I read Javier's The Power of the Powerless

*The original text was originally published on Medium: Echoes of Water .

"Miss Xu, you have to wait at home if you have an order. Your book is sent from Hong Kong, and the postage is relatively expensive." After signing the name, the postman handed me the small kraft paper bag. This small book in traditional Chinese finally reached my hands across the sea.

The Power of the powerless was written about thirty years ago. The author Javier was originally a Czech playwright who drafted the "Charter 77" movement. After the democratic transition, he became the democratically elected president. After leaving office, he also visited Taiwan. In Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian was in power.

Recently, the Czech Republic sent Taiwan a vaccine. For many years, Czech literature has also been popular in Taiwan. However, this book is temporarily unavailable in Taiwan, and the old editions are all out of print. It was republished by Hong Kong Hummingbird Publishing House this year.

Looking at it from the beginning, the first sentence of the first chapter smiled when I saw it:

A specter is lingering in Eastern Europe, and that is what the West calls "dissent".

It is not difficult to imagine that he wrote more than 20,000 words as a declaration of political action. A special appendix at the end of the book, a biographical excerpt from the "Director of Javier's Library", also mentions that Javier could not have been unaware that this was a mockery of the Communist Manifesto.

Czech Republic under the Soviet regime. Havel called it a "post-totalitarian regime" at the time. Like many works of social science (or political philosophy, whatever) scholars, in order to explain that the Czech situation at that time was different from the classical dictatorship, Havel must have a correct understanding of social contradictions and the nature of the regime (but he has been mocking the word) to highlight how unique, valid, and fundamental his claim to "upright sincerity" is, and despite knowing or naming issues, he reluctantly uses the term "post-totalitarian" to set the tone.

Here, I will not review the discussion of the term "post-totalitarian" in various disciplines, and simply simplify the abstract based on Havel's own definition: (p.27–28)

1. Our system is no longer confined to one place, but runs amok in a vast power bloc controlled by one of the two superpowers. The nuclear balance of power in the world gives the system a surface stability never seen before by classical dictatorships.
2. Classical dictatorships lacked historical foundations, and rather by chance, we have a "correct understanding" of the historical foundations of the nineteenth-century proletariat and socialist movements.
3. "Right knowledge" has become a "secular religion" that provides ready-made answers to any question. The ideology of people feeling rootless, lost, and unable to grasp the meaning of the world has an intoxicating charm.
4. Traditional dictatorships have improvisational elements, but ours has been established for over sixty years in the Soviet Union and nearly three decades in Eastern Europe. It established a comprehensive and complex mechanism for direct and indirect manipulation of the entire population.
5. The classical dictatorship still has a bit of revolutionary excitement and heroism. The Soviet bloc is no longer isolated from other developing worlds. The values of developed Western countries also exist in our society. Without knowing this, it is impossible to understand the nature of power in our system.

The following chapters are more familiar stories:

The owner of the fruit and vegetable store hangs the slogan "Working class all over the world, unite!" in the window, but it doesn't matter what the slogan is, what matters is that he hangs it up. This is the regime's use of "ideology" to bridge the relationship between the people and the regime. Because ideology provides people with an illusion of identity, dignity, and morality, enabling us to deceive the world, deceive ourselves, and hoard our own conscience. If the owner of a fruit and vegetable store is trying to live a life of "honesty and sincerity," it may not necessarily be refusing to hang up the slogan, but maybe it's just a cover-up. In short, being aware of the illusion of living in a lie, and thus able to implement it with self-determination in present, present personal practice, this "living in the truth" is the most important proposition of his book.

Upright and sincere, it will later be derived into "hidden space", linked to the band attack before the Czech Charter 77 Movement; and then drawn into concepts such as "independent social life" and "parallel state", which is a post-totalitarian system Leave a room for hope.

The concept of "honesty and sincerity" is developed from the behavior of a vegetable and fruit store owner, and is developed in various chapters of the book by imagining his situation, thinking and actions, replacing the rigid and measurable operational definitions of academic language.

As for "ideology", of course at that time, it must have clearly pointed to the communist ideology of the Soviet regime, and he has a vivid description:

As a bridge of excuses between institutions and individuals, ideology bridges the gap between institutional goals and life goals. It pretends that the needs of institutions are derived from the needs of life. It's a world that pretends to be the real world.

At the same time, he has passionate accusations that the post-totalitarian system "wears the gloves of ideology":

This is why life in the system is always permeated with hypocrisy and lies: the government ruled by the bureaucracy is called the people's government, the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class, the depravity of man is said to be the ultimate liberation of man, the concealment of the truth is called Let the truth come out, manipulating power to crush the people is called power in the hands of the people, excessive abuse of power is called investigation according to law, suppressing cultural development is called letting a hundred flowers bloom, expanding the sphere of influence is called supporting the oppressed people, and no freedom of speech becomes the highest priority of freedom. Form, farce elections have become the highest stage of democracy, stifling independent thinking has become the most scientific worldview, and military occupation has become the aid of brothers and friends.

Looking at this passage alone, I almost think it is a mockery and criticism of the contemporary post-21st century democracy.

In fact, this book is not without this attempt, even thirty years ago.

Before that, let me say that in the following chapters, he also discusses two explanations in the spirit of science: one is a place that allows forces other than the regime to supervise ideology (we may call it "democracy"). ), where the morality of "honesty and sincerity" may not be as political as it is in a post-totalitarian system; the other is law, which he named the Charter of Human Rights, the International Declaration of Human Rights, and The Helsinki Accords, at the same time, simply asked, "In a place full of abuse of power and law, is it really necessary to accept the principle of the rule of law so widely and voluntarily?"

As he also has a set of critiques of the legal norm itself, this can then lead back to his derivative attempts at any government or bureaucracy other than post-totalitarian regimes. I think (to me, a person who has worked in a government unit, who has read a lot of positive and negative lists of provisions) the most intriguing is this passage:

Of course, it is not the provisions in the law that expressly prohibit citizens from doing things and what they will be charged with if they violate them. Instead, it shows what people can do and what they can do. The chapter on rights, etc., will be fully revealed.

. . . Even in the best of circumstances, the law is nothing more than an imperfect and more or less roundabout way of preventing life from going from good to bad.

Although the book is at the forefront, the scope of the solution has been clearly defined as "post-totalitarian", but the criticisms in the book sometimes point to the broader modern state system, norms, and the logic of ideological mobilization of people. There is another paragraph in it. He said that another feature of the post-totalitarian system that is different from the classical dictatorship is that whether it is an uncle who sells vegetables or a high-ranking prime minister, they are all involved in this society of lies driven and created by the system. , but to a different degree. The explanation here is that there is quite a kind of "social" collectivity that is present in either democracy or dictatorship.

However, his real main point is from the individual, the present:

People are forced to live a lie, but they are forced because they can actually live that way. Therefore, it cannot simply be said that the system alienates human nature; on the contrary, it is the alienated human nature that supports the system as a great cause to which one can involuntarily devote himself. It became a portrait of the depravity of human nature, a testimony that people could not be true to themselves.

The so-called honesty and sincerity, or self-selection, live in a kind of truth:

Humans can be alienated only because among humans, there are indeed some things that can be alienated.

The second half of the book specifically deals with the context of the "opposition" and criticizes those who were directly engaged in political work at that time. He believes that those people "do not know enough" about the social and political reality of the post-totalitarian system and fail to see things "prior to politics". Politically, it is not seen that they are the soil in which a real political transformation is brewing. Here is a powerful comment:

The farther away one is from the politics of the concrete "now" and the more one focuses on the abstract "one day in the future," the easier it is to degenerate into new forms of slavery. People living in a post-totalitarian system already know all too well that whether they can live as one person is far more important than one party or multiple parties, how parties define themselves and what name they give themselves.

And to elaborate more on what a "dissident" is, and to have a stronger independent social life, and more generally, "Sometimes we must go into the abyss of suffering to understand the truth, just as we must run to the bottom of the well in broad daylight. You have to go to see the starlight." And very lightly brought to the organization activities, or even the answer of "what to do". (Although he himself said that the "post-democracy" chapter he invented should be deleted. If you read through his concerns, such issues are very secondary.)

Moreover, this new climate and new essence can only be “practiced” and cannot be expressed rashly.

When we read it, we don’t consciously take a seat at the modern democratic system. In fact, it is actually Havel’s intention to expand his inferences to more parts than the post-totalitarian system. He cited Heidegger’s overall crisis of modern technological society, bringing in metaphysical things, and Made the following claims:

The post-totalitarian system is just one aspect of the inability of modern humans to control their own destiny, perhaps a more intense aspect that reveals its true roots. The automatic mechanism of post-totalitarianism is nothing but an extreme manifestation of the automatic mechanism of global technological civilization. The failure it reflects is just one of the common failures of modern people.

I think at this moment, thirty years later, such a reminder is almost self-evident.

In the end, he returned to the context of the book. The moment he wrote was when he experienced the Prague Spring movement, and he had just launched the Charter 77 movement in which his allies were questioned to death, but he had not yet ushered in the victory of democratization. More than a decade later, the Velvet Revolution followed, and he was elected president.

The moment of writing is indeed a dark place at the bottom of the well.

At the time, the book ended like this:

The real question is whether the "bright future" is really so far away forever, or on the contrary, it is already here, and it is only because of our blindness and cowardice that we cannot see it in ourselves and around us. , and thus unable to develop it? If so, what should we do?

Living "upright and sincere" and living "with hope" are two different things in my opinion. "The Power of the Powerless" is about the first thing in content, and the second in its form.