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8/12/2019 Great Piece by John Kay
1/2
December 20, 2011 7:54 pm
Spontaneity or slogans:
the lessons of VclavHavels greengrocer
By John Kay
Vclav Havel, the first and only president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, died last
week. The central figure of his famous dissident essay, The Power of the Powerless,
was a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: Workers of the World Unite!
Havel asked an apparently simple question: what is the purpose of this display?
The shopkeeper is not motivated by an intention to communicate his enthusiasm for
unity of the workers of the world. Nor was his superior seized by such desire. And the
leaders of the authoritarian system in which the sign is displayed know that their
power would not long survive unity of the workers of the world. In fact, it is unlikely
that anyone who sees the sign gives attention to its substantive content.
The real meaning is not conveyed by the printed words. The greengrocers intention is
to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: I am afraid and
therefore unquestioningly obedient. That is what the mourners of Kim Jong-il are
saying today. But, Havel observes, there would be much more resistance to a sign that
made such a statement explicit. Even in a totalitarian state, people seek some dignity.
We might console ourselves that this sloganising is characteristic of their totalitarian
societies, not our liberal democracies. But are we sure? Are corporate mission
statements, or motivational displays in offices and factories, really spontaneous
demonstrations of sincerely felt sentiments? Or do people say these things or hang
them on the walls with the same indifferent resignation as the greengrocer? Is there
much distinction between official exhortations to drive well, recycle conscientiously
and to celebrate diversity, and official exhortations to redouble efforts to build aworkers paradise? Would a visitor from Mars find it easy to distinguish commercial
advertisements from political slogans? Is the capitalist assertion that the client always
comes first more honest, or more informative, than the socialist proclamation of the
unity of the workers of the world?
Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of
discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not
Page 1 of 2Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Vclav Havels greengrocer - FT.com
12/21/2011http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/04d440d8-2a7e-11e1-8f04-00144feabdc0.html
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just on language but on society itself. He described the speaker who has gone some
distance towards turning himself into a machine, observing: The appropriate noises
are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were
choosing his words for himself. We often hear such speakers at business conferences
and on political platforms.
Havel also emphasised the mechanical nature of the process of effusion. Part of the
essence of the post-totalitarian system, he said, is that it draws everyone into its
sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may
surrender their human identity in favour of the system. The empty exhortation of
workers of the world unite! conceals the reality of the power structure that lies
behind it. But the vacuous rhetoric traps the speaker as well as the hearer, the leaders
as well as the led. Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are
its subjects, wrote Havel. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are
false, and self-descriptions fraudulent.
Havel in the 1970s, like Orwell in the 1940s, denounced the debasement of political
language. But the cancer spread. The private sector mastered the art of speech without
thought through management jargon. These techniques were then reimported into
politics. The interval in which Clement Attlee and Dwight Eisenhower made speeches
in the conversational language of ordinary intelligent people proved brief. Political
discourse has reverted to strings of sound bites, the process Orwell described as
gumming together long strips of words, which have already been set in order by
someone else. Vacuous slogans are today found as often on the walls of public sector
offices as in the business sector.
Orwell insisted that the meaning should choose the word, and not the other way about.
For Havel, in the more desperate environment of communist Czechoslovakia, the issue
was the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.
We miss the unflinching intellectual integrity of these great writers.
Page 2 of 2Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Vclav Havels greengrocer - FT.com
12/21/2011http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/04d440d8-2a7e-11e1-8f04-00144feabdc0.html