When No One Believes the Sign Anymore

Václav Havel and the Power of the Powerless in Our Time

In 1978, Václav Havel wrote an essay of some seventy pages entitled The Power of the Powerless. He dedicated it to the memory of the philosopher Jan Patočka, one of the first spokespeople for Charter 77. Patočka had died the previous year, following prolonged police interrogations. This gives the text a gravity of its own. It was not philosophy written at a safe distance from power. It was an inquiry into the conditions of truth, written by people who knew that truth could cost them their freedom, their health, and perhaps their lives.

Yet Havel does not begin with heroes, rebels, or imprisoned dissidents. He begins with a greengrocer.

Every morning, the greengrocer places a sign in his shop window bearing the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” He hardly does so because he is aflame with revolutionary fervour. He displays the sign because it is expected of him. It tells the authorities and those around him that he knows his place, observes the ritual, and does not want trouble.

No one really needs to believe the words. It is enough that everyone behaves as though they do.

Here lies Havel’s decisive insight. The system is sustained not only by those who command, monitor, and punish. It is also sustained by everyone who repeats its language, performs its rituals, and conceals their own experience in order to be left in peace. The individual is not merely a victim of the system. The individual also becomes one of its small supports.

The system remains effective only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.

A Different Society

We must be careful when bringing Havel into the present. Norway today is not Czechoslovakia in 1978. We live in a democracy with free elections, independent courts, a free press, and a public sphere in which the government can be criticised without the critic being imprisoned. An essential distinction between discomfort and oppression lies here: oppression begins when departure from the official language can be met with coercion or systematic sanctions, rather than merely opposition or disapproval. If every disagreement or administrative decision is described as totalitarian, this distinction disappears. We then lose sight of those who still risk their freedom or their lives by speaking the truth—and at the same time deprive Havel’s concepts of the precision that makes them useful.

But Havel’s text concerns more than one historical form of government. It concerns a temptation found in every organised society: the temptation to allow the official picture to replace lived reality.

Democracies, too, can develop a language that conceals more than it reveals. Cuts can be called efficiency measures. Control can be called quality assurance. People who do not receive help can be recorded as having completed treatment. An institution can declare that the service user is at the centre while no one has time to listen to that person. A university can speak warmly of academic freedom while the researcher learns that what really counts is the number of publications, citations, and grants secured.

The words are not necessarily false in themselves. The lie arises when the distance between the words and reality becomes known but can no longer be spoken of. Everyone sees the distance. Yet the meeting, the report, and the presentation continue as though it did not exist.

We have then placed our own sign in the greengrocer’s window.

The Digital Shop Window

Havel’s greengrocer displayed his slogan in a physical shop window. The shop window of our time is often digital.

We show who we are, what we support, and which community we belong to. We like, share, and repeat. Some things we do because we mean them. Some we do because we know what is expected in the circles to which we belong. And some things we leave unsaid because the price may be the loss of standing, employment, friends, or belonging.

The digital system does not always demand obedience through an order. It teaches us through reward. What arouses anger, fear, and moral outrage receives attention. What requires slow reflection disappears more easily. The algorithm does not ask whether a claim is true. It records whether we pause, react, and pass it on.

A curious form of participation thus arises. We can despise the content and still help to spread it. We can know that the debate has been simplified and still choose the wording that attracts the greatest response. We can lament polarisation while rewarding it with our attention.

The difference between this and Havel’s system is not insignificant. The greengrocer knew to whom he was submitting and why. The algorithm has no intention at all—it merely optimises for attention. Yet the outcome is similar: the system does not need our conviction. It needs our participation, and it receives it regardless of what we think about the content we spread.

The figures reveal different aspects of a public sphere under pressure. According to Freedom House, global internet freedom had declined in 2025 for the fifteenth consecutive year. At the same time, the Reuters Institute’s news survey for that year found that four in ten people sometimes or often avoid the news—partly because the stream of war, conflict, and catastrophe feels overwhelming. The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026, for its part, shows how disinformation, polarisation, and declining freedom of expression accompany democratic backsliding in a number of countries.

We are therefore exposed to ever more influence while becoming too exhausted to confront it. Between manipulation and fatigue, the public sphere can gradually be surrendered to those who are loudest and most certain of themselves.

Living Within the Truth

What, then, does it mean to live within the truth?

It does not mean that one person owns the truth. Anyone who claims to possess the whole truth can quickly create a new sign that others are required to display. Havel’s concept of truth must not be confused with the fanatic’s certainty or with the idea that my experience is automatically true for everyone.

To live within the truth is, rather, to try to bring words and experience closer together. It is to say: This does not correspond to what I see. This figure conceals something. This person disappears inside the category we have created. I do not know this. I was wrong here.

Truth then appears not first as a grand theory, but as a practice. It begins in small things: an honest answer, a precise objection, a refusal to repeat wording one knows to be misleading. It can mean asking one more question when everyone else wants to end the meeting. It can mean listening to the person whom the institution’s language has made invisible.

For Havel, the greengrocer becomes dangerous on the day he takes down the sign. Not because this single act topples the state, but because it reveals that the ritual works only for as long as it is repeated. When one person stops pretending, others can see that they, too, are pretending.

Truth therefore has an illuminating power. It casts light on what had previously been regarded as inevitable.

The Power of the Powerless

We tend to think of power as something others possess: governments, owners of capital, the media, technology companies, or leaders. Havel does not deny this power—he knew its brutality better than most. But he points to a vulnerability that even a powerful system has: it depends on millions of small actions confirming that the world is as the system says it is.

There is therefore a power even in those who appear powerless. It is not necessarily the power to win. It is the power to withhold participation in the lie.

This power must not be romanticised. The person who protests may lose their job. The whistleblower may be isolated. The journalist may be threatened. In authoritarian states, an utterance can lead to imprisonment or death. Even in a democracy, truth can carry costs. Havel promises no easy victory.

But obedience is not neutral either. When we remain silent to protect ourselves, our silence may also protect the system. When we repeat the words to avoid trouble, the words remain in the window a little longer.

Truth as Responsibility

Havel’s essay was dedicated to Jan Patočka. This was no coincidence. For Patočka, philosophy was connected with the care of the soul and with human responsibility for one’s own life. A person does not become free by withdrawing from the world, but by standing responsibly within it.

This responsibility has become more demanding because truth itself has become a battleground. Artificial intelligence can produce images, voices, and texts that appear convincing. Political actors can sow doubt faster than anyone can verify their claims.

But here, too, lies a danger that Havel himself would have recognised: the struggle against lies can become a new instrument of power, not merely a defence against an old one. When governments, technology companies, or communities of opinion grant themselves the exclusive right to decide what may be said, a new version of the problem Havel described emerges. A regime that prohibits lies in the same way that the Soviet state prohibited truth has not resolved the greengrocer’s dilemma—it has merely replaced the sign in the window. The danger lies not in the work of countering disinformation itself, but in the moment when this power becomes immune to challenge: when no one can any longer ask who guards the guardians, because the question itself is branded as a contribution to the lie.

Living within the truth therefore requires more than exposing the lies of others. It requires us to examine our own as well, and to be as vigilant towards guardians of truth as towards liars. Which claims do I share because they confirm what I already believe? Which words do I use to make my own role appear more innocent? When is my silence wise restraint, and when is it participation?

Havel offers no method that removes this uncertainty. He gives us something more difficult: a responsibility that cannot be handed over entirely to the system, the experts, or the algorithm—not even when they act in the name of truth.

When the Sign Is Taken Down

The Power of the Powerless remains a powerful essay because Havel brings the question of politics into everyday life. He asks not only who governs the state. He asks how power enters our language, our work, our fear, and our wish to be left in peace.

We do not live under the regime about which Havel wrote. Yet our society, too, needs people willing to describe the distance between what is said and what is happening. Democracy is defended not only in the polling station or parliament. It is defended in the newsroom, at the university, in the workplace, in the helping services, and around the meeting table—whenever a person refuses to let a convenient phrase replace reality.

This is not an abstraction. It may be the greengrocer, the teacher, the caseworker, or the researcher—any one of us, one morning, standing before our own window. She may not have the power to change the system alone. But she has one possibility the system can never entirely control: she can take down the sign.

The weakness of power is that it needs our participation. The power of the powerless begins when a person stops pretending.