Summerbook #21: The Power of the Powerless

 The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel

This is one of those very famous books you always mean to read, and so I thought I'd give it a try this summer.  It's short and dense, just 21 chapters long, and published in 1978.  The edition I read has a very helpful introduction from Timothy Snyder, and so here's some information I cribbed from that: Ten years after the Prague Spring, nobody was particularly pro-communist anymore, but Havel was worried about how everyone just...adapted and resigned themselves to the status quo.  He wrote this book asking what ordinary people could do to make change wherever they were; he considered that he was critiquing the West too.

Essentially, Havel asks, do we just go along, playing the game (whatever it may be), or do we try to live in truth?  By 'live in truth,' he doesn't mean to take up another Big Philosophy and live by it, or foment yet another revolution; he means to make decisions according to a personal sense of what is right and what matters.  I suppose Solzhenitsyn's 'live not by lies' has something in common there.  By living in truth, you don't know who may be influenced or touched, or whether anyone will be, but it's the most likely way to send ripples out into the world.

Two people are his examples: the (archetypal) grocer and the (real acquaintance) brewery worker.  The grocer puts a placard in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!"  In 1978 Czechoslovakia, nobody is going to take this as an impassioned declaration of belief, so what does it mean?  Does it mean 'I'm playing ball, don't report me'?  Does it mean 'they sent this to me so I have to put it in the window'?  How could the grocer live in truth?  Well, he could point out that we all know this poster is a lie...  

The brewery worker, a real person, was just an ordinary guy, but he really cared about brewing good beer -- possibly he was the only person at the brewery who did.  He thought of ways the beer could be improved and put them to the management, who didn't care to hear about it.  They could have used his ideas, but didn't bother.  Eventually he took his ideas to the top, was labeled a trouble-maker, and lost his job.  Nobody wanted to make decent beer.  But in his way, he lived in truth; he couldn't stand to just spend his life making awful beer.

Havel is standing up for human dignity and moral integrity, and not just going along to get along.  The closest he gets to advocating for a new kind of government is to imagine that people could one day live in self-discipline rather than under a yoke, and he knows that's a flight of fancy.  He just wants to ask what the ordinary person can do, and the answer is to refuse to live in lies, but to live in truth as far as possible.

Interesting, dense, a good one for your list.