Vaclav Havel:
> In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state > of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing > their sense of what this world means, … ideology inevitably has a > certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an > immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and > suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new > meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and > loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: > the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and > responsibility, for an essential aspect of … ideology is the > consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. (II) > >
"The Power of the Powerless," Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2 where, however, the text appears to have been OCRed but not to have undergone sufficient proofreading.…
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. (III)
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Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality. (IV)
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[Ideology] is one of the pillars of [the "post-totalitarian"] system's external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie. (V)
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Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their 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 excusatory, 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. (VIII)