Thread by @ooana

🧵 more from Havel on dissidents. I can’t stress enough how important this essay is #TeamReality web.archive.org/web/2012010714…

“Perhaps it is now appropriate to outline some of the reasons why "dissidents" themselves are not very happy to be referred to in this way. In the first place, the word is problematic from an etymological point of view.

A "dissident," we are told in our press, means something like "renegade" or "backslider." But dissidents do not consider themselves renegades for the simple reason that they are not primarily denying or rejecting anything.

On the contrary, they have tried to affirm their own human identity, and if they reject anything at all, then it is merely what was false and alienating in their lives, that aspect of living within a lie.

But that is not the most important thing. The term "dissident" frequently implies a special profession, as if, along with the more normal vocations, there were another special onegrumbling about the state of things.

In fact, a "dissident" is simply a physicist, a sociologist, a worker, a poet, individuals who are doing what they feel they must and, consequently, who find themselves in open conflict with the regime.

This conflict has not come about through any conscious intention on their part, but simply through the inner logic of their thinking, behavior, or work (often confronted with external circumstances more or less beyond their control).

They have not, in other words, consciously decided to be professional malcontents, rather as one decides to be a tailor or a blacksmith.

In fact, of course, they do not usually discover they are "dissidents" until long after they have actually become one. "Dissent" springs from motivations far different from the desire for titles or fame.

In short, they do not decide to become "dissidents," and even if they were to devote twenty-four hours a day to it, it would still not be a profession, but primarily an existential attitude.

Moreover, it is an attitude that is in no way the exclusive property of those who have earned themselves the title of "dissident" just because they happen to fulfill those accidental external conditions already mentioned.

There are thousands of nameless people who try to live within the truth and millions who want to but cannot, perhaps only because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, they would need ten times the courage of those who have already taken the first step.

If several dozen are randomly chosen from among all these people and put into a special category, this can utterly distort the general picture. It does so in two different ways.

Either it suggests that "dissidents" are a group of prominent people, a protected species who are permitted to do things others are not and whom the government may even be cultivating as living proof of its generosity;

or it lends support to the illusion that since there is no more than a handful of malcontents to whom not very much is really being done, all the rest are therefore content, for were they not so, they would be "dissidents" too.

But that is not all.

This categorization also unintentionally supports the impression that the primary concern of these "dissidents" is some vested interest that they share as a group, as though their entire argument with the government were no more than a rather abstruse conflict

between two opposed groups, a conflict that leaves society out of it altogether.

But such an impression profoundly contradicts the real importance of the "dissident" attitude, which stands or falls on its interest in others, in what ails society as a whole, in other words, on an interest in all those who do not speak up.

If "dissidents" have any kind of authority at all, and if they have not been exterminated long ago like exotic insects that have appeared where they have no business being, then this is not because the government holds this exclusive group and their exclusive ideas in such awe,

but because it is perfectly aware of the potential political power of living within the truth rooted in the hidden sphere, and well aware too of the kind of world "dissent" grows out of and the world it addresses: the everyday human world, the world of daily tension between

the aims of life and the aims of the system. (Can there be any better evidence of this than the government's action after Charter 77 appeared, when it launched a campaign to compel the entire nation to declare that Charter q~ was wrong?

Those millions of signatures proved, among other things, that just the opposite was true.) The political organs and the police do not lavish such enormous attention on "dissidents"-which may give the impression that the government fears them as they might fear an alternative

power clique-because they actually are such a power clique, but because they are ordinary people with ordinary cares, differing from the rest only in that they say aloud what the rest cannot say or are afraid to say.

I have already mentioned Solzhenitsyn's political influence: it does not reside in some exclusive political power he possesses as an individual, but in the experience of those millions of

Gulag victims which he simply amplified and communicated to millions of other people of good will.

To institutionalize a select category of well-known or prominent "dissidents" means in fact to deny the most intrinsic moral aspect of their activity.

As we have seen, the "dissident" movement grows out of the principle of equality, founded on the notion that human rights and freedoms are indivisible.”