The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1418: Havel's 'The Power of the Powerless' - Part 5

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

59 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. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. This is part five of my reading of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless. We are up to part 16, and I know. am going to jump in. The post-Sotelitarian system is mounting a total assault on humans and humans stand against it alone, abandoned, and isolated. It is therefore entirely natural that all the dissident movements are explicitly defensive movements. They exist to defend human beings and the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system. Today, the Polish group KOR is called the

Committee for Social Self-Defense. The word defense appears in the names of other similar groups in Poland. But even the Soviet Helsinki monitoring group and our own Charter 77 are clearly defensive in nature. In terms of traditional politics, this program of defense is understandable, even though it may appear minimal, provisional, and ultimately negative. It offers no new conception, model, or ideology, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of the word, since politics always assumes a positive programming can scarcely limit itself to defending someone against something. Such of you, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionally political way of looking at things. The post-Sotelitarian system, after all, is not the manifestation

of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is something radically different. a complex, profound, the long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation of society. To oppose it merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political liner program. It is a problem of life itself. It is a problem of the system itself. My emphasis there. I added that if you're just listening and not reading along. It is not, it is not like, oh, we're going to use this system that is totally against us

to defend ourselves from this system. No, they live under different, you know, Czechoslovakia lived under different circumstances. I mean, they were basically at one whole totalitarian unit. Here we have different ways of operating. We have federalism. We have states. We have cities. We have counties. We have county sheriffs. It's different. You can, in many cases, separate the system at the local level from the system at the national level. It's been done. It's still being done through today. your local system does not have to be the regime, the Nuremberg system, the regime. It can exist outside of it. There's a difference between us and them. Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity is not only a more realistic approach,

since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it concerns people's everyday lives. at the same time, and perhaps precisely because of this, it is also an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the very essence of things. It aims at truth living historically. There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

Sometimes you have to sink to the bottom. Unfortunately, nowadays, when you tell, people, we're at the bottom and you're going to have to figure your way out. No one's coming to save you. That's black pill. That's what it's called. It's called blackpilling. Apparently, you know, if you go to the doctor and the doctor says, the doctor says, well, you have cancer, but we have treatments for it. just telling you you have cancer is blackpilling to some people. There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight. It seems to me that today, this provisional, minimal, and negative program,

the simple defense of people, is in a particular sense and not merely in the circumstances of which we live, an optimal and most positive program, because it forces politics to return to its only proper starting point. Proper, that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided. Individual people. In the democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics is yet to happen.

And some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics. It's amazing. He could see back then what so many of us just close our eyes to now. In our world, precisely because of the misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politics has already undergone that transformation. The central concern of political thought is no longer abstract visions of self-reedeming, positive model, and of course the opportunistic political practices that are the reverse of the same coin.

but rather the people who have so far merely been enslaved by those models and their practices. Every society, of course, requires some degree of organization. Yet, if that organization is to serve people and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways. The depravity of the opposite approach in which people are first organized in one way or another by someone who always knows best what the people need, so they may then, so they may then allegedly be liberated is something we have known on our own skins only too well. To sum up, most people who are too bound to the traditional political way of thinking

see the weaknesses of the dissident movements in their purely defensive character. In contrast, I see that as their greatest strength. I believe that this is precisely where these movements supersede the kind of politics from whose point of view their program can seem so inadequate. So he says up here, blah, blah, blah. Every society, of course, requires some degree of organization. Yet if the organization has served the people, not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways. Now, one thing that Czechoslovakia didn't have was they weren't overrun by, you know, subcontinentals and well-funded, well-organized diaspora groups. They were just dealing with a top-down totalitarianism.

the people who believe that we all were dealing with is diaspora groups missed the fact that the diaspora groups control or one of them specifically controls the top down totalitarianism and that's a foreign element whereas you will have you would have had in Czechoslovakia Russian apparatchiks who were there to oversee things. it's not as obvious as it is now where you allegedly have liberty and freedom. You can still buy a house. You can still sell it. You can even make a profit on that house. But if you say the wrong thing, there's a group that can, who controls the government, that can squash you, make your life unlivable, make you miserable. make you miserable.

They even kill you, but in jail. Which many ways today, when you look at the demographics of jail, is a death sentence. So not all of this corresponds, but what it does show you is that most people don't see the top-down problem. And they don't see the diaspora problem. and they think that if they get somebody at the top who can get elected, like a president, who says that he's fighting for them, but is really answering to the Diaspora group, well, that's even more complicated than what Mr. Havel was dealing with here. 17. In the dissident movements for the Soviet bloc, the defense of human beings usually takes

the form of a defense of human and civil rights as they are entrenched in various official documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights, the concluding Act of the Helsinki Agreement, and the constitutions of individual states. These movements set out to defend anyone who is being persecuted for acting in the spirit of those rights, and they in turn act in the same spirit in their work, but insisting over and over again that the regime recognized and respect human rights and civil rights and by drawing attention to the areas of life where this is not the case. Their work, therefore, is based on the principle of legality.

They operate publicly and openly, insisting not only that their activity is in line with the law, but that achieving respect to the law is one of their main aims. How many times have you heard somebody say, You know, if we just enforced the laws here, things would be much better. If we enforced immigration laws, if we enforced criminal, you know, violent crime law, if we just enforced the law. Yeah. I mean, we can talk about the Constitution and we can talk about all these things.

They didn't even have these things. They're just invoking them and trying to. create almost out of thin air an environment of legality. We have legality here, but it's not enforced. So what do we do? This principle of legality, which provides both the point of departure and the framework for their activities, is common to all dissident groups in the Soviet bloc, even though individual groups have never worked out any formal agreement on that point. The circumstance raises an important question. Why in conditions where a widespread and arbitrary abuse of power is the rule, is there such a general and spontaneous acceptance of the principle of legality?

On the primary level, the stress on legality is a natural expression of specific conditions that exist in the post-totalitarian system and the consequence of an elementary understanding of that specificity. If there are, in essence, only two ways to struggle for a free society, that is, through legal means and through armed and unarmed revolt, then it should be obvious at once how inappropriate the latter alternative is in the post-hitalitarian system. Revolt is appropriate only when conditions are clearly and openly in motion, during a war, for example, or in situations where social or political conflicts are coming to a head. It is appropriate in a classical dictatorship that is either just setting itself up or is in a state

collapse. In other words, it is appropriate where social forces of comparable strength, for example, a government of occupation versus a nation fighting for its freedom, are confronting each other on the level of actual power, or where there is a clear distinction between the usurpers of power and the subjugated population, or when society finds itself in a state of open crises. which should, if you're somebody who doesn't want civil war, that should trigger you. That should trigger something in your brain when he says that where there's a clear distinction between the usurpers of power and the subjugated population. I mean, has anybody noticed anything since October 7th?

Nobody wants anybody who thinks that. They want violence. They want, like, violent civil war. Some people may see that as the only way that change is going to happen. But I think the only people that actually really wants it are people who, unfortunately, feel like there is not, that this could not be done any other way. And they're willing to push it. And, you know, I've read too much about what happens in countries, even modern countries, when something like that kicks off. And, you know, we have to be planning for something else or praying for something else.

Conditions in the post-Satilitarian system, except in extremely explosive situations like the one in Hungary, of course, precisely. are, of course, precisely the opposite. They are static and stable, and social crises, for the most part, exist only latently, though they run much deeper. Society is not sharply polarized on the level of actual political power, but, as we have seen, the fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person. In this situation, no attempt at revolt could ever hope to set up even a minimum of resonance in the rest of society, because that society,

is superific, submerged in a consumer rat race and wholly involved in the post-Fetilitarian system, that is, participating in it and acting as agents of its automatism, and it would simply find anything like revolts unacceptable. It would interrupt the revolts as an attack upon itself, and rather than supporting the revolt, it would very probably react by intensifying its bias toward the system, since, in its view, the system can at least guarantee a certain quasi-legality. Add to this the fact that the post-Satilitarian system has at its disposal a complex mechanism of direct and indirect surveillance that has no equal in history, and it is clear that not only would any attempt to revolt come to a dead-end politically, but it would also be almost technically

impossible to carry off. Remember how I mentioned earlier, how, you know, all you have to do is enforce the laws that are on the books. Yeah, I mean, when you, he's here talking about a, you know, a direct surveillance kind of thing. I mean, that's why this whole flock camera thing and people are like, oh, well, because my guy is in office, because my guy is president, we need to build this system because it'll help to stop crime. I literally see videos every day on the internet of like a hundred people like mobs going into stores and ransacking the stores and I can see everyone's faces. Okay, so how we already have that. And I'm all for flock cameras if you're going to make it completely illegal and criminal for the enemies of good, of decency.

and order, if you're going to make it illegal for them to even be able to exist in this society, so that they never get a chance to have control of those flock cameras. But then again, if that happened, we wouldn't need the flock cameras, would we? I mean, I don't get this whole thing about how, well, Trump can use them to, for what? what are you you how are you using them that you're telling me the things that are already in place or inadequate how is this going to help what was the what i mean i think they've only been able to point to one incidents where a flock camera even helped find someone like find like a missing kit i'm glad that kid is safe i mean you're literally building your panopticon and

if you're not going to destroy your enemy. The only reason to increase the power of the state is if you're going to use it to destroy your enemy. And that's just Machiavellian politics. Left or right. But who do you think will use mass surveillance beyond what we already have to destroy their enemy? Do you think it's going to be repatriated? Republicans, or do you think it's going to be Democrats? And if you believe it's one gigantic, one-party system, then you know that if Republicans aren't going to use it and Democrats are, Republicans are going to do nothing to stop them. The only way you increase your power, the power of the state, is if you don't plan on giving that power up, end of the story. I will not hear.

any other arguments. Anything else is foolish and emotional, or at worst, you're being paid to do that, to push that line. Most probably it would be liquidated before it had a chance to translate its intentions into action. Even if revolt were possible, however, it would remain the solitary gesture of a few isolated individuals, and they would be opposed not only by a gigantic apparatus of national and supernatural power, but also by the very society in whose name they were mounting their revolt in the first place. This, by the way, is another reason why the regime and its propaganda have been ascribing terrorists to amassed to the dissident movements and accusing them of illegal and conspiratorial methods. Because most people are fucking retards. Most people just go

along to get along. Most people are never going to take the sign out of the window. most people are never going to say world war we should have never fought the war in in europe in war two what are they going to do they're just going to be like yeah that's that's the guy over there that took down the flock camera that's the guy over that's the guy over there who um who put out those flyers that's your neighbors why they know you and it's better for them to disassociate themselves from you now, then you get caught, and then they start asking them questions about what you were doing and if they knew what you were doing, and then they get in trouble. And let's face it, most people are just cowards. All of this, however, is not the main reason

why the dissonant movement support the principle of legality. The reason lies deeper in the innermost structure of the dissident attitude. This attitude is and must be fundamentally hostile toward the notion of violent change, simply because it places its faith in violence. Generally, the dissident attitude can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence, and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence. Let us recall, for example, that the blindness of European pacifism was one of the factors that prepared the ground for Second World War. Sure, that's what it was. It wasn't the fucking, it was. It It was in Bolshevism, basically trying to take over all of Europe and murder anyone that, like, ever did the sign of the cross.

Sure, that's what it was, Vaclav. Let's remember that you're an artist. And a normie? I don't know. As I have already mentioned, dissidents tend to be skeptical about political thought based on the faith that profound social changes can only be achieved by bringing out regardless of the method. Changes in the system or in the government and the belief that such changes, because they are considered fundamental, justify the sacrifice of less fundamental things. In other words, human lives. Respect for a theoretical concept here outweighs respect for human life.

yet this is precisely what threatens to enslave humanity all over again. Dissident movements, as I have tried to indicate, share exactly the opposite view. They understand systematic change of something superficial, something secondary, something that in itself can guarantee nothing. Thus, an attitude that turns away from abstract political visions of the future toward concrete human beings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and now is quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to all forms of violence carried out in the name of a better future, and by a profound belief that a future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists now.

In other words, the future would be fatally stigmatized by the very means used to secure it. I can't agree with him here. I mean, there's just... maybe in the system that he's talking about, but he just, he has, he's already proven that he has World War II brain. So, yeah, I, that's just something that you hear post-war consensus enjoyers say. No, I mean, even someone like Paul Gottfried clearly says the only way that this regime gets destroyed. is through right-winged totalitarianism.

That's it. Because right now it's, I mean, and he's using right-winged totalitarianism, knowing what that really right and left are not even applicable anymore, but for shorthand's sake, is these people who are absolutely insane, the people who've controlled the regime for 100 years, and the people who are still post-war consensus enjoyers. They need to be destroyed. I mean, it's just, it's, it's existential.

That's what the people who don't understand, like Operation Barbarossa, they don't understand that it's an existential problem. It was an existential crisis. Notice that when Hitler went west into France, to it. Were they just dropping bodies and burning? I mean, no. Why?

Because they were European. Because they understood that Europe was going to have to stand united against this threat. When they went east, well, that's where the enemy is. And you do what you have to do. I mean, he probably saved, you know, what it. What was Western Europe and Eastern Europe, I mean, genuinely Europe would have been overrun by Bolshevism if it wasn't for Adolf Hill or if it wasn't for the Spanish win in the Spanish Civil War. I think it's an arguable once you look at it. When you look at it, minus emotion, minus the myth, minus even morality.

There was an existential crisis. Europe was going to die. And in many ways, it did anyway, because the quote-unquote standard bearers of the West at that point, which would have been the United States, sided with the barbarians. At the same time, this attitude is not to be mistaken for political conservatism or political moderation.

The dissident movements 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. For them, the problem lies far too deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological. Some people, faithful to the classical Marxist doctrines of the 19th century, understand our system as the hegemony of an exploited class over an exploited class, and operating from the postulate that exploiters never surrender their power voluntarily, they see the only solution in a revolution to sweep away the exploiters. Yeah.

Naturally, they regard such things as a struggle for human rights as something hopelessly legalistic, illusory, opportunistic, and ultimately misleading because it makes a doubtful assumption that you can negotiate in good faith with your exploiters on the basis of a false legality. Good assumption. The problem is, is that they are. unable to find anyone determined enough to carry out this revolution with the result that they become bitter, skeptical, passive, and ultimately apathetic. In other words, they end up precisely where the system wants them to be. This is one example of how far one can be misled by mechanically

applying in post-totelitarian circumstances ideological models from another world and another time. whatever the future is going to be it may have echoes of the past but it's not going to be the past when I mean this was a phrase it was really popular a few years ago but the only way out is through

we're not going back there is not going to be a perfect there is not going to be a based world if you're a Christian you know why, because men are fallen. Of course, one not need be an advocate of violent revolution to ask whether an appeal to legality makes any sense at all when the laws, and particularly the general laws concerning human rights,

are no more than a facade, an aspect of the world of appearances, a mere game behind which lies total manipulation. Quote, they can ratify anything because they will still go ahead and do whatever they want anyway. End quote. an opinion we offer an encounter. It is not true that constantly to take them at their word to appeal to laws every child knows or binding only as long as the government wishes is in the end just a kind of hypocrisy, an obstructionism, and finally, just another way of playing the game,

another form of self-delusion. In other words, is the legalistic approach at all compatible with the principle of living within the truth? There is your there is your question. Apply it to today. In other words, is the legalistic approach, is appealing to this regime, or even trying to use the structure of it at all compatible with the principle of living within the truth? To me, that's the greatest question that I've asked myself, and I've asked people close to me that I trust. And that's a question that needs to be answered, I think, before. Before we can do the only way out is through thing.

This question can only be answered by first looking at the wider implications of how the legal code functions in the post-hotalitarian system. Let's see how it compares to today. In a classical dictatorship, to a far greater extent that in the post-totelitarian system, the will of the ruler is carried out directly in an unregulated fashion. A dictatorship has no reason to hide its foundations nor to conceal the real workings of power, and therefore it need not encumber itself to any great extent with a legal code. The post-totelitarian system, on the other hand, is utterly obsessed with the need to bind everything in a single order.

Life in such a state is thoroughly permeated by a dense network of regulations, proclamations, directives, norms, orders, and rules. Well, I'm starting to answer the question. It is not called the bureaucratic system without good reason. A large proportion of those norms function as direct instruments of the complex manipulation of life that is intrinsic to the post-totelitarian system. Manipulation of life. What other term do I think? Oh, social engineering. Individuals are reduced to little more than tiny cogs in an enormous mechanism, and their significance is limited to their function in this mechanism.

Their job, housing accommodation, movements, social and cultural expressions, everything, in short, must be cosseted together as firmly as possible, predetermined, regulated, and controlled. Every aberration from the prescribed course of life is treated as error, license, and anarchy. From the cook in the restaurant who, without hard to get permission from the bureaucratic apparatus, cannot cook something special for his customers, to the singer who cannot perform his new song at a concert without bureaucratic approvals, everyone in all aspects of their life is caught in this regulatory tangle of red tape, the inevitable product of the post-sotelitarian system. With ever increasing consistency, it binds all the expressions and aims of life to the spirit of its own aims, the vested interests of its own smooth, automatic operation.

In a narrower sense, the legal code serves the post-totelitarian system in this direct way as well. That is, it too forms a part of the world of regulations and prohibitions. At the same time, however, it performs the same service in another indirect way, one that brings it remarkably closer, depending on which level the law is involved, to ideology, and in some cases makes it a direct component of that ideology. Like ideology, the legal code functions as an excuse. It wraps the base exercise of power in the noble apparent. of the letter of the law.

It creates a pleasing illusion that justice is done, society protected, and the exercise of power objectively regulated. Have you ever thought about the fact that the rule of law is just another myth? I mean, it's a legal code. They can be changed. It's not gospel. It's not truth. If something is ever changing, it's not Logos.

All this is done to conceal the real essence of post-totelitarian legal practice, the total manipulation of society. If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about. The hidden political manipulation of the courts and of public prosecutors, The limitations placed on lawyers' lawyers' abilities to defend their client. The closed nature, de facto of trials,

the arbitrary actions of the security forces, their position of authority over the judiciary, the absurdly broad application of several deliberately vague sections of that code, and of course the state's utter disregard for the positive sections of that code, the right to the citizens. All of this would remain hidden from our outside observer. The only thing he would take away would be the impression that our legal code is not much worse than the legal code of other civilized nations and not much different either, except perhaps for certain curiosities such as the entrenchment and the constitution of a single political party's eternal rule and the state's love for a neighboring superpower.

Wow. Just wow. So if anybody looked at ours or just looked over our, I mean, all they have to do is look at the way we operate. I mean, it's much more out there. It's on TV. It's can be seen everywhere. You have two political parties instead of one. But when it comes to really, really important stuff like war and, oh, the states love

for a neighboring superpower. Well, not a neighboring superpower. But doesn't neighboring superpower make more sense than a country that's 6,000 miles away? And they basically are a shithole. They're basically a shithole where Christians get spit on. They use human beings as target practice. they celebrate the fact that one of their cities is the gayest city in the world. I mean, you could almost understand, or you could understand,

if you had a neighboring state that was a superpower that, and you weren't as powerful, that you'd want to be aligned with it or even, you know, align yourself with it strongly. but something that's halfway around the world and doesn't do anything for you and is like the girlfriend that like when you go out she starts fights with dudes

knowing that she's not going to be able to win you're going to have to jump in that you're going to have to fight her fights for her. Wow. But that is not all. If our observer had the opportunity to study the formal side of the policing and judicial procedures and practices, how they look on paper, he would discover that for the most part, the common rules of criminal procedure are observed. Charges are laid within the prescribed period following arrest, and it is the same with detention orders. indictments are properly delivered. The accused as a lawyer and so on.

In other words, everyone has an excuse. They have all observed the law. In reality, however, they have cruelly and pointlessly ruined a young person's life, perhaps for no other reason than because he made Samistock copies of a novel written by a banned writer, or because the police deliberately falsified their testimony, as everyone knows, from the judge on down to the defendant. Or he said something online.

about a group that is that beloved group up there that we talked about. Yeah. Or if you were trying to get a state contract and they said, well, have you ever protested Israel? And you're like, yeah, fuck those guys. And they're like, you can't have a state contract. Why, I'm the most qualified. but I'm also charging you less than everyone else.

Still, that's not important. What's important is your attitude about Israel. Yet all of this somehow remains in the background. The falsified testimony is not necessarily obvious from the trial documents in the section of the criminal code dealing with incitement does not formally exclude the application of that charge to the copying of a banned novel. In other words, a legal code, at least in several areas,

is no more than a facade, an aspect of the world of appearances. Then why is it there at all? For exactly the same reason as ideology is there. It provides a bridge of excuses between the system and individuals, make it easier for them to enter the power structure and serve the arbitrary demands of power. The excuse lets individuals fool themselves into thinking they are merely upholding the law and protecting society from criminals.

Without this excuse, how much more difficult it would be to recruit new generations of judges and prosecutors and interrogators. As an aspect of the world of appearances, however, the legal code deceives not only the conscience of prosecutors, it deceives the public, it deceives foreign observers, and it even deceives history itself. How can you live historically when it's completely distorted? Like ideology of the legal code and its essential instrument of ritual, communication outside the power structure. It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power, a form, a framework, a set of rules. It is a legal code that enables all components of the system to communicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish their own legitimacy. It provides their whole game with its rules and engineers with their technology. Can the exercise of post-totelitarian

power be imagined at all without this universal ritual, making it all possible, serving it? as a common language to bind the relevant sectors of the power structure together? The more important the position occupied by the repressive apparatus in the power structure, the more important that it function according to some kind of formal code. How, otherwise, could people be so easily and inconspicuously locked up for copying banned books if there were no judges, prosecutors, interrogators, defense lawyers, court stenographers, and thick files, and if all this were not held together by some form of order. some firm order.

And above all, without that innocent-looking section rule on incitement. This could all be done, of course, without a legal code and its accessories, but only in some ephemeral dictatorship run by a Ugandan bandit, not in a system that embraces such a huge portion of civilized humankind and represents an integral, stable, and respected part of the modern world. That would not only be unthinkable, it would quite, it would quite simply be technically impossible. Without the legal code functioning as a ritually cohesive force, the post-sotelitarian system does not exist. The legal code is no different than the post-war consensus, than the post-war myth. It's all there to have the appearance of, in our case, I guess it would be,

fairness, even though we all know it's that depending on how much wealth you have, you're standing in the world. And, you know, if you can appeal to, hey, you shouldn't have taken this to court, we should have taken this to the rabbis. Yeah. It's all faking gay to bring something back from a couple years ago, again. The entire role of ritual facades and excuses appears most eloquently, of course, not in the prescriptive section. in the legal code, which sets out what a citizen may not do and what the grounds for prosecution are, but in the section declaring what he may do and what his or her rights are. Here, there is truly nothing but words, words, words. Yet even that part of the code is of immense importance

to the system, for it is here that the system embellishes its legitimacy as a whole before its own citizens, before schoolchildren, before the international public and before history. The system cannot afford to disregard this because it cannot permit itself to cast doubt upon the fundamental postulates of its ideology, which are so essential to its very existence. We have already seen how the power structure is enslaved by its own ideology and its ideological prestige. To do this would be to deny everything it tries to present itself as, and thus one of the main pillars on which the system rests, would be underwent. mind, the integrity of the world of appearances. What's interesting is that you, you know, basically the world of appearances in the case of Czechoslovakia would have been, they would have paid lip service to how they look to the outside world. We actually care more about how

fellow Americans accept the lies. That's what the people in charge do. The ones who structured this system care more about how we view the lies that they're telling us. We don't care what anybody thinks outside. If the exercise of power circulates through the whole power structure as blood flows through veins, then the legal code can be understood as something that reinforces the walls of those veins. Without it, the blood of power could not circulate in an organized way, and the body of society would hemorrhage at random. Order would collapse. A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws, not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws, does not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything

other than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays, but precisely because they know how desperately the system depends on it, on the noble version of the law, that is. They also know how enormously significant such appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such appeals. Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law

clear to society and to those who inhabit its power structures. I mean, I guess that's the one really good thing about living under, like, a totalitarian system. Or a system that was designed to be a totalitarian system is that it's so much easier to recognize. Where here, it's a free country, bro. They draw attention to its real material substance, and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law to affirm and make credible this agency of excuses. This means a communication, this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so for the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power as part of the system's own mechanism of self-preservation and its principle of cohesion,

or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling the ritual. They have no other choice because they cannot disregard the rules of their own game. They can only attend more carefully to those rules, not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communication system. To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they have no validity, and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the ritual. It would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enabling those who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest and therefore the most mendacious form of their excuse. I'd take a sip already. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors, or judges. If they were dealing with an inexperienced chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention,

as individuals with a name no longer protected by the anonymity of apparatus, suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the ritual. This is not alter the fact that a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but the very existence of the official's anxiety necessarily regulates limits and slows down the operation of that despotism. I think you could probably see that and you could get local and state apparatus, here to break and to basically get your way. But there's, try that in Washington, D.C.

This, of course, is not enough. But an essential part of the dissent and attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the human here and now. It places more importance on often repeated and consistent concrete action, even though it may be inadequate, and though it may ease only insignificantly the subject, suffering of a single insignificant citizen than it does in some abstract fundamental solution in an uncertain future. In any case, is not this, in fact, just another form of small-scale

work in the Maserican sense, with which the dissent an attitude seemed at first to be in such sharp contradiction? This section would be incomplete without stressing certain internal limitations to the policy of taking them at their own word. The point is this. Even in the most ideal of cases, the law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a service and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. I'm going to repeat that. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a service. It's to render a service and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. Understanding that the law

does not, enforcing the law does not bring about order. It only starts you down that path. It's probably something that most people just can't get. You don't have order because you have more laws than anyone else and you're enforcing them. And laws should be enforced. The fact of the matter is, the moral laws you have, the less order you have. If you have to start writing laws and you have a constitution, then you don't have a constitution. The constitution reflects the constitution of the people. And that people should only want that constitution written on paper so that they can look and see themselves reflected in it. not that it would be an enforcement mechanism.

If it's an enforcement mechanism, you went wrong somewhere. This is what should be written. That should be written on the hearts of the people, not because people's hearts are wicked and you need to restrain them. Sure, people's hearts are wicked and they do need to be restrained. That's not what that paper is for, and that's not the best way to do it. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions. It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected, but in which it is impossible to live.

Conversely, one can imagine life being quite bearable, even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always the quality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or repress it, not merely, merely whether they are upheld or not. Often strict observance of the law could have a disastrous impact on human dignity. The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life does not lie either in the Constitution or in the Criminal Code. These merely establish what may or may not be done, and thus they may make life easier or more difficult. They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate, or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning. The struggle for what is called legality must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is.

Without keeping one's eyes open to the real dimension of life's beauty and misery and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics. Without really wanting to, one would thus become more and more like the observant. who comes to conclusions about our system only on the basis of trial documents and is satisfied if all the appropriate regulations have been observed. All right, that is, I think that's the longest part in the book, in this paper. I'll call it a paper. But that is a very long, very coherent section and it's one that really needs to be thinking of be thought about going into the future so that's it my second reading today my voice is starting to go yeah that's it

be back with Thomas in a couple days something else planned I can't remember what it is Oh, yeah, oh, I got a good one. Someone who's never been on the show before. That'll be fun. I've got a couple things coming up. And, of course, we've got to finish this one out and see when that can, this can be done because I have a new reading that I want to start. And I actually got permission from the author to do it, which is awesome.

So that's it. And I'll be back in a few days with another episode. Take care, everyone.