It is easy to pick holes in Havel’s arguments, for instance in his Panglossian confidence in the probable harmony among differing interpretations of what it means ‘to live in the truth’. Havel dodged not only differences of political opinion, declaring the need to ‘shed the burden of traditional political categories and habits’, but also difficult questions about such tensions within the human condition as trust and betrayal, love and suspicion, faith and despair, creativity and destruction. Aside from moral appeals and exemplary actions, Havel’s essay also offered little consolation to individuals who choose to live in the truth, and who suffer injuries when the sky falls down on them, as often it does. Havel simply supposed that, despite everything, individuals ‘by nature’ want to live in the truth, a supposition that mistakes ontology for history. The point is that we feel ourselves to be responsible individuals who want to keep our spines straight and live in dignity in the world thanks to the survival of tradition, for instance, because we have inherited such a disposition from Christian-influenced traditions, as his friend Jan Patočka was fond of pointing out. That point begs a series of hard questions about the problem of deaf ears and hostile minds and hearts. Havel was aware, of course, that the origins of our capacity for action in the world as individuals are necessarily shrouded in some mystery: if the existential roots of individuality were graspable, then the tender plant of individuality would die. But it has to be said that, although in particular contexts at particular points in time some people are inclined to live truthfully, we are not ‘by nature’ lovers of truthful living. ‘The Power of the Powerless’ thus failed to propose a way of breaking the hypnotic effects of a system of power that, as he admits in one passage, offers to people who feel lost and humiliated ‘an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish’.
The same point about the limits of Havel’s ontological account of living in the truth can be put in a different way and with different implications. Whether intended or not, Havel’s belief in the ontological principle of living in the truth encouraged the abandonment of politics — the often messy and always complicated activity of collectively encouraging individuals ‘to live in the truth’ and thereby to decide who gets what, when and how. Havel’s account supposed that the good society is one that recognizes and gives expression to its most secure foundation, the individual living in truth. Expressed differently again, Havel’s defence of living in the truth rests upon a species of what his Hungarian colleague György Konrád later called anti-politics.246 It supposed that politics is a type of impersonal and unprincipled activity that reaches its zenith in the figure of the grey-suited Party apparatchik, generals with tinted shades, leather-jacketed secret policemen, military-uniformed bureaucrats, and other cogs in the late-socialist state; that politics is shrewdness, manipulation, unfreedom, the struggle of some to exercise power over others; that politics is inherently absolutist, in that its field of operation, human beings living together in complex societies, is infinitely deep and wide, and that therefore the hunger of those politicians who politically seduce, manipulate and subsume others is never fully satisfiable.
Havel’s essay admittedly contained a few passing references to the importance of such procedural arrangements as the rule of law and the necessity of defending human and civil rights, as specified in the constitutions of particular states, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Human Rights, and the Concluding Act of the Helsinki Agreement. But nowhere did the text mention politics as a form of collectively based speech and interaction orientated to the attainment of the good life (as in the Aristotelian tradition). The text also eschewed talk of parliaments, armies, police forces, the civil service, local government, as if these institutions were somehow unnecessary or secondary or optional or ultimately dispensable procedures, or what Havel called ‘dry’ mechanisms, since they cramp the truthfully-living individual. Talk of synergies between individuals and organizations should be suspected, he implied. There is always a zero-sum power relationship between subjects who think and act in the truth and their institutional environment. Havel’s statement about the primacy of the individual’s existence over the institutional frameworks within which they live made this point clear. ‘It is of great importance,’ he wrote, ‘that the main thing — the everyday, thankless, and never-ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity — never impose any limits on itself, never be halfhearted, inconsistent, never trap itself in political tactics, speculating on the outcome of its actions or entertaining fantasies about the future. The purity of this struggle,’ he concluded, ‘is the best guarantee of optimum results’.247
The limitations of an ontology of individualism, and especially its strange other-worldly unconcern with the institutional preconditions of liberty, would later become evident in the political battles sparked by Havel’s penchant for acting as a prima donna, surrounding himself with hand-picked appointees, and his maverick appeals to ‘the citizens’ over the heads of parliament and the courts of law. ‘The Power of the Powerless’ was equally unconcerned with the philosophical limits of individualism. Indeed, it concealed these limits through literary skill, that is, by attempting to divine individual readers’ sympathy through the sheer rhetorical force of his text, for instance in its bold appeal to shed the burden of all inherited political thought and political habits, or in its comparison of living for the truth with the act of surfacing from darkness into the light of day. Its provocative summary of the significance of Charter 77 was also exemplary of its rhetorical force: ‘The confrontation between a thousand Chartists and the post-totalitarian system,’ wrote Havel, ‘would appear to be politically hopeless. This is true, of course, if we look at it through the traditional lens of the open political system, in which, quite naturally, every political force is measured chiefly in terms of the positions it holds on the level of real power. Given that perspective, a mini-party like the Charter would certainly not stand a chance. If, however, this confrontation is seen against the background of what we know about power in the post-totalitarian system, it appears in a fundamentally different light. For the time being, it is impossible to say with any precision what impact the appearance of Charter 77, its existence and its work has had in the hidden sphere, and how the Charter’s attempt to rekindle civic self-awareness and confidence is regarded there. Whether, when, and how this investment will eventually produce dividends in the form of specific political changes is even less possible to predict. But that, of course, is all part of living within the truth. As an existential solution, it takes individuals back to the solid ground of their own identity; as politics, it throws them into a game of chance where the stakes are all or nothing.’
Powerful rhetoric of this kind was eventually to move millions of people to clap and cheer Havel. Even at the time it seemed to work small wonders. Retyped by loyal fingers, it was read to shreds by hundreds, perhaps thousands who found the essay brilliantly persuasive. There were some who reacted with hostility — the little-known Charter 77 group around Emanuel Mandler fiercely criticized Havel’s unrealistic defence of a political theory and strategy that set itself up as a ‘moral judge’ of society, served in practice to deepen the division between ‘normal’ citizens and ‘dissidents’, and thereby exposed the opponents of the regime to state repression.248 The Czech dissident scholar Václav Černý reportedly also bitterly attacked the essay as the ‘horribly superficial, shallow’ work of a figure who was ‘pathologically conceited, pathologically ambitious’.249 Yet many more Czechs and Slovaks found the essay enlightening. Even dough-faced Party bureaucrats read and discussed its themes.250 Foreign translations of the essay also sometimes caused a minor sensation, as in Italy, where the tiny Bologna publisher CSEO sold more than 30,000 copies in quick time.251 The essay also earned handsome praise wherever it appeared in the Soviet block. The Polish reaction was not atypical. The Polish writer Stanislaw Barańczak recalled how the underground translation of the essay produced ‘broad-based popularity and unanimous respect’ for Havel within the ranks of the opposition during the late 1970s.252 The remark of the Polish Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak also captured something of the way the essay engendered the joy of ‘living in the truth’ among its first, otherwise deflated readers within the Soviet block. ‘This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road,’ said Bujak: ‘Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers’ Defence Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?’ Bujak continued: ‘Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later — in August 1980 — it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered.’ Bujak added: ‘When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfilment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay.’253
It could even be said that the act of writing the essay was an exemplary case of the civil resistance to power — a small-scale initiative — that it advocated. Despite everything that was to follow this act of resistance, two major things were permanently achieved by ‘The Power of the Powerless’. To begin with, Havel’s rough treatment at the hands of the authorities illustrated to everybody with eyes that could see that the regime’s propensity to violence highlighted the need to find peaceful alternatives — just as the essay had proposed. ‘The Power of the Powerless’ rejected Sorelian-type myths of brave and heroic violence. Havel admitted that there are times, during the build-up to the Second World War, for instance, when the use of violence must be regarded as a necessary evil. In these ‘extreme situations’ violence must sometimes be met with violence, for otherwise remaining passive effectively works against decency and in favour of the rule of violence. But the trouble with violence, he argued, is that it is the extreme case of the instrumentalization of concrete human beings, often for some abstract, spurious and ill-defined better future. Violence is the antithesis of living in the truth. It follows that ‘a future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists now’. Havel insisted that those who live in truth ‘do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough’.
The non-violent sentiment of ‘The Power of the Powerless’ resonated with the fact that the heavily armed late-socialist regime ensured that surveillance, military parades, prison and fears of random violence were constant everyday companions of the whole population, who understandably felt a deep antipathy towards the use of violence as a tactic of resistance. In opposition to the traditional left and right, the essay associated bravery not with heroic acts of violence, such as terrorism, assassinations or kidnappings, against perceived enemies. Bravery is rather seen as the civilized patience of citizens who seek to live decently in an indecent regime and, therefore, remain unmoved by acts of violence directed against them. Havel supposed an inner connection between violence and state-centred politics, and he therefore (implicitly) rejected Marx’s well-known view that Violence is the midwife of every society pregnant with a new one’. According to Havel, violence is the enemy of all societies, old and new. Compared with the (calculated) impatience of revolutionaries and revolutionary politics, Havel’s account of power was imbued with a fundamentally different sense of time. It rejected fantasies of apocalyptic revolution because it supposed that ‘living in the truth’ requires citizens to acquire the art of patience. It further supposed that acts of living in the truth could not succeed in days, weeks or months; that there is no such thing as total defeat; and that, if necessary, citizens must wait a very long time and be prepared to endure harsh setbacks. In short, Havel envisaged a peaceful abolition of the late-socialist system by means of a slow fermentation of opposition underneath, and in opposition to, the edifice of state power.
The proposed theory of living in the truth was more than simply an attack upon late-socialism. From under the rubble of that system, it was something of a parable about the dangers of all forms of concentrated power. It therefore necessarily involved a challenge to the whole of modern political thought’s preoccupation with the sovereign power of the territorial state. Without saying so in exactly these words, Havel’s essay proposed lopping off the head of sovereign power. It breathed new life into the maxim that the struggle against stupidity is the only human struggle that is always in vain, but can never be relinquished. More than that — this was its second major achievement — the essay proposed a new practical solution to the age-old problem of finding a remedy for the hubris of political power.
The problem of hybris was first formulated by classical Greek thinkers and historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, for whom the ambitious desire to have more than one’s share of power is a necessary feature of political life and one that inevitably produces disastrous effects. From Thucydides and others, there is no good news for us. The Greek analysts of power warned that power breeds overconfidence and imprudence. Hybris is the progeny of high position, as Euripedes explained, in a famous passage in the Suppliant Women, where it is said that the conqueror ‘is like a poor man who has just become rich: he commits hybris, and his hybris causes him to be ruined in his turn’. Hybris, we are told, is also fed by the need of the powerful to shield themselves against the aggression of the powerless, whose oppression breeds fear. Power is sometimes despised by those who don’t have it and those who exercise command over others become the object of fear and hostility or even hatred, which is why the powerful tend to act imprudently. They are prone to paranoia, plotting and flattery of their subjects, which prompted Pericles to say that he feared before everything else the city of Athens’ arrogant mistakes, such as refusing the offer of peace during the time of Pylos, acting cruelly against other cities, and initiating new conquests, especially in Sicily. Finally, our Greek ancestors warned, hybris breeds hybris. Power leads to increases in power because powerful rulers have to act that way. As things plummet out of control, the path of prudence, the acquired skill of judging ‘what is best’, as the Greeks loved to say, gets ever narrower... and it becomes narrower still, as Isocrates, Demosthenes and Pericles in his Epitaphios all emphasized, because of the decline of civic morality among both rulers and ruled, the final effect of which is discord, stasis.
The originally Greek idea that hybris and its dangerous effect are rooted in the very nature of power over others survived into modern times — think of the various accounts of the rise and fall of the Roman empire by writers such as Polybius, Livy, Sallust, Florus, Montesquieu and Gibbon. The theme of hybris left a bad taste in the mouths of all those who knew that modern forms of state power were prone to corruption. Unfortunately, the analysts of hybris gave a Greek gift to the modern world, in that they provided no permanent remedy for the dangers of hybris, except for the thought that it is punishable by the gods, who so hate the wish to have more than a fair share of power that they are prone to turn against mortals, as Herodotus reports Artabanus to have warned Xerxes before he finally made the decision to attack Greece: ‘You see the biggest creatures, how God crushes them with his thunder, and doesn’t allow them to make a show of their great size. But the small ones don’t trouble him. You see how he always directs his blows towards the highest houses and the highest trees. God indeed abases anything that grows above the rest... For God doesn’t allow high-mindedness in others but himself.’
Except in millenarian circles, warnings about divine intervention against the powerful ring hollow in our times, and so it can be said, from the perspective of the ancients, that we moderns have been bequeathed what might be described as an aporia, an extremely difficult perennial problem that seems virtually insoluble. The problem is this: given the tendency in the world of politics towards hybris, how can its disastrous effects be overcome? How, in other words, can citizens be liberated from the permanent dangers of corruption and the infernal rise and fall of states? Can human beings find other ways of organizing power that would release them from hybris? Or must we reckon with the ultimate impossibility of containing hybris? Is life nothing more an endless struggle for power that comes to rest only at the point of death? Or can only divine intervention now rescue us from the trials and tribulations caused by our own hubris?
In ‘The Power of the Powerless’, interestingly, Havel’s response to these questions cross-referred to the German philosopher and critic, Martin Heidegger. In a famous interview with Der Spiegel published only after his death, Heidegger discussed the problem of whether any political system, including democracy, can reverse the hubris of our technological age.254 The essence of modern technology is its imprisonment of Man within a Frame-Work (Ge-stell) that puts men and women in their place, assigns them tasks, and calls them to order, all the while crushing their existent individualities by means of abstractions, thus rendering them powerless. ‘I don’t know whether you’re frightened,’ Heidegger remarked to his interviewers. ‘I am when I see TV transmissions of the earth from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb. Man has already been uprooted from the earth. What’s left are purely technical relations. Where man lives today is no longer an earth.’
So what is to be done? Is there any solution to this problematic hubris of modern times? Heidegger’s reply is as striking as it is unsatisfactory. ‘Only a God can save us now,’ he says, using words that Havel’s ‘The Power of the Powerless’ repeats, with a twist. Heidegger’s polemics against the modern world led him to urge others to step away from the ‘noise’ of the world, to withdraw so as to allow individuals in their concrete being-there to listen thoughtfully to the call of Being. Concrete individuals should actively strive to be passive, that is, to engage in the contemplation of the present, to prepare expectations or, as Heidegger puts it, ‘to prepare to be prepared for the manifestation of God, or for the absence of God as things go downhill all the way’.
In broad outline, Havel accepted Heidegger’s diagnosis of the crisis of modern technological society. Late-socialism is seen by Havel to be a thoroughly modern regime which, contrary to being a regression or mutant, is in fact both ‘an inflated caricature of modern life in general’ and the possible shape of things to come. Late-socialism was the most complete and devilish expression so far of modern attempts to transform citizens into subjects who are compelled to act as if they were mere casts of extras in a fully politicized stage performance directed from above. The Soviet-type system of late-socialism is ‘a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies’. Havel also acknowledged Heidegger’s observation that there appears to be no way out of the powerlessness produced by modern regimes of power. We seem to be condemned to look on helplessly at the coldly functioning organizations that engulf us by tearing us away from both our natural habitats and fellow human beings. ‘We have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control.’ That leaves only one possible earthly weapon against hubris. Heidegger missed it: the cultivation, from below and against all odds, of institutions that can develop ‘the independent life of society’ and thereby empower the powerless, even preventing them from ever becoming new masters of others. Tentatively, and in clumsy language, Havel called this new and desperate possibility ‘social self-organization’. With greater confidence and precision — and political implications of the most dramatic type — it would soon be called civil society.