The Power of the Powerless Revisited

In the empire of lies, the humblest truth is revolutionary, mere reality is subversive.

—Simon Leys, introduction to The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, by Chen Ruoxi

In my writing, I always start with what I know: my experience of this world, the one in which I live, and my experiences of myself. In short, I always write about what I am living through, what I see, what interests me, and what upsets me. I’d probably be unable to write from any other impulse. But I always hope that by thus bearing witness to certain specific experiences of the world, I will touch on something universally human, that the “specific” is merely a way and a means of testifying to the essence [Being] of humanity, to man in the world of today, to the crisis of modern humanity, that is, to something that, in one way or another, touches everyone.

—Václav Havel Notes to Largo Desolato, 1984

When Václav Havel was finding his way as a young playwright in the early 1960s in a small, experimental theater called Divadlo na Zábradlí (Theater on the Balustrade) tucked away in the back streets of Prague’s Old Town, he and the director he worked with at the time, Jan Grossman, developed a new approach they called apelativní divadlo. It’s a term that does not translate easily into English. It means, literally, a form of theater that calls upon, or appeals to, its audience. By that, Havel and Grossman did not mean theater that was merely entertaining, making audiences laugh or cry, providing them with a temporary escape from their possibly hum-drum lives, but rather theater that addressed audiences in unexpected ways, exhorting them to a more complex response to the action on stage, challenging them to think more deeply about what they were seeing and hearing, and thus inviting them to complete the work that the playwright, the director, and the actors had begun.

At face value, this seems like a perfectly normal goal for any ambitious theater to aim for. But Havel and Grossman were not working in normal times; Czechoslovakia was slowly emerging from the dark shadow of Stalinism, and what the two men and their collaborators were trying to create was not just a new kind of drama, but a new kind of audience involvement—one that, in the prevailing ethos, was truly subversive. In a system that deliberately isolated people through fear, apelativní divadlo aimed to reconnect people not just to ideas, but to each other as well. And they succeeded. Thanks in part to Havel’s plays, the Balustrade became one of the most popular theaters in Prague, and it gave birth to a new sense of community among its audience, a community of complicity and of common understanding that liberated them from the rigid worldview the regime had imposed like a virtual cage over people’s lives. In a way, it was a forerunner of what Havel would come to call “non-political” politics. “With each new work,” Havel wrote of that period, “the possibilities of the repressive system were weakened: the more we were able to do, the more we did, and the more we did, the more we were able to do.”

This approach, this effort to expand the range of the possible, would become the hallmark of almost everything Havel engaged in from then on. From his defense of a small, independent magazine called Tvář (Face) in the mid-sixties, to his activism during the Prague Spring and later that year, during the Soviet invasion, and then, as a banned writer, in his polemics with fellow writers Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík, and Petr Pithart, his open letters to Alexander Dubček and Gustav Husák, his support for samizdat enterprises, and his involvement with the civic rights movement, Charter 77, and ultimately, as president of his country, Havel’s words and deeds challenged people to engage with the world around them, and through this civic engagement, to weaken the system’s grip and restore their moral integrity and their capacity to act responsibly as citizens.

This “appellative” quality of Havel’s work, its call to civic engagement, is nowhere more evident than in his most important essay, The Power of the Powerless. From the mocking reference to Marx in its opening line—“A specter is haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”—to the stunning optimism of its conclusion, that the “brighter future” might already be present, if only one could see it, his essay is a potent blend of manifesto, analysis, prescription, and prophesy that practically demands a response from its readers. If Marx once took philosophers to task for merely understanding the world rather than trying to change it, then we can see in The Power of the Powerless a synthesis of those two apparently separate approaches. In it, Havel demonstrates that a fuller understanding of how totalitarian power works leads to an understanding of the forces of change that are always at work out of sight, under the visible surface of reality, in what he calls “the hidden sphere” of society. The role of those who oppose that power or stand outside it in various ways—call them dissidents, if you like—should not be to fight for, or devise, an alternative system to replace the existing one, but to identify the forces of positive change that are already there, to work with them, to encourage them to flourish in the open, without trying to calculate or predetermine what the outcome might look like.

Havel locates the Achilles’ heel of the “post-totalitarian” system, as he calls it, ¹ in the very thing that appears to be its greatest strength: in an airtight system of appearances, of façades, of mendacious institutions whose only purpose is to stifle change, to create a permanent status quo, and to serve and sustain the impersonal, “blind automatism” that makes the system seem so inevitable and immutable. The regime, he says, turns everything into a lie that must be sustained at all costs. But in doing so, the deadening hand of the system finds itself in conflict with “the aims of life,” a conflict which he says is present in everyone:

In everyone, there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser extent, of coming to terms with living within a lie. . . . This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself [VI].

The question of identity is at the very center of Havel’s writing, both as a playwright and as an essayist, and it’s worth noting, as many have done, not just how political his theater is, but also how theatrical his political thinking is, how he lays out his case not so much as a sequence of logical arguments but rather as dramatic conflict in which citizens of a totalitarian state find themselves enmeshed in an existential struggle, caught between appearances and reality. How the drama unfolds depends on the choices they make.

But there’s a deep irony here. Many of Havel’s plays, regardless of their comic aspects, are essentially tragedies in which the protagonists begin by trying to resist the relentless and impersonal pressure of the system, but then, despite their best intentions, end up serving it. What ultimately defeats them is not the system’s overwhelming power, which would certainly crush them if they confronted it head-on, but their own twisted logic, which they deploy to justify their surrender, making their defeat and humiliation seem, in their own eyes at least, like the best possible outcome. His dramatic protagonists end up choosing to “live within the lie.” In other words, they end up perpetuating the system that has enslaved and humiliated them.

On the other hand, Havel’s essays—and particularly The Power of the Powerless—radiate his belief that positive change, in harmony with the genuine aims of life, is not only possible but almost inevitable, and that the truth that will set people free is best revealed in a clash of opposites. What Tom Stoppard has called Havel’s “moral imagination” ² has two poles, a yin and yang, a deeply felt awareness of the contradictions that give both his dramatic and his non-dramatic writing its powerful creative tension. In his drama, for aesthetic reasons (because any other outcome would seem like kitsch), it is the dark side—the system, entropy, falsehood, death—that triumphs. In his essays, on the contrary, it is life, truth, moral integrity, and human authenticity that have the upper hand.

To convey this in The Power of the Powerless, Havel creates a cast of characters—the greengrocer, his customer, and later, the “dissident” brewmaster Š, and their antagonist, the “automatized” system—to play out the drama inherent in post-totalitarianism. But here he inverts the dramatic structure of his plays. His protagonists begin not in revolt but in conformity. By displaying a clichéd political slogan—“Workers of the World, Unite!”—in his window, the greengrocer initially declares that he is loyal to the system, that he is comfortable living within the lie. But in a stunning reversal, Havel imagines that one day, the greengrocer snaps and refuses to display the slogan. He stops voting in meaningless elections, he begins to say what he really thinks in public meetings. “In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie,” Havel writes. “He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. . . . His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth” (VII).

The consequences of this revolt are far-reaching, and not just for the greengrocer, who will certainly be severely punished for his transgression. In stepping out of the world of lies and into the realm of truth, the greengrocer “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 . . . and exposed the real, base foundations of power.” From there, Havel says, it will be possible to trace “the virus of truth as it slowly spread[s] through the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disintegrate” (VIII).

Havel spends most of the rest of the essay exploring the consequences of the viral spread of truth throughout society. The most immediate, observable results are that such rebellion creates communities of people who have one important thing in common: they have chosen to embrace the consequences of “living in truth,” whether that choice involves freely making music and art and literature despite attempts by the state to stop them, or a more organized form of opposition like Charter 77. In a way, Havel was rediscovering, in different circumstances, the truth of Albert Camus’s famous reworking of Descartes in the late 1940s: “Je me révolte, donc nous sommes.” Havel understood “living in truth” as an existential revolt, and he warned against attempts to convert this newfound solidarity, this “we,” into yet another political program. “A better system,” he cautioned, “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” (XI). What he was really asking for was a continuation and a deepening of the very thing that was beginning to happen spontaneously all around him: the slow, painful renewal of civil society, of the infinite variety of associations people form when they are left to their own devices.

Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in late 1978, in the shadow of imminent arrest. I translated it in the early 1980s, when he was in prison serving a three-and-a-half year sentence for subversion. It was the first work of Havel’s I had had to grapple with, and the experience was all the more intense because of the urgency of Havel’s message and the need to find ways of conveying it with the same urgency to readers who had not lived in totalitarian states, a category that would include almost all of his English-speaking readers. Such an audience might understand Havel intellectually, but not with the emotional or visceral immediacy that a Czech reader might. The challenge for me, as his translator, was to find ways to present Havel’s intellectual insights with some of that emotional immediacy.

Let one example stand for many: Havel’s special understanding of the role of ideology. Political parties the world over have sets of shared ideas—sometimes called ideologies—that serve as tools in their quest to gain political power, and in that sense, the role of ideology is easy enough to understand, even for the uninvolved layperson. We also sometimes understand ideology more broadly to mean something like a worldview, a set of beliefs—articulated or not—that underpins a society or an economic system.

In totalitarian or post-totalitarian states, however, ideology takes on another function. It now becomes an explicit tool for clinging to power, and that changes things in a fundamental way. Havel tried to explain this, in part, by focusing on the hold totalitarian ideology has over individuals like the greengrocer. “Ideology,” he wrote (in my translation) “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 is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, their adaptation to the status quo.”

That passage proved to be one of the most difficult in the essay to translate. The nub of the idea, which lies in the phrase I chose to translate, almost literally, as “fallen existence,” has Biblical overtones that are absent in the Czech. Havel’s original expression—“propadnutí jsoucnu”—is a glancing reference to philosophical ideas derived from phenomenology that were a common currency of discourse in the dissident community. In hindsight, I might have translated it this way: “[Ideology] is a veil behind which an individual can hide the fact that he or she has been reduced to a mere entity, objectified, and forced to adapt to the given state of things.” Either way, the meaning of this passage is clear: that post-totalitarian ideology is an instrument by which people are integrated into the “automatism” of the system, becoming dehumanized cogs in the process. By choosing “trivialization” rather than “objectified” to describe what can happen to a person’s self-esteem under “post-totalitarianism,” I was coming down on the side of the emotional rather than the cerebral meaning of Havel’s argument. It was a choice that was bolstered by my own experience of living in that system, when I came to understand that the system’s assault on human dignity was by far its most powerful lever of control.

Since my first encounter with The Power of the Powerless, I have had several occasions to return to the essay, and each time, despite the specific circumstances in which it was written, I find new levels of meaning in it. The peaceful “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 was, in a way, an overwhelming vindication of Havel’s basic understanding that it would be many acts of living in truth, and not acts of violence, that would ultimately undermine the system. One of the reasons why the Czechoslovak transition to democracy happened so peacefully was that during the 1970s and especially during the 1980s, more and more people began living and acting by their own lights, forming new associations, and behaving as citizens, so that by the time the regime collapsed, hundreds of thousands of people were willing, if not always able, to take on the business of self-government. It was fascinating to see people, most of whom had not been dissidents, stepping into the vacuum left by the crumbling of the regime and assuming responsibility, and it remains one of the most astonishing and inspiring examples of what Corazon Aquino called “people power.” In that sense, The Power of the Powerless was prophetic.

I also saw, in the months that followed, how one of Havel’s most penetrating insights—that everyone who lived inside the system was both a victim and a perpetrator of post-totalitarianism—influenced his actions as president, especially when he cautioned Czechs and Slovaks not to rush to condemn all Communists, because everyone, Communist or not, had been implicated in sustaining the system. It was not a popular position to take. Havel was seen by many to have dealt too leniently with former Communists, when a harsher retribution would have been preferred. Moreover, Havel’s distrust of partisan political solutions, his skepticism that parliamentary democracy could be anything more than a transition phase in anticipation of a deeper “existential” revolution to come, meant that the field was left open for less scrupulous, more adept politicians to take control of the transition to a market-based democracy.

I returned to Havel’s essay again in 2003, after Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown by the “coalition of the willing.” In its more than three decades in power, the Ba’ath Party had created a totalitarian state in Iraq not unlike the one common throughout the Soviet satellites in Central Europe, though far more ruthless. For some Iraqi dissidents, Havel was a beacon. Had the American conquerors heeded the message of The Power of the Powerless, they might not have been so quick to tear down the existing institutions of civil power and exclude Ba’ath Party members from public life, since the real locus of the social renewal they sought lay not in these institutions themselves, but in each individual. Not surprisingly, when they dismantled the institutions without giving Iraqis a chance to heal themselves, it led to a period of civil anarchy from which the country, and indeed the entire region, has yet to recover.

During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, I went to Cairo and arranged for a translation into Arabic of The Power of the Powerless, thinking that the essay might provide some guidance to the activists who were busy forming new political parties and associations in the wake of Mubarak’s ousting. But by the time the essay appeared in print, it was clear that the situation faced by reformers in Egypt resembled more the “classical dictatorships” described by Havel in section II of the essay than it did post-totalitarianism. The Egyptian “Arab Spring” turned out to be only a brief respite from the military dictatorship that persists in Egypt to this day.

And now, according to some, we are living in a “post-truth” era, or at least an era where, throughout the developed world, trumpeting outright lies appears to be a more effective route to gaining and holding onto political power than deploying verifiable facts. Again, using The Power of the Powerless as a point of departure, we are prompted to ask whether such lies will “merely” poison the atmosphere and make communication among people extremely difficult. Or will the practice of the big, persistent lie prove so effective a tool of dominance that it will become institutionalized, creating a world in which mendacity becomes first the norm and then the rule? Will democratic institutions themselves cease to function as intended—that is, to serve the real, down-to-earth interests of people—and become instead instruments of maintaining and extending power? And if this happens, will it compel people to forego those real interests and the evidence of their senses and, instead, embrace an illusory democracy, if only to protect themselves by a show of loyalty to the system or the people running it? Will “living within the lie” become “the new normal?”

Toward the end of The Power of the Powerless, Havel looks reluctantly into the future and calls for “a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to . . . the ‘human order,’ which no political order can replace” (XXI). If we translate what he means into practical terms, I think he is describing the revival of civil society. Only after having reclaimed oneself can one reclaim or re-create associations, institutions, organizations, entities, that serve society, not the system. To see what the bright future might be like, Havel says, we only have to look around us at the growing number of people who have already broken out of the “lie” and are forging a life for themselves that is more authentic, more in harmony with their true interests and their true “being.” These people, he believed, were harbingers of that brighter future.

Havel turned out to be right about that. In fact, I think the greatest strength of the current Czech Republic, for all the malaise in its parliamentary system, is the fact that today the country has a strong non-profit, civil society sector, and that is due, in no small measure at least, to Havel’s patronage. In our “post-truth” society, when the trends toward hollowing out our traditional institutions appear to be growing, the power of those excluded from power to harness the truth may be our own best hope as well.