Learning from Vaclav Havel

Here's a 2008 essay by Bruce Bawer on what we can learn from Vaclav Havel. An excerpt:

In the essay, Havel imagined a man who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in Communist Czechoslovakia (runs, not owns: in Communist Europe, of course, all businesses were owned by the state). The man puts in his store window a sign bearing a Communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why, Havel asked, does he do this? The answer: he’s afraid. He wants to live “in harmony with society,” and must prove he’s obedient. Havel noted that such a man might hesitate, out of shame, to post a sign explicitly admitting his fear; but the sign bearing the Communist slogan helps him conceal his cowardice from himself by hiding it behind the façade of ideology — an ideology that offers people “the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.” Communist ideology, Havel pointed out, obliges people to “live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Moreover, while life in free societies “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization,” life under Communism “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.” People like Havel’s greengrocer, by going along with all this, become not only victims of the system’s oppression but also collaborators in it — for the sign in the window, in addition to testifying to the shopkeeper’s meek compliance, increases pressure on other merchants to put signs in their windows lest the authorities start asking why they haven’t. So it is that ordinary people, by kowtowing to the system, become its enforcers. (Thus are the subjects of Communism the equivalent of dhimmis under Islam.)