Václav Havel and the Power of the Powerless: Part 2 The Post-Totalitarian State
This is the second and concluding part of a two part analysis of Václav Havel’s seminal 1978 dissident essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ - the first part may be found here.
Understanding then, the ideas of Havel regarding the action of dissent and the processes by which individuals enter it, as well as the nature of power, we come to Havel’s contemporary relevance: the post-totalitarian system.
The post-totalitarian system, created under Soviet Russia, is dissimilar to the totalitarianism of Stalin or Hitler. Despite the Western fetish for pouring scorn the concepts of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and totalitarianism, this concept aptly describes the system within which we live today.
Many of its characteristics mimic those of contemporary Western liberalism. The state mandated correct understanding of life and the way that individuals should lead it, Havel argues to be a general trait of dictatorships though lacking the transparency of a military dictatorship, societies hijacked by political ideology whether it be the communist system of the Cold War Era, or contemporary liberalism, these ideologies weaponise this concept through a permeation unique to even the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century.
‘One legacy of that original “correct understanding” is a third peculiarity that makes our systems different from other modern dictatorships: it commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish.’
But what is this relevance of the post-totalitarian system to the modern day? In the context of communist Eastern Europe, the raison d’être of the state, the communist revolution, provided the people with justification for the dictatorship, as Havel writes “if an atmosphere of revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence on all sides characterizes classical dictatorships, then the last traces of such an atmosphere have vanished from the Soviet bloc. For, some time now this bloc has ceased to be a kind of enclave, isolated from the rest of the developed world and immune to processes occurring in it.”
Comparison of the totalising powers of Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union, modern Europe faces a similar dilemma contra the Western liberal nexus of Washington D.C., however with a curious alteration – the ruling elite though nominally their power may originate in the United States, is decentralised throughout the Western Bloc such that those organs of power centred in the United States engage to some degree in a power-sharing arrangement with those in Brussels, London, and Berlin.
This power-sharing arrangement is merely a form of parasitism by which Washington keeps the world in its orbit, and would better be described in medieval terms as a vassal-ship or in some cases, serfdom. International aspect of the communist bloc – not really a normal dictatorship via military or political rule – still a part of the international community in a weird, factionalised form. Yet it is system without concrete form – flexible and malleable as its core essence seeks new different ways of exercising power.
“Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social levelling. I am afraid that the term “dictatorship, regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. We usually associate the term with the notion of a small group of people who take over the government of a given country by force; their power is wielded openly, using the direct instruments of power at their disposal, and they are easily distinguished socially from the majority over whom they rule. One of the essential aspects of this traditional or classical notion of dictatorship is the assumption that it is temporary, ephemeral, lacking historical roots. Its existence seems to be bound up with the lives of those who established it. It is usually local in extent and significance, and regardless of the ideology it utilizes to grant itself legitimacy, its power derives ultimately from the numbers and the armed might of its soldiers and police. The principal threat to its existence is felt to be the possibility that someone better equipped in this sense might appear and overthrow it.”
For modern Europe, fooled by a pervasive liberal ethos and weakened by successive self-deceptions in the realms of economic, political, and social policies, Havel’s analysis of the communist system is pertinent to contemporary European issues with respect to the liberal choke hold over Europe.
The post-totalitarian system demanding conformity and suppressing all the independent self-constitution, drive, and motivation of a people – subjugated to the will of the state under which human life is considered another component of a broader historical-political machine.
“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 of the post-totalitarian system 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?”
If living within the truth in the post-totalitarian system becomes the chief breeding ground for independent, alternative political ideas, then all considerations about the nature and future prospects of these ideas must necessarily reflect this moral dimension as a political phenomenon. The insertion of an ideological character was one of the Soviet Union’s chief instruments of control in Eastern Europe, and today it remains much the same vis-à-vis the United States and Europe. Through providing the illusory image of a functioning economy, social progress, and ostensible political change, the liberal system is able to provide its captives with a veneer of tangible political change, while leaving untouched the root issues within the system.
“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something supra-personal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward 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.”
Ideology is that which bridges the excuses of the system and the mind of the individual – condoning failure under an ideological remit that turns a state policy failure into a collective societal fault, which only the state may fix. With ideology being the guarantee of continuity within the system, all threats to it – external and internal – are treated with extreme concern. The permeation of liberal paraphernalia across the public and private sectors is an indication of the strength held by propaganda outlets in maintaining this power on a public level. Havel’s greengrocer’s sign merely added to the panorama of the post-totalitarian system and the aesthetic domination of society with symbology which obliges them to belief, and therefore responsibility for the state. The NGO-complex in Ireland and Europe contribute substantially to this phenomenon, being consequences of the system’s public facing persona. Unique though to contemporary liberalism and its relation to Havel’s theory is the cult of the individual; an idea which Havel argues as central to his thesis on political dissent and political change, but is now a major talking-point of the current Western liberal system.
“Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favour 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 and ensnared by it, like Faust with Mephistopheles.”
Europe today is experiencing what may be considered the first breakthrough, similar enough to the growth of resistance movements under the Soviet Bloc, with the convenient benefit of operating political organisations in societies constitutionally obliged to maintain open political discourse. The strategic use of social media and modern political campaigning strategies which capitalise on the grievances of citizens such that they may enter into a dissident group have provided a point of departure from this system, as the people no longer engage in the established system, they no longer feel responsible for it and its failures, thereby opening the window for opposition, and real political change.
“For the real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”