Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  “The Power of the Powerless” addresses the great moral dilemmas of the individual in a society where terror has become more insidious and almost invisible, and where the mechanisms of repression have been internalized to an unprecedented degree. Havel’s essay offers a strategy of self-emancipation for the individual, an alternative to the philosophy of historical abandonment and impotence. His thesis is that it is possible to defeat the logic of conformity, that freedom is a subjective variable that cannot be completely suppressed.

  One should bear in mind that the essay describes the political and moral situation in Husak’s “normalized” Czechoslovakia, a country where forgetting had been turned into an official state policy. One should recall also that in a totalitarian society dissent is impossible. For critical ideas to be able to come to the fore and to have a social impact, the system must undergo a minimal opening. Havel’s essay deals precisely with the sociological and psychological premises for dissent and captures the defining characteristics of the post-totalitarian society. Compared with the Stalinist conditions, when all forms of real or potential critique were ruthlessly suppressed, the post-totalitarian society allows fledgling forms of disobedience. In countries like Albania and Romania, such collective efforts for liberation were impossible, because the regimes had preserved all their coercive powers. In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the erosion of communist authority was accompanied by limited toleration of critical actions. Two features symbolize the nature of such a post-totalitarian regime. First, this is an authoritarian order that reproduces itself by virtue of automatism rather than through traditional mobilizing forms of integration and control. Second, the system’s main ally, the individual’s conviction that nothing can be changed in the given circumstances, that cooperation with the powers-that-be is the only route to tranquility, has lost its intimidating, self-paralyzing force. Everybody, the powerful and the powerless, is aware of the extinction of the old myths, but very few dare to say so openly. The beleaguered minority of truth-tellers, another post-totalitarian feature, is the alternative to the established order:

  A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called “dissent.” This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.25

  The principal feature of that system is a change in the function and influence of the ruling ideology. Whereas under mature Stalinism ideology imbued life in a monopolistic manner, forcing the individual to participate in collective rituals of “revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence,” in the post-totalitarian order the dominant structures appear to be exhausted. There is a general fatigue in the functioning of all institutions.

  Of course, ideology still exists in a post-totalitarian society, but it is a residual construct, with no chance to stir responsive chords among the populace or to create deep emotional attachments. To illustrate the situation in which ideology is both omnipotent and irrelevant, Havel resorts to a parable. He describes the behavior of a manager of a fruit and vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and the carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!” To be sure, the greengrocer couldn’t care less whether or not the world proletariat closes ranks. Besides, he realizes that his placing this slogan in the window does not promote the cause of proletarian internationalism. Nothing is more remote from his everyday concerns than the Marxist call for global workers’ solidarity. The question to ask is, If the greengrocer is indifferent to the content of this slogan, why does he act this way? Havel’s answer is that by performing the ritual the greengrocer sends a signal to the authorities, who had provided him with the poster and who expect him to behave as a disciplined fragment of the social body.

  If he refuses to display the poster, the greengrocer ruins a certain cohesion, he breaks the rules of obedient conformity and jeopardizes his status. At least that is the way he rationalizes his conduct. After all, the greengrocer might ask, what’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting? And what’s wrong with his placing this poster among the apples and carrots? Havel shows that the hidden meaning behind the greengrocer’s gesture is directly related to his ideological conformity: “The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: ‘I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”26 If the greengrocer refuses to comply with the ritual, he violates the socially sanctioned forms of normalcy.

  Under post-totalitarian conditions, the individual is not expected to be an enthusiastic worshipper of the supreme leader. It is enough for him or her to endorse, by practicing them, the rules of systemic self-reproduction. With each greengrocer who abides by those rules, the system adds to its chance to endure. Certainly, if the greengrocer were asked to admit his subservient behavior publicly, to acknowledge that he is just bowing to the dictates of an anonymous power, he would consider such a demand unfair. He would argue that by simply displaying an innocuous slogan he is not adding to the suffering in the world. After all, the slogan has long since lost any uplifting meaning, and nobody takes it seriously any more. Its mere presence in the window guarantees the greengrocer’s self-esteem: He does what the power wants him to do, but without publicly confessing his moral capitulation. He does not say: “I am weak and scared and terrified, and therefore I lie.” He says: “I am just adhering, even in an abstract way, to a harmless cause. I do what I am supposed to do because it is not up to me to change the world.”

  The ideological camouflage of serfdom is the main underpinning of the post-totalitarian order.

  Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology. 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 to part with them. As the repository of something “supra-personal” and objective, 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 very pragmatic, but at the same time an apparently dignified, way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed towards people and towards God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own “fallen existence,” their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.27

  Ideology is the substitute for naked terror, the pabulum offered by the system to its subjects in order to placate their doubts and convince them that theirs is the only rational behavior. With its contempt for the values of life, ideology can sanctify moral defeats and criminalize moral heroism. The creation of civil society in Eastern Europe included a rebellion against the mortifying role of ideology.

  Civil society was an attempt to de-ideologize the public sphere, to wrest it from the pseudo-political form of manipulation that prevented the
free exercise of the individual’s basic rights. By defending the “real aims of life,” civil society reconstructs the genuine sense of human solidarity and rejects a political system’s universalistic pretense. In all the East European countries, the struggle for society’s self-emancipation was waged in the name of the right to think and act differently. Whereas the system stakes its life on conformity, regimentation, and uniformity, civil society springs from creativity, originality, and singularity.

  To expose the intrinsic mendacity at the foundation of the post-totalitarian system, of the “blind automatism” that ensures its self-reproduction, is one of the main purposes of an emerging civil society. Before offering an alternative to the existing order, it is necessary to understand the characteristics and the essence of the post-totalitarian order: It must be obvious that the times of show trials, of naked terror, are over; the system lacks authentic popular support—its ideology cannot arouse any form of mass fervor; and the system—based on inefficiency, waste of human energy, and immense corruption—still continues to exist, in spite of what common sense would suggest. Everyone is aware that the system is bankrupt, but few will openly break with it. According to Havel, the source of this systemic perpetuation lies in its ability to manipulate signs and symbols. The system is based, more than anything else, on semantic abuse:

  The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but is does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: 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 abuse of power 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 world view; 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 fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.28

  Havel’s masterful analysis of the post-totalitarian era offers a clear, insightful explanation of the way the Brezhnevite system operated. The Brezhnevite system did not attack the individual in the traditional, brutal way. It made suffering less visible and tried to annihilate the distinction between victims and torturers. The distance between those two categories almost completely vanishes in a system where everybody is made to participate in the universal lie. It is precisely for that reason, because the lie is embedded in the very core of the established order, because it is its unique source of vitality, that the system must stick to the official doctrine regardless of its absolute and widely understood fallacies. The more absurd the ideological claims, the more important they are for the self-confidence of the power elite.

  It is ideology that justifies the command economy, the limitation of individual rights, and the communist party’s “predestined role.” Without the ideological matrix, the system would simply fall apart. And indeed, at the moment ideological zeal ceased to be fortified by the irradiating power of the Soviet center, the East European regimes collapsed like so many houses of cards. Havel called the system of ideological norms, prohibitions, and limitations that ensured the prolongation of the post-totalitarian system a “metaphysical order”:

  This metaphysical order is fundamental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure; it integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarian structure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.29

  Such ideological fetishism is not based on any form of conviction. The symbols that justify the system must be endorsed through the practical behavior of individuals. They are not supposed to believe in these pseudo-values, and everyone knows that nobody is speaking the truth. Precisely this is the key to the post-totalitarian technique of domination: the make-believe, the simulation of conviction, the as if transformed into an all-embracing mechanism of self-delusion:

  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.30

  The moral numbness of the population is the most important ally of post-totalitarian power. The system works as long as the prevailing lie is accepted and tolerated by the individual, as long as the average citizen, the greengrocer, continues to endorse the ideological nonsense although aware that all this verbiage is nothing but a collection of lies. The problem, therefore, is not simply to identify the source of oppression in the government but also to realize how each individual is tied to the power structure. Some are directly responsible for repressive measures, while others consecrate the status quo through their obedience and refusal to state the truth. According to Havel, the system’s ability to turn its victims into accomplices makes post-totalitarianism different from classical dictatorships. The very idea of change has vanished, and the individuals try to come to terms with what appears to them to be the only possible form of life. They accept the system’s demagogy; they repeat it and thereby strengthen it. This complicity is not rooted only in moral weakness, or careerism, or indifference, but also in despair about the chances of getting out of the existing order.

  The schizophrenic post-totalitarian order has penetrated not only the institutional and sociological levels but also the psycho-emotional infrastructure of individuals. When the greengrocer displays the laughable slogan about proletarian unity, he is also sending a signal to the world that he does not see another way to have a normal life without this, after all, innocuous genuflection to official behests. But liberation starts at the individual level, as self-emancipation from the empire of lies and in the decision to live in truth. Emancipation, the birth of an alternative to the all-pervasive He, comes not as an exogenous benefit bestowed by others, but at the moment when the individual, our friend the greengrocer, decides to put an end to what he sees as a grotesque form of self-denial.

  The individual decides that he or she wants to live in accordance with his or her genuine beliefs and sentiments. He decides that he wants to live in truth. To be sure, at the moment the greengrocer ceases to put the slogan in the window, or later, when he opens his mouth and criticizes the rulers for their abuses, he antagonizes those who have not made up their minds and who are still hostage to the official lies. They spurn him and attack him for breaking the rules. He is the dissident who has dared to show that one is not doomed to be a slave forever, that it is up to the human being to assert his or her human qualities, even if this can lead to diminished status or other forms of marginalization.

  The significance of the greengrocer’s rebellion goes beyond the individual, and the system reacts accordingly, sensing the contagious impact of such behavior:

  The greengrocer has not committed a simple, i
ndividual 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 façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundation 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 entirety.31