"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both"
About this Quote
Power, Havel insists, is not a throne you seize but a weather system you help create. The line cuts against the comforting cartoon in which “the powerful” do things to “the powerless.” Instead, power is an accumulation of “thousands of interactions” - tiny bargains, silences, favors, evasions, rituals of obedience that feel too small to matter until they add up to a regime’s daily oxygen.
The subtext is unmistakably shaped by life under late communism: a state that survived not only through police and prisons but through the ordinary choreography of compliance. Havel is pointing at the shopkeeper who hangs the slogan, the office worker who doesn’t question the lie in the meeting, the citizen who learns to self-censor before anyone censors him. His famous target is “living within the lie,” and here he widens the lens: coercion is real, but it’s stabilized by participation that’s often half-voluntary, half-survival.
That’s why the most radical sentence is the last one. “Everyone has a small part of himself in both” refuses purity politics. It’s a moral warning to dissidents tempted to imagine they stand outside the system, and a strategic argument about leverage: if power is relational, it can be interrupted relationally. Change doesn’t begin only with toppling leaders; it begins when enough people stop performing the small roles that make domination feel normal. In a post-totalitarian society, conscience is not private. It’s infrastructure.
The subtext is unmistakably shaped by life under late communism: a state that survived not only through police and prisons but through the ordinary choreography of compliance. Havel is pointing at the shopkeeper who hangs the slogan, the office worker who doesn’t question the lie in the meeting, the citizen who learns to self-censor before anyone censors him. His famous target is “living within the lie,” and here he widens the lens: coercion is real, but it’s stabilized by participation that’s often half-voluntary, half-survival.
That’s why the most radical sentence is the last one. “Everyone has a small part of himself in both” refuses purity politics. It’s a moral warning to dissidents tempted to imagine they stand outside the system, and a strategic argument about leverage: if power is relational, it can be interrupted relationally. Change doesn’t begin only with toppling leaders; it begins when enough people stop performing the small roles that make domination feel normal. In a post-totalitarian society, conscience is not private. It’s infrastructure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Vaclav
Add to List
