

1. See Chapter 4 of Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option (2017) for a more detailed development of this dimension of Havel’s thought.

2. See Adrian Vermeule, “Integration from Within,” American Affairs II.1 (2018) for a defense of this strategy, presented in opposition to the “Benedict Option” approach.