The Power of the Powerless [Volume: 2(1983), pp. 3-22]

18
Vaclav HAVEL
VIII
A person can be alienated from himself only because there is something in him to alienate. The terrain of this violation is his authentic existence.
Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is
the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any
sense: it exists because of that background. In its apologetical, chimerical
rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the
human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies,
therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its
hidden openness to truth.
The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within
the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally,
invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this
sphere that life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it
speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for
communication exists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the
perspective of power, very dangerous. The complex ferment that takes place
within it goes on in semidarkness, and by the time it finally surfaces into the
light of day as an assortment of shocking surprises to the system, it is usually
too late to cover them up in the usual fashion. Thus they create a situation
in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it
to react in inappropriate ways.
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
posttotalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between
these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously
take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a
classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the
level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various
instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human
consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of
this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers,
because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the
hidden aims of life, in man's repressed longing for dignity and fundamental
rights, for the realization of his real social and political interests. Its power,
therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable political or social
groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that
society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on
the soldiers of the enemy as it were -that is to say, on everyone who is living
within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least)
by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their