Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on responsibility and a "post-democratic" system (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

> [Jan] Patočka used to say that the most interesting thing about > responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that > responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, > in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and > that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether > it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel *polis*. If Western young > people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails > them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously > because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, > since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example > of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now > — but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves > of it. > >

In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one's responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it. (XVIII)

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In his June 1978 Harvard lecture, [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn describes the illusory nature of freedoms not based on personal responsibility and the chronic inability of the traditional democracies, as a result, to oppose violence and totalitarianism. In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny. (XX)

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Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the "human order," which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community — these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go. (XXI)

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As is perhaps clear from even so general an outline, the systemic consequences of an existential revolution of this type go significantly beyond the framework of classical parliamentary democracy. Having introduced the term "post-totalitarian" for the purposes of this discussion, perhaps I should refer to the notion I have just outlined — purely for the moment — as the prospects for a "post-democratic" system. (XXI)

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Does not this vision of "post-democratic" structures in some ways remind one of the "dissident" groups or some of the independent citizens' initiatives as we already know them from our own surroundings? (XXII)

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The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it? (XXII)