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Václav Havel, 1936-2011
"The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth." —Václav Havel, 1978.
As a sign of respect, let's all pronounce his first name correctly.
My dear fellow citizens. For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.
Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.
The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone.
We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
New Year's Address to the Nation, 1990
Žižek wrote this very good and prescient piece about him in the LRB in 1999.
@barnhouse
Hmph. If you're Žižek and are smart and supple and Hegelian enough to stand on every ladderstep simultaneously, you can be that preciously "prescient" about anybody once their politics (or religion) turns out different than you'd have liked. Žižek doesn't so much dispute your position as make disappointed red scrawls in the margins of your Habilitationschrift and blame your existence on social forces. — But you've got to admire that bold admiration for the heroic image of people's justice in Bolshevik propaganda films!
No regrets for the death of this Reaganaut counter-revolutionary.
@23abraxas Arise and sing, comrade!
Not just a counterrevolutionary, but also one of the great anti-utopians.
"A dissident runs the risk of becoming ridiculous only when he transgresses the limits of his natural existence and enters into the hypothetical realm of real power, that is, in effect, into the realm of sheer speculation … He attempts to go on speaking the truth outside the world of truth; standing outside the world of power, he attempts to speculate about power or to organize it."