The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1409: Havel's 'The Power of the Powerless' - Part 2

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

54 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a reading of Václav Havel's dissident essay, "The Power of the Powerless."The Power of the PowerlessPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's PaypalPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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If not, here's a show. This is Take Two. I want to welcome everyone back to my reading of The Power of the Powerless by Vaklov Haville. I'm going to jump right in where I left off in the... the first episode. Glad to be back to this one. All right, here we go. Part six. Why, in fact, did our green grocer have to put his loyalty on display in the shop window? Had he not already displayed it sufficiently in various internal and semi-public ways? At trade union meetings, after all, he had always voted as he should. He had always taken part in various competitions.

He voted in elections like a good citizen. He even signed the anti-charter. Why, on top of all of that, should he have to declare his loyalty publicly? After all, the people who walk past his window will certainly not stop to read that. In the Green Grocer's opinion, the workers of the world ought to unite. The fact of the matter is, they don't read the slogan at all, and it can be fairly assumed they don't even see it. If you were to ask a woman who had stopped in front of his shop what she saw in the window, she could certainly tell you whether or not they had tomatoes today,

but it is highly unlikely that she noticed a slogan at all, let alone what it said. It seems senseless to require the green grocery 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, and apartment windows, and on buildings. They are everywhere, in fact. They form part of the panorama of everyday life. Of course, while they ignore the details,

people are very aware of the panorama as a whole. And what else is the greengrove slogan, but a small component in the huge backdrop to daily life? The propaganda just starts to fade into the background. The only question is, is has it faded into the background? because you just don't notice it anymore because you've absorbed it, or are you just at the point where you're unconsciously just ignoring it? The green grocer adds to put the slogan in his window,

therefore not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning as well. It reminds people where they're, are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing. It indicates to them what they must do as well if they don't want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their

peace and tranquility and insecurity. One of the biggest problems that you're going to have in a society as such is, so Czechoslovakia, Soviet Czechoslovakia, is, in a war, is, in if you start speaking up against the regime, even privately, people will wonder, okay, well, is this person trying to set me up, trying to see if I agree with the subversives, or are they really trying to do something? So it's not only difficult for the person who is hearing somebody saying something that might be subversive, but also the person who's saying something that's subversive, they have to be 100% sure that that person would be on their side. So you don't want to break the rules of the game,

but you also don't want to alienate yourself from society. If you start speaking subversibly and the other person is just scared to death, they're going to, if they don't turn you in, they will ignore you. They will shun you. And you do that to enough people, and now you're all alone. So, instead of being all alone, people just keep playing the game. Think about the post-war consensus and the things that we know to be untrue. But you can't say them out loud. Why?

Because you will be shunned. You will be considered a bad person. You'll be considered immoral. Or worse. things can happen depending where you're living countries certain countries you live in you say the wrong thing about what happened you know the post-war consensus and you go to jail the woman who ignored the green grocer's slogan 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 green grocery did

and she could do so precisely because she was doing it against the background of the general panorama with some awareness of it, that is, against the background of the panorama of which the green grocer's shop window forms a part. When the green grocer visits her office, he will notice her slogan, he will not notice her slogan either, just as she failed to notice his. Nevertheless, their slogans are mutually dependent. Both were displayed with some awareness of the general panorama, and we might say under its Dictot. Both, however, assist in the creation of that panorama, and therefore they assist in the

creation of that Dictot as well. The Green Grocer and the office worker have both adapted to the conditions in which they live, but in doing so, they help to create the conditions. So as long as you're going along with, what you know is wrong, you're perpetuating it. And as I said before, it's scary to step out of that. You are perpetuating it. When you're around your family, people you love, the people that you really should be able to be honest with by going along with it, you're perpetuating it.

And you're helping them to perpetuate it. They do what is done, what is to be done, what must be done, but at the same time, by that very token, they confirm that it must be done in fact. They conform to a particular requirement, and in so doing, they themselves perpetuate that requirement. Metaphysically speaking, without the Green Grocer's slogan, the office worker slogan could not exist and vice versa. Each proposes to the other that something be repeated and each accepts the other's proposal. Their mutual indifference to each other's slogans is only an illusion.

In reality, by exhibiting their slogans, each compels the other to accept. the rules of the game and to confirm thereby the power that requires the slogans in the first place. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time, they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments. That is, you know, if you want to call it the normie that you know, they are a victim. but as long as they're doing everything they can to perpetuate the system as it works, to perpetuate the myth,

to perpetuate the narrative, to perpetuate the power structure, also an instrument. If an entire district town is plastered with slogans that no one reads, it is on the one hand a message from the district secretary to the regional secretary, but it is also something more. A small example of the principle of social,

auto totality at work. Part of the essence of the post-totelitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity and favor of the identity of the system. That is, so they may become agents of the system's general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals. So they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into it and ensnared by it, like Faust by Mephistopheles. More than this, so they may create,

through their involvement, a general norm, and thus bring pressure to bear on their fellow citizens. And further, so they may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable, and ultimately, so they may, with no external urging come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society. By pulling everyone into its power structure, the post-totelitarian system makes everyone an instrument of mutual totality, the auto-totality of society. I'm sure every single one of you, if you're actually listening to this and you're absorbing it, you, I don't even have to make a comment, you're commenting to yourself.

You know exactly what this is. You know exactly what we've been pulled into. Whether it be vicious propaganda, where you're forced to cheerlead things that are against your morality, against your being, or whether it's something small. you know exactly what he's talking about. And you should, if you listen to this show and listen to others,

you should recognize this for what it is, what he's talking about. Everyone, however, is in fact involved and enslaved, not only the green grocers, but also the prime ministers. Differing positions in the hierarchy merely established differing degrees of involvement. The green grocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has very little power. The prime minister naturally has greater power, but in return he is far more deeply involved.

Both, however, are unfree, each merely in a somewhat different way. The real accomplice in this involvement, therefore, is not another person, but the system itself. I don't even have to quote it, but, you know, the purpose of a system is what it does. So if your, you know, if your boomer aunt or your boomer parents are quoting Fox News, if they've never talked about Iran in their life, but now they're saying that Iran's been at war with us for 47 years, you know what we're talking about here. You know what he's talking about here.

And I'm just using that as a modern example because it's something that we're dealing with right now. But it's much more dangerous when you think about the last hundreds, 150 years. Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt, but it gives no one unlimited responsibility and guilt, nor does it completely absolve anyone. Thus, the conflict between the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflict between two socially defined and separate communities, and only a very generalized view, and even that only approximative, permits us to divide society into the rulers and the ruled. Here, by the way, is one of the most, important differences between the post-Sotelitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can still be drawn according to social class. In the post-totelitarian system, this line runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his own way is both a victim and supporter of the system.

What we understand by the system is not, therefore, a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something that permeates the entire system and is a factor in shaping it, something which may seem impossible to grasp or define, for it is in the nature of a mere principle, but which is expressed by the entire society as an important feature of its life. If we don't, if we take the system down, what will happen to us? If we change the system, what will happen to us? Shouldn't we be trying to take over the system and fight against the system by using the system that's oppressed? Wait, what?

This is something I disagree with with people who are close to me. The system has been designed to do this. If you consider it using the most mild language immoral, wouldn't it be immoral to use it for your own ends, even if you consider them to be moral? And even if they are moral, there's a question for you. Sorry, I had to take a sip. The fact that human beings have created and daily create,

the self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not, therefore, the results of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history, nor is it history somehow gone off the rails. Neither is it the product of some diabolical higher will, which has decided, for reasons unknown, to torment a portion of humanity in this way. It can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration of such a system. There is obviously something in human beings which responds to this system, something they reflect and accommodate, something within them, which paralyzes every effort of their better selves to revolt.

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore, not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan as a degenerate image of its own degeneration as a record of people's own failure as individuals. The system only works because of our own failures. The case can be made that, you know, a social engineering regime that is 100 years old, yeah, people are victims. We've already said that. We've already gone over it. But yeah, it's also our failing. You know, we have, we have had for, you know, a couple, a few decades now access to the internet,

where there's a lot of information that people have used to free themselves of this mind virus, and not everybody's going to do it. Unfortunately. So how do we move forward? I probably said this in the first part of this in part one, but, you know, when, when, when, When James Burnham wrote the managerial revolution in 1940, he spoke of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia or Stalin's Soviet Union, sorry, and the United States. And when it came to the way they were run, when it came to the managerialism of all of them,

he really didn't see a lot of difference. Now, some may have, I don't know that anybody listening to this has, any affinity for Stalin's Soviet Union, but there may be some, there are some who have affinity for the United States, and there are some that are going to see Hitler's Germany in a way that the mainstream doesn't.

But they were managerial. They were run by managers. It's undeniable. I'm sure many of you listen just can name the managers. You can name the people who were ahead of this department. that department, this department, that department, they are managing top down. It's just a matter of where,

I guess we'll never know where Germany's version of managerialism would have led to, but I'm fully convinced it would have led to managerialism had they won the war. Because that's, that was the zeitgeist, just as everybody in the 20s was calling themselves

a socialist. That was where it was headed. The essential A potential aims of life are present naturally in every person. 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 degree of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity and to utilitarianism. In everyone, there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river

of pseudo-life. This is much worse than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse. It is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself. Upon my reading of Havel in the past, he because I guess of the hypercollectivism that he was living under he embraced individualism. When we hear this, we should probably think more along the lines of how living historically has been destroyed. I get to understand his reaction and I understand the reaction of others because I've been there. But once you understand that you come from a tribe and you come from a line and that that goes forward and that goes back, then you understand that one of the ways to get you,

one of the immediate ways to get past this and to start breaking out of it, especially in your mind, is to embrace who you are and where you came from. And who you are and where you came from is not solely individualistic. It can't be. You can't win that way.

In highly simplified terms, could be said that the post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. It is not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social autototality 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, it is not the grayness

and the emptiness of life in the post-otelitarian system, only an inflated character of modern day 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. Part 6. Let us now imagine that one day something in our green grocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections, he knows rafarse. He begins to say that he really thinks what he really thinks in political meetings.

And he even finds a strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt, the Green Grocer steps out of living within a 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 within the truth. 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 will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him, and his fellow workers will wonder about 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 green grocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the green grocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty or simply as part of the general panorama to which belongs an awareness that this is how the 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 oneself, what I was saying earlier. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else to a greater or lesser degree as components of the post-totelitarian system,

as agents of his automatism, as petty instruments of the social autototality. So basically, by not speaking the truth and hiding certain things, hiding your opinions, you're contributing. You're a part of the system. But once you step out,

well, you have to be able to take what's going to come after you, which could be the whole weight of the state. It could be isolation. And, you know, one thing that people never talk about is, is that, you know, the green grocer of his wife is living better than some other women that she knows. and all of a sudden now her standard of living goes down. Historically, women do not feel well with that.

Sorry, ladies, you just don't. As a whole. So there's more than people think about. There's more to it. And books have been written about what happens when you step out of line. and you start speaking your mind. And you've seen it. We've seen it.

I mean, we, if you were online for the last 15 years, you saw the cancellations. You saw what was it. What speaking out and saying the wrong thing would get you. You didn't, you don't even have to be, you could come at it from an academic standpoint. But still, you're rocking the boat. the most, I would say if you wanted to look in our system and figure out, like, see the

pinnacle of the kind of person who doesn't really have any power. They do have power, but they don't have political power per se. They don't have sovereign power. But they do have power when it comes to political. speech and political talk. Just look at con ink. Look at con ink. Anyone who start, anyone they're associated with or anyone they notice that is starting to get popular on the quote unquote right. If they're to the right of them, they're not towing the line. They're not, they're not pulling their weight anymore. They're not following the, they're not promoting the narrative. They're trying to

destroy the myth. Now you're a, you're no different, now you're woke right because the left seeks to destroy myths. And now because you're trying to destroy, to destroy myths, you're just like them. Perfect example. But, you know, a lot of you, if you started speaking your, your opinions, maybe, maybe not so much anymore, God, hopefully, to people around you, you may see that they don't come around as much anymore, not so quick to return a text or answer a call. Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions,

those anonymous components of the system will spew the green grocer from its mouth. There, that's the right. That's like con-ink at this point. The system, through its alienating presence on people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictated. The Green Grocer has not committed a simple individual 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 facade of the system and exposed the real base foundations 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 green grocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to appear behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the law can constitute the system only if it's 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. The thing I love about this section here is that I really don't have to comment on it. Some of you people are probably pissed off. I'm commenting so much about it. venting too. This is years of frustration. So please allow me. I apologize. 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. After all, the green grocer was a threat to the system, not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings, and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. 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. And I will once again mention living historically. Thomas obviously talks about it since the very first time I ever interviewed him. Darrell Cooper uses, you know, has picked up. up on that, use the same language on Tucker, and Darrell went on Tom Woods, Tom Woods' most recent episode, and they talked about living historically. This is how you break containment on it.

This is how it gets out there that you, if you're living within this system and promoting this system and allowing this system to dominate you, to be a part of you, that you're defending it, then you can't live historically. By living historically, this is the way you fight against it. By looking at the values of the system and looking at the values that you know deep down inside you have, hopefully, and seeking to live those, that you're a threat to the system. But not only are you a threat to the system, but that the more people that do it, the more people expose the system. And the more that the system becomes exposed, the faster it's destroyed. In the post-totalitarian system, truth in the wildest sense of the word has a very special import, one unknown in other contexts.

In this system, truth plays a far greater and above all a far different role as a factor of power or as an outright political force. How does the power of truth operate? How does truth as a factor of power work? How can its power as power be realized? Part 8. Individuals can be alienated from themselves. only because there is something in them to alienate. I'm going to read that sentence again.

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. When we talk about deracination from who we are, this is what Mr. Havel is talking about. 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 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 rooted... Let me start that sentence again. I wasn't ready for chimerical. 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 to hidden space of life and its real aims of its hidden openness to truth. The singular explosive and calculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent, this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly and the truth grows. It is to this sphere. It is to this sphere. It is to this that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists, but this place is hidden and therefore from the perspective of power very dangerous. The complex ferment that takes place within it goes on in semi-darkness, and by the time it finally

surfaces in the light of day as an assortment of shocking surprises to the system, it is usually too late to cover them up in the usual fashion. Thus they create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways. Let's take a sip real quick. It seems that the primary breeding ground for what might, in the wildest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-Sotelitarian system, is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course,

will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real institutionalized quantifiable power, which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether, the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special 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 names of life and human beings repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights for the realization that 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. It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are right 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 being itself. The hidden movements that it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth when, where, under what circumstances and to what extent are difficult to predict. In something visible, a real political act or

event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lives, it is never quite clear where the proverbial last straw will fall or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes almost as a reflex action preventatively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth. That was a lot. But if you listen to this show, I think you get everything that he's saying.

You have to start living within truth. You have to start living historically. And even if you're doing it in secret and you're not telling anybody, it will permeate. This is exactly what Dr. Johnson and I are talking about in on resistance to evil by force, by Ivan Aline. If you have a town that's become so poor that 10% of the women

are secretly prostituting themselves, that is going to have an effect on the town. And like I said, and they're doing it in secret. Can we explain this? Sure, if you're a Christian, if you have a metaphysics, you can explain this. But you can't get,

get past the fact that whenever, that this can't, things like this can't stay hidden. Evil can't stay hidden. And if evil can't stay hidden, good cannot stay hidden. And if people are living historically, if they're living truth, not what this regime puts out, not what this regime sells us, not what this regime tells us they will persecute us for if we don't, you know, live as they. They want us to live. But if we live within the truth of who we are and where we came from and where we're going,

which has nothing to do with some other group that was persecuted for however long and who cares, that has nothing to do with you. The reason we study them is because we need to know everything we can about them. We need to see what they've done in the past so we can see what they're going to. to do in the future. Because history may not repeat itself, but damn, if there isn't, aren't something, things that are just used over and over and over again. But it's up to you to start living, I mean, it sounds fucking woo-woo leftist, living

your truth. But you're not living your truth, you're living be-truth. And when people start to do that, that's when you're going to see things move. That's when the myths fall apart. That's when the narrative is no longer taken seriously. That's when plain lip service to it just becomes intolerable for people. Continuing. Why was Solzhenycinism driven out of his own country?

Certainly not because he represented a unit of real power, that is. Not because any of the regime's representatives felt he might unseat them and take their place in government. Solzhenycin's expulsion was something. else, a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences. And so the post-totalitarian system behaved in a characteristic way. It defended the integrity of the world of appearances in order to defend itself, for the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off her

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 crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably. When I speak of living within the truth, I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thoughts such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or group revolts against manipulation, anything from a letter by intellectuals to a worker's strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration,

from refusing to vote in the farcical elections to making an open speech at some official Congress, or even a hunger strike, for instance. If this suppression of the aims of life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifaceted manipulation of all expressions of life, then, by the same token, every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totelitarian system politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance, not to mention explosive power. That whole list he went down. it may not even

it's not going to apply to all all societies or all cultures you have to figure out what that is and you have to or if you can't figure it out you look for people who figured it out moving on

the Prague Spring is usually understood as a clash between two groups on the level of real power those who wanted to maintain the system as it was and those who wanted to reform it. It is frequently forgotten, however, that this encounter was merely the final act and the inevitable consequence of a long drama

originally played out chiefly in the theater of the spirit and the conscience of society. And that somewhere at the beginning of this drama, there were individuals who were willing to live within the truth, even when things were at their worst. These people had no access to real power, nor did they aspire to it. These people had no access to real power,

nor did they aspire to it. The sphere in which they were living their truth was not necessarily even that a political thought. They could equally have been poets, painters, musicians, or simply ordinary citizens who were able to maintain their human dignity. Today it is naturally difficult to pinpoint when and through which hidden winding channel a certain action or attitude influence a given milieu and to those and to trace the virus of children. truth as it slowly spread through the tissue of the life of lives, gradually causing it to disintegrate. One thing, however, seems clear. The attempt at political reform was not the cause of society's reawakening, but rather the final outcome of that reawakening. Political reform didn't happen because, oh, people woke up one day and oh, we need political reform. It has to start long before that.

I think the present also can be better understood in the light of this experience. the confrontation between a thousand chartists and the post-satilitarian system 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 the chance. If, however, this confrontation is seen against the backdrop of what we, know about power in the post-Fetalitarian 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. For this reason, it is undertaken only by those for whom the former is worth risking the latter, or who have come to the conclusion that there is no other way to conduct real politics in Czechoslovakia today.

which, by the way, is the same thing. This conclusion can be reached only by someone who is unwilling to sacrifice his own human identity to politics, or rather, who does not believe in politics that requires such a sacrifice. The more thoroughly the post-totelitarian system frustrates any rival alternative on the level of real power, as well as any form of politics independent of the laws of its own automatism, the more definitively, the center of gravity of any potential political threat shifts to the area of the existential and the pre-political. Usually without any conscious effort, living within the truth becomes the one natural point of departure for all activities that work against the automatism of the system. It can't start with politics.

It starts with something much deeper. Politics can eventually become the mechanism. by which you can protect yourself so that you can live in a true way. But you have to, there has to be a truth there in the beginning, or else it all falls apart. What are you fighting for? And even if such systems ultimately grow beyond the area of living within the truth, which means they are transformed into various parallel structures, movements, institutions, they begin to be regarded as political activity.

they bring real pressure to bear on the official structures and begin, in fact, to have a certain influence on the level of real power. They always carry with them the specific hallmark of their origins. Therefore, it seems to me that not even the so-called dissonant movements can be properly understood without constantly bearing in mind this special background from which they emerge. That's it. I'm up to part nine, and I'm going to leave it right there. already recorded with Dr. Johnson today, so I've been doing a lot of talking, and my voice is starting to take a little bit of a toll.

But I hope the, I know that the last section that we read on, in the first episode, hit a lot of people. And I hope that things that we've read now, especially these last three sections, are beginning to, maybe a different,

language, someone else's language and seeing it from afar, seeing it happens to someone afar can help you to understand a little more clearly of exactly what we're going through. People ask, you know, well, you know, you talk about, you need, you know, it's a vanguard and it's really only a small group and everything like that. It's like, yeah, but I still care about people and I want people to live in the most true way possible. I know that once you don't have to be part of a movement, you don't have to be part of a group, you don't have to be part of an organization to help to create the kind of change that's actually needed at this point in time. But just you out there living historically and living in a true way helps to create the real kind of power.

that's going to be needed for the future. And that real kind of power is stronger than any political system or political power. The politician can order someone to kill your body. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a power that's stronger than that, more powerful than that, and that's eternal.

I'll leave it at that. All right? See you on the next reading. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care.