Following on prof Federico Nazar's presentation, I would like to present you, or remind you of, some lessons that we gained in Eastern Europe under the totalitarian regimes that were before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Thirty-five years ago, the division of Europe into the Western and Eastern block ceased. It can be argued that both blocks were tormented, however, if by different means: West by growing centralizing power of the corporations and East by totalitarian faceless state bureaucracy.
Prominent Czech dissident Václav Havel expressed some interesting ideas in his essay “Power of the power-less” that was published in 1978, nearly half a century ago. The scarcity and irregularity of supply of basic necessities in the socialist Czech republic created an interesting position for managers of local stores. It is important, especially for the Western audience, to remind themselves that under that regime the only employer was the state, and nobody could have a private enterprise. So, managers of small corner shops became actually very powerful people because of the irregularity of supply; if people wanted to get vegetables, meat, etc. it was always good to have a friend as a butcher or greengrocer to actually get what you needed. I am starting with this because in the essay the main “protagonist” is a manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop.
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop placed in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”
Now, why has he done that? What message is he trying to convey? And why has he chosen this platform for his message? Does he genuinely care about the struggle of the workers?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers do not think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in society.
The slogan is really a signal, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way:
I, the greengrocer, 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.
This message, of course, is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential snitches, informers. Had the greengrocer been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”; he would not be nearly as indifferent to its meaning, even though the statement would reflect the truth. He would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “Well, why the workers of the world should not unite, after all?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, and at the same time concealing the low foundations of power.
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 in fact making it easier for them to part with these. As a repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position 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.
It seems senseless to require the greengrocer to declare his loyalty publicly. But it makes sense nevertheless. People ignore his slogan, but they do so because such slogans are also found in other shop windows, on lamp posts, bulletin boards, in apartment windows, and on buildings; they are everywhere, in fact. They form part of the panorama, if you like, of everyday life.
The woman who ignored the greengrocer’s slogan while checking out the shop window may well have hung a similar slogan just an hour before in the corridor of the office where she works. She did it more or less without thinking, just as our greengrocer did, and she could do so precisely because she was doing it against the background of the general panorama and with some awareness of it, that is, against the background of the panorama of which the greengrocer’s shop window forms a part. When the greengrocer visits her office, he will not notice her slogan either, just as she failed to notice his.
The greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality. The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it 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 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.
Ideology creates a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.
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 the 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.
In such system, power is passed on from person to person, from clique to clique, and from generation to generation in an essentially more regular fashion. In the selection of pretenders, a new “king-maker” takes part: it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were, to be borne aloft by it.
No matter who is replaced by whom, succession is only possible against the backdrop and within the framework of a common ritual. It can never take place by denying that ritual. Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power. Is it not characteristic that, on all levels of the power hierarchy, individuals are increasingly being pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, those uniformed flunkeys of the rituals and routines of power?
The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the diktats of this automatism which select people lacking individual will for the power structure, that it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the system will continue.
The ruling figures, despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the systems own internal laws ― laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon. In any case, experience has taught us again and again that this automatism is far more powerful than the will of any individual; and should someone possess a more independent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymous mask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchy at all. And when the individual finally gains a place there and tries to make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who will follow.
The necessity of continually hiding behind and relating to ritual means that even the more enlightened members of the power structure are often obsessed with ideology. They are never able to plunge straight to the bottom of naked reality, and they always confuse it, in the final analysis, with ideological pseudo-reality. It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is something that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system's external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation: it is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.
Let us now imagine that one day our greengrocer snaps and stops putting up the slogans just for the sake of it. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live truthfully.
The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria ― at that time we could travel only within the Eastern block, we could not cross the Iron Curtain ― will be in vain. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder what is going on with him.
Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute him either because it is expected of them, or in order to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.
The system, through its alienating effect on people, will punish the greengrocer for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defence dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offence, 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 foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor in fact is 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.
For the layered cover presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperor is naked!” ― when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game ― everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole monolith seems then to be made paper about to start to tear and disintegrate uncontrollably.
This is understandable: as 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.
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 ― the truth ― must be suppressed more severely than anything else.
This special ― super ― power 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.
And now Havel makes the crucial point:
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 by the urge force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive self-preservation, may at least adapt to that force). It is a massive weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of human existence.
The giant bureaucracy of the state apparatus is inert, slow to respond to unexpected occurrences. Any unexpected, out-of-the-order, occurrence can any time bring down the whole system. The unpredictability and genius of human imagination and creativity can at any moment present the last drop that makes the glass to overflow, the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
All however small, seemingly unimportant actions by individuals can trigger this last lethal blow to this current thoroughly rotten system gingerly and painstakingly built over the decades by the globalists. It is up to every and each individual human being to take responsibility into own hands and break through this Kingdom of Lies.
Thank you.
