Shattering lies

I've been reading excerpts from Vaclav Havel's work for decades, so I guess it's time I read his epochal book, The Power of the Powerless. A Maggie's Farm link took me to an Australian site called The Quadrant, where I found this rumination on Havel:

The sense of personal responsibility—together with the refusal to accept the ideology’s lies— provides many small opportunities to begin to live authentically, honouring one’s own and other people’s better nature. The rulers cannot tolerate this honesty; their system is built on falsehoods, so any truth proclaimed anywhere is a danger. The proclamations may be small; for example, someone says that the state-run brewery produces terrible beer; or that the concerts organised by authorities are tedious compared to amateur music nights; or that elections are farcical.

These truths are prosaic—beginning to live in truth usually is—but they signify a shift. And they have an odd, disproportionate potential because any system founded on falsehoods will always be subject to recurrent social, cultural, economic or legal crises barely restrained by the crust of lies. A small truth enacted “in the ‘hidden sphere’, in the semi-darkness where things are difficult to chart or analyse” may have huge effects with surprising speed. This hidden sphere—of real human vocation involving communication, trust, choice and freedom—is obscure but omnipresent; it’s the everyday sphere where the genuine aims of life burst beyond the aims set by the system. It’s the powerful ally of truth.

From the book itself:

What is this independent life of a society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self-education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied, free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organisation. In short, it is an area in which living within the truth becomes articulate and materialises in a visible way.

The strongest thread in my personal political philosophy is the primal importance of voluntary human institutions: "independent social self-organisation." Government can facilitate them by imposing a certain amount of order and coordination, but it can't replace them and must never crowd them out. No system of external order can make up for the chaos and violence that emanages from empty people with empty lives. We have to be responsible for ourselves and deal with each other on the ground of "communication, trust, choice and freedom." This is why I trust a free market over any other economic system: it requires people to bargain and persuade rather than dictate. It can't relieve us of our duty of generosity and disinterested mutual support, but then neither can a supposedly compassionate socialist safety net.