"Living Within the Truth"

Vaclav Havel's "Green Grocer"

I recently finished reading Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc., and highly recommend it for a number of reasons:

But one passage in particular struck me as we enter a year with much potential darkness and uncertainty, wondering what we can each do about it.

It was her description of the power of “symbolic acts” for truth and democracy. And her summary of an essay by Czech playwright and philosopher (and later president) Vaclav Havel, “The Power and the Powerless.” (You can find it here).

The Green Grocer’s Sign

To quote Applebaum: “Havel asked his readers to imagine a greengrocer, an ordinary citizen in what was then communist Czechoslovakia, [who] ‘places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: ‘Workers of the the world, unite"!” But the catch is that the grocer doesn’t really believe in the sign, or the slogan. “[H]e has placed the sign in the window to demonstrate his symbolic loyalty to regime, knowing that if he does not do so, there could be trouble….He does it, Havel writes, ‘because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.’”

The grocer also does it because it helps him “conceal his obedience to the state from himself. He can hide his low motives—his desire to get on in life—beneath a higher motive: the ‘unity of the workers of the world.’”

Havel explains that it is the combined acts of everyday people, such as this grocer, that are the core of an autocratic system: “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-totalitarian 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 in 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 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 posttotalitarian system makes everyone an instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality of society.

Everyone, however, is in fact involved and enslaved, not only the greengrocers but also the prime ministers. Differing positions in the hierarchy merely establish differing degrees of involvement: the greengrocer 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.”

“Living Within the Truth”

Now, Applebaum summarizes, what happens when “someone walks into this imaginary shop wearing a [Solidarity] badge (in Warsaw in 1980) or an Otpor T-shirt (in Belgrade in 1998) or carrying a rose (in Tblisi in 2003) or wearing an orange jacket (in Kyiv in 2004-2005)”? The greengrocer “confronts people who have decided to say what they think and to advertise what they believe, despite the regime. To use Havel’s language, these are people who want to ‘live the truth.’”

Havel expanded on this phrase, and how much of a threat it is to a regime built on lies when individuals decide to “live within the truth.” And, to take it a step further, when the greengrocer himself decides to tear down his own sign and “live within the truth”:

“The greengrocer 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 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 greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

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 greengrocer 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.”

Applebaum summarizes: “Havel believed that if everyone were forced to choose, and if everybody were forced to confront propaganda with reality, then sooner or later the falsehoods promulgated by the regime would be exposed.”

Or as Havel wrote: “It seems that the primary breeding ground for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth.”

At some point, he hoped, the point is reached “where living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of living with a lie and becomes articulate in a particular way is the point at which something is born that might be called the "independent spiritual, social, and political life of society." This independent life is not separated from the rest of life ("dependent life") by some sharply defined line. Both types frequently co-exist in the same people. Nevertheless, its most important focus is marked by a relatively high degree of inner emancipation. It sails upon the vast ocean of the manipulated life like little boats, tossed by the waves but always bobbing back as visible messengers of living within the truth, articulating the suppressed aims of life….What is this independent life of society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organization. In short, it is an area in which living within the truth becomes articulate and materializes in a visible way.”

Havel ended his essay admittedly unsure if his approach would work in toppling a post-totalitarian (as he called it) Czechoslovakian state: “We do not know the way out of the marasmus of the world, and it would be an expression of unforgivable pride were we to see the little we do as a fundamental solution, or were we to present ourselves, our community, and our solutions to vital problems as the only thing worth doing.”

But he closed the essay with this: “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?”

Havel wrote this essay in 1978. He became president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, and after it dissolved, served as president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.

So yes, he was onto something.

2025

Folks, I am not suggesting we currently face what Havel and his fellow Czechs faced in 1978. We are not in the depths of the post-totalitarian state he describes.

But we do face an assault on truth by multiple aligned forces (foreign autocracies, oligarchs, and, soon, our government itself), combined with a grinding assault on foundational principles of representative democracy and the rule of law at multiple levels of government. And the clear risk is that it is about to get worse.

This can all feel overwhelming. Too big to counter.

But as Havel and Applebaum point it—and as Havel showed—we can counter it.

And it starts with each of us dedicating ourselves to “Living Within the Truth.” Using our voices and our actions and our involvement in everyday (non-political life) to uplift the truth—exposing through that commitment and clarity the falsehoods before they can take hold.

To confront “appearance….with reality.”

Doing so not only steels us, and gives us purpose. It also puts the lies in clear relief to others. And it invites others to make a similar choice—to take down their sign, or not put one up in the first place.

And there are so many ways to do this, as Havel explains:

“in its most original and broadest sense, living within the truth covers a vast territory whose outer limits are vague and diffieult to map, a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast majority of which will remain anonymous and whose political impact will probably never be felt or described any more concretely than simply as a part of a social climate or mood. Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual.”

I will use this newsletter to “Live Within the Truth” as best I can.

Day 29 — December 29, 2024

Media accounts emerged of a disturbing act of political and racial violence clearly motivated by Trumpian rhetoric. A Colorado man has been charged with following (for 40 miles) and allegedly assaulting a television reporter of Pacific Island descent. “This is Trump's America now," the man said amid the alleged incident. “[A]re you even a U.S. citizen?…I'm a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!" Once the assailant caught up to his victim, he allegedly put him in a headlock before others stepped in.

The incident follows other recent acts of right-wing violence and vigilantism, including a letter circulated in a rural Oregon community calling upon citizens to track and report people of color as suspected undocumented immigrants to be “rounded up.”

As Eric Larsen describes in “A Garden of Beasts,” this type of sporadic violence emerged amid Hitler’s rise in Germany. I summarized this earlier this month: “Early on in their stay, perhaps the most pressing issue the new Ambassador faces is the rise in sporadic violence against Jews, Jewish-Americans, and soon, Americans in general who refuse to signal their support for Hitler. The acts of violence and hate—punches, beatings, stabbings, violent mobs—creep into every day life. And local authorities do little to nothing to stop them. That onset of regular violence—random as to its timing and location, but systematic and targeted as to the perpetrators and victims—and its ultimate normalization, is a sign that something dark is overtaking German society. Suicides also increase, another ominous indicator.”