Justice & Law Quote by Vaclav Havel

Havel borrows the cold authority of physics to make a hot political point: the universe slides toward disorder, but a human life worth defending moves the other way, toward form, meaning, and responsibility. It’s a bracing reversal. Entropy isn’t just a science-term here; it’s a metaphor for the everyday drift of societies when nobody is accountable - the creeping normalization of cynicism, fear, and moral laziness.

The line works because it refuses comforting mysticism. Havel doesn’t claim history automatically bends toward justice. He implies the opposite: decay is the default setting. If “structure” exists - in a conscience, a community, a democratic institution - it’s a maintained achievement, not a natural condition. That’s the subtext of a dissident who lived through a system designed to dissolve independent civic life. Under authoritarianism, disorder often wears a uniform: propaganda that scrambles truth, bureaucracies that turn people into files, public language emptied into slogans. Entropy as political strategy.

Calling the struggle “the basic law of life” also lets Havel elevate dissent beyond mere opposition. The intent isn’t to romanticize rebellion; it’s to define citizenship as a continuous act of construction: building trustworthy speech, durable norms, and solidarities that outlast intimidation. The word “struggle” matters because it rejects passivity. Structure doesn’t appear; it’s chosen, rehearsed, defended.

In Havel’s context - a playwright turned president after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution - the statement reads like a manifesto for post-revolutionary adulthood: winning freedom is the easy part; keeping it requires daily work against the pull of chaos and forgetfulness.