🧵The Flame Beneath the Curtain

The “deep state” is not deep.
That is the first lie, and it is told with such confidence you can forget to laugh.
It is no more than stage-light and sleight; actors cued to strike their poses while the crew rearranges the set in the dark.

Magic is real.
This is not magic.
This is weak wizardry: impressive from the seats, paper-thin on the stage.
Like Egypt’s magicians, who kept up until the plague of lice—until the smallest, most ordinary thing showed their limit.

They brought us derin devlet from across the sea, once a phrase for hidden generals and criminals who outlived elections. Here it became a conjuring word—no longer analysis, but an incantation that folds complexity into a single phantom. 

Say it, and every fear wears the same mask.
The fear is real. The mask is not.


It has always worn costumes.
The Black Hand in the Balkans.
Frankist Kabbalah turned inside out.
Socrealist Dangxing, “Party Spirit,” binding artists to the state like draft animals.

Different uniforms, one choreography: hollow the living thing, then rule it through the name.


But there has always been another inheritance.
A platinum ring that will not tarnish.

A Parthian archer, horse in full stride, turning to loose the arrow while the world says “retreat.”
Movement with memory; a step away from the stage and toward the horizon.
You cannot arrest that geometry.


They tell you the matrix is everywhere; it isn’t.

What they call depth is cardboard.
It folds when you stop believing it is a wall.


The founders knew: a free people must be armed—with muskets, yes; but also with memory, art, humor, joy, and the right to gather in open defiance. 

Reduce “arms” to gunpowder alone, and you are trapped in their favorite duel—pro versus anti, a fight they can win whichever side you choose.


The real arsenal is human:
a rifle that protects;
a lyre that inspires;
a workshop that produces;
a stage that reveals;

a pen that remembers.


The “military–industrial complex” sounds like tanks and runways; the dangerous word is industrial.
Industry is not only factories; production is not only goods. The means is us.
Studios, kitchens, backrooms, garages, places where raw becomes real.

Property, rightly held, is not a trophy; it is a promise to make.
Happiness is not a destination; it is the right to pursue, and pursuit is the life of the thing.


That is why they fear joy.
True joy is a solvent—it dissolves control, makes fear lose its grip.

Shared laughter carries oxygen into closed rooms.
It can burn hotter than anger and longer than outrage.
That is why they snuff the ghost light—the small lamp left burning between acts to keep the stage alive. In darkness, they can claim each entrance as creation itself.

Shakespeare knew the opposite:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention…
They replace her with false illumination—light that blinds, not reveals.
Their lamp is an interrogation; the Muse is a sunrise.

And here is the trespass they never confess:
they try to copy God.
A counterfeit Exodus.
Plagues on cue, a Red Sea made of gates and scanners, a wilderness of entertainment and dependency.
Water to blood becomes poisoned wells—of truth, of food, of memory.

Frogs become floods of grotesque symbols and noise.
Lice—the hinge where the imitation breaks—still comes, and they cannot pass it.
They can imitate form. They cannot create life.


It is the same with their “meme magic.”

Real memetic force draws from Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of muses where symbol meets lineage; where a joke is a key and an image is an inheritance.
Cut her away, and you get spectacle without soul: a flash, a brand, a directive to clap.

They flood the current with Party Spirit and call it culture. It spreads; then it dies.


That is why Romantic Surrealism is the answer.
It is not escape; it is return.
A vow to tie imagination to memory so the real can breathe again.

A mirror turned, showing the “depth” as a painted room.
Then the door opens…to the place deeper than any state, any state of mind, any created state; where no decree can follow you.


This is why naming them mediocre works.
It is not insult; it is diagnosis.

They cannot create. They cannot understand.
They clear the stage to hide their lack, demanding reverence where they cannot earn wonder.
They fear the work of the bard, the builder, the dreamer more than any army, because armies can be bought. Wonder cannot.

So here is the vow:
Zachor: ✨remember.
Keep the ghost light burning.
Carry the rifle if you must; carry a song regardless.
Build the shop; hang the canvas; rehearse the scene; mint the small business; teach the child.
Anchor your symbols in Memory so they cannot be seized.

Refuse their stage directions; use their cardboard for kindling.


When you see it clearly, the set is only a set; the “deep” is shallow glass.
The conjuror is just another courtier without his robe.
And the rider; head turned, eyes remembering, body in motion - keeps moving.


Weak Wizardry

🧵📝
The False God: History as Purpose (Exiled Divine Feminine- Clio Orphaned Without Memory) 
Part 2  of 3 of The Power of Truth:
How Art Ushers in *and Defeats* Totalitarian Creep
Updated From my Substack Artful Veritas (July 2024)

“The specific teleology of Marxist thought consists in leading all concepts and objects to the Purpose, referring them all to the Purpose, and defining them all through the Purpose. The history of all epochs and nations is but the history of humanity’s march toward Communism… ” (On Socialist Realism by Abram Tertz 1959) 

{Cure ✨Clio and the origin of Mneme   Zachor! Shamor✨#RomanticSurrealism}

/1

Vaclav Havel explains first some simple but important realities which made up the Soviet Union, but I believe strongly are not only alive and well today but have altered form only superficially. What they share in their apparent belief system is superficially important compared to what they share in a suprapersonal way. They share Party Spirit and Ideology and are completely ruled by it. 

/2

In the words of Stalin, “the base produces the superstructure so that it can serve the base.”

The regime itself does not dictate things ideologically, but rather what is unique to the totality of Totalitarianism is that Ideology in fact rules it.

Here first are the basic differences Vaclav elaborated which we can all very much relate to:

/3

1. our system is not limited in a local, geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over many geographical regions and nations. We see institutions which have grown in order to sustain and maintain said system…from the WHO to the WEF to the UN, GMOs and Corruption of Fiscal Sponsorhsip’s intent to limit state influence via 501c3s (Thousand Currents) 

/4

2. although it quite naturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, the range of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a single, unifying framework. Ideologically these shift; sustainability, DEI, ESG, Currency, etc etc but none of these are ultimately ever considered more valued than the continuity of the System itself. 

/5

3. Despite there no longer being a Soviet bloc, we see clearly the attempt to conform with the same “principles” and structure and nearly everywhere if not everywhere has been penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments designed to assure its own survival. 

/6

4. There IS a historical foundation that is lacking in classical dictatorships. Or perhaps more accurately, and I am shifting slightly from Havel here, this foundation is in fact not so much rooted in history as rooted in a redefining of History.

/7

Lastly what we must fully comprehend here is that unlike dictatorships or even oppressive regimes prior to modernity this is not simply a set of ideas or ideals. It is, in fact a religion. Even if most aren’t aware of it and even if segments of its adherents differ slightly in their deity or form of worship it is the RELATIONSHIP with their God(s) that is the key to understanding both the nature of what Vaclav called the post totalitarian system, and what I call Totalitarian Creep. 

/8

That key is essential to understanding its greatest weakness as well and its very odd, unnatural, irrational and anti-human behavior.
It is difficult to describe this religion without utilizing another one in juxtaposition. This is because this new religion which has been creeping along human society for millennia received a kind of super fuel with the onset of industrialization and mechanization. 

/9

It is of no surprise that the system itself seems to reject the very fuel that allowed it to rapidly grow and pervade everything. This is one clue to understanding the very weakness that will ultimately destroy it, or cause it to destroy itself. 

The question is only, how long will it take and what damage will be left and what will be left of human life or life at all when that moment comes?

/10

I often imagine Jonestown as a microcosm of Totalitarian Creep, although there are other examples. Much like Jonestown, this system is in fact ultimately fated to destroy its host. It is a mistake to try and apply natural rules to something this unnaturally willing to place all survival as subordinate to it. Ideology is the purveyor of, temple of and only essential value in this system. What it worships is Purpose.

/11

Imagine for a moment what comes to mind when you ask yourself or are asked “what is the opposite of life?”
Many people will say death. 

I would argue this is incorrect.
The opposite of life is a machine.
In mythology and stories we have seen often the warnings of what happens when mechanization goes too far. 

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein 

Terminator Series 

Battle Star Galactica 

The Jewish Mystical Idea of the Golem

Golem from Lord of the Rings adapted from above 

/12

And so on and so on…
A key quality of Totalitarian Creep is mechanization and therefore trivialization of Life; its opposite and its greatest threat. 

/13

Totalitarian Creep “commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness” (Havel Power of the Powerless) is more a religion than any dictatorship or any system of rule we are familiar with including what we traditionally call “fascism.”
Remember Jonestown? The microcosm here is unmistakeable. 

/14

Especially when one realizes that each and every member of the “Temple” were both pillars of and enslaved by it. Just as we are.

/15

That smaller and now this new Totalitarian Temple “offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. 

/16

To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish.”(Havel)

/17

He continues. “Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.”

/18

Truth in this context requires a definition, because it is not truth in the sense which we have all, for now and mostly, come to define it. It is truth that has a very insular definition, it is an illusion. Mind you a very consistent and tenacious one, which in fact becomes far more important that actual truth itself. 

/19

It is Ideinost which can only be determined by Partiinost- as Washington warned, the warmth of the spirit of Party has begun its total consumption, or one might say total capture of the means of production.

/20

What makes this new Totalitarian Temple so dangerous is, much like when Jonestown moved from the Bay Area down to its isolation in the Forrests and became itself, the landscape that surrounds us is in total. Escape requires something very unusual and has little to do with the overthrow of those who appear to lead it. Of course there are two escape paths. Each path is based entirely on how one relates to Truth.

/21

The spirit of Party is much like a supernatural spirit, however it is in fact Suprapersonal. This spirit is within every human being. In some faiths it’s described symbolically as one form of our soul or perhaps even temptation. But that’s irrelevant. It’s part of the human condition which was so widely explained in Washington’s farewell address as well as in the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and even later, Emerson.

/22

We see it again in Jung and of course all the way back to Aristotle and in a form which I personally would argue set the stage for its igniting and potential to consume; Plato.
What matters, I believe in this particular situation though is an understanding again that YOU, each of us, everyone is involved. 

/23

This is the most important thing, I believe, is required to understand totalitarian creep distinctly from a Dictatorship of any kind and also its most oppressive but weakest point of its foundation.

Let’s return to this concept of a Great Narrative for a moment. 

/24

https://youtu.be/eaEPlMBy7Ok?si=xBsALZueaGcVBpRS

I asked a while back what story were we telling when the dancing nurses were telling us who was and who was not essential and what was necessary to participate “socially” and “happily.” Remember? 

/25

We’ve heard a lot about mass formation. I think we’ve been given only a narrow view - a view which is faulty primarily because it mechanizes the masses and describes reality as if every person is at the mercy of the forward march of the “the masses”, delusional as they may be…

/26

This resignation and sort of need to duck for cover as “history” marches over us in its own way places Purpose as an idol. It makes each of us feel powerless against a frantic activity occurring all around us, amplified by the very mechanization which built the illusion to begin with.

It’s the Koolaid.
It’s Frankenstein’s monster.

/27

How often do we hear today that this new Industrial Revolution will change everything and we are powerless to stop it? That we must submit, be absorbed, adapt or essentially become inessential or worse.

What story are we being told?

Again. Truth has a different definition within totalitarian creep. 

Truth is only whatever the regime needs to glorify and sustain itself.

/28

Truth is subordinated to something higher, that higher thing is not based on anything established by the means human beings are accustom to. 

/29

The demoralization caused by a mechanized march toward something which seems to be ruled by anonymous flunkies and soulless automatons is of course deeply crushing to the spirit, but not to the spirit of Party or to Ideology which seems to take on different standards from moment to moment and commands its apparent leadership with a kind of psychotic set of orders, seemingly contradictory and seemingly in opposition to the principles it claimed moments before. 

/30

Let me remind you. This is a mechanized religion. Or rather a religion structured to only sustain itself, worshiping its Purpose which has at its core a false premise. That all history, all life, everything that has ever been and ever will be has existed in order to fulfill ITS purpose. Which, nihilistically and like Jonestown is Purposeless. Everything is a utility to sustain a belief in Purpose - it is purely a mechanized way of looking at everything and all. 

The opposite of life.

/31

Why does this system seem to require and use the immature and the young? Well…remember your own adolescence. A child brought up in an ideal family will have a sense of self not because they are rewarded simply for being good. Their sense of self is self evident, not based on their effectiveness as a tool for something that is desired purely from outside themselves. When that happens we call it emotional abuse. 

/32

Havel writes; “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. 

/33

It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.“

/34

Totalitarian creep, in its mechanized view of existence and in its need to sustain its own existence views everything and everyone only as a tool- something that solidifies or assures that existence or is a threat to it. 

It is, in its own way, very very immature as well.

/35

What Vaclav calls the Post - Totalitarian system I’m calling totalitarian creep because it has not yet fully imbedded itself. Even if this doesn’t reach thousands or even tens of thousands or tens people I am able to write about this and someone else may see it despite any censorship or limitation. 

/36

In a post totalitarian system that would be near impossible. The creep, also, I believe exists and may always to some degree or another. We have a great deal of it to wade through now. But for how long really is, I believe, up to each of us.
What choices do we have? Well…Vaclav says that the powerless are in fact able to access a power which those in power (as it appears) do not have. In fact we have seen recently how even those in power do have access to it. 

/37

He elaborates how actual Truth plays a roll that is enormous, unique and also uniquely threatening to this system. 

He says…

/38

“Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, aud self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the posttotalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the posttotalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states. 

/39

The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. 

/40

Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself.  And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. 

/41

Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. 

/42

For this reason, an individual's desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system….
He then reinforces how and why each of us are both part of and enslaved by it before he explains what disintegrates it - and we had a glimpse of that very thing only a few days ago and then the expected reaction by the system to what it perceives (rightly) as an attack on itself.

/43

I encourage you to read the entire essay but here is a key point. Perhaps the key point now. 

“Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”
That, is socrealism or socialist realism or perhaps we can call it The Great Narrative or The New Normal. 

/44


Whatever we call it. It’s a lie. And it’s also the structure of the Testaments of this New Temple/Religion. It is the Gospel of Liberation Theology and the formula repeated over and over by its priest class; also, much like the Aztec priests were, enslaved to the worship of Purpose (and willing to sacrifice their own, themselves and anything to that Purpose.) 

/45

It is new. It is a symptom of modernity but it is derived from something very old and often obscured because it reveals its inherent quality; the mechanized ethics of human beings. 

The hero of this dark gospel is simple and so is the structure. “The hero is Toil and the Toiler is unthinkable outside the collective.”

/46

That was Gorky’s phrase, one of the founders of Stalinist Socialist Realism, adopted by Mao, Hitler and birthed much earlier and described by Russian actual realist writers and artists as the death of the author, destroying of art and by its True Believers as a means to “engineer human souls.”

Vaclav goes on “The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. 

/47

This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code;

/48

the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.

/49

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

/50

The False God: History As Purpose


Some of the great thinkers who tried to discuss the phenomenon of hatred and scapegoating of my Jewish people had, they thought, the debate advantage by being neither Jewish nor masochists nor sadists (all who fit the bill of Bukowski’s Genius of the Crowd quoted in previous

thread just above are to varying degrees truly masochists or sadists - and so is their art) say very similar things. They screamed it from rooftops both figuratively and literally    They wrote this and even died or waited until they died, they tried protect these ideas.  

Even from themselves. 

Still this war on memory has had its eyes squarely upon this “problem” for millennia. Or they insist that any claim the problem exists and is no problem at all is the problem. 

They pretend time doesn’t flow forward but rather backward infinitely.  Time lines - the facts of history happened or they did not   Wisdom evolves. History leaves ripples that create waves.

To not talk about this problem is to deny the existence of Jews and therefore actually hate Jews, not protect them as so often is protested.

Again, remember, this isn’t my thinking , it was said by Eugene Ionesco of Sartre and his other contemporaries in 1967.)Ionesco’s Journal)

He remarked on the strange phenomenon we see now then in so many ways and was search idk and pleading for our existence to not be trivialized as he wept also for his Paris and all of mankind and the end to his culture he feared was irreversible. 

While he was not a jew (nor would he need to be to see the tragedies unfolding that got us to now) he was adept at seeing systems of authoritarian idiocy remarkably and unapologetically and painfully.

These waves don’t simply happen to humanity nor are they our total responsibility. That’s hubris.  

History rhymes just as musically and complexly as a symphony or a mathematical proof. 

Even Neitzche himself, remarked along side Ionesco in another time, on the strange phenomenon we see now,  then in so many ways.  

They saw what happens to good men and women. They  saw the strength it takes to not succumb and how rare it is for anyone to be uncommon and how, they said, this was necessary to understand to understand totalitarianism.

Yet - here we are. As if the four  years, and three thousand before  never happened.

The Phenomenon of Time

It is said, by many, that in part the justification for Jew hate can be found in the writings and brilliance of people like Nietzsche. 

However this, just like every justification when seeking the answer to why are Jews so hated, by intellectuals, pseudo intellectuals and their pawns and pupils is not only shallow, but false.

What I find remarkable as of late is how many justifications often cite, adopt, even claim ideas and language and declarations that are uniquely part of jewish wisdom and spirit, preserved by my people for millennia

 or - bastardizations of non Jewish but equally thoughtful, wise, brilliant
and complex ideas;  without any hatred or even, what is worse than hate, contempt for my people they apply to these thinkers, artists and more.

Since I am inseparably Jewish, both in truth and according to those whose passion for my people often seems only to show itself in our dead or murmur of annihilation (I don’t only mean Hamas here) the reality that being called  “Jew lover” is also treated with

the utmost contempt by the reframing of non Jewish people’s ideas (because they dared simply not to hate us) and that burden for too many people is not simply a fellow traveler to be dismissed or ignored or trivialized.   


I’ve heard this before. Haven’t you?

Were you called a vaccine denier even if you were vaccinated? 

Anniversary of the beginning of all this “new normal” certainly is part of this quickening pace of how much history does indeed rhyme. So much oddly and ironically and heart breakingly of course too, reminds me of so much of the last four years.

Remember Mass Formation? The Political Witch Hunt Ritual? The warnings and cries of Never Again is Now or if you don’t like comparisons don’t do comparable things? Remember masking? Masking children? Forced medical or coerced medical treatments - 

called safe by consensus upon children? Shunning neighbors? Murder? Indifference? Morality being determined by committee. Threats of dark winters of death or suicide if not compliant while death was described by stats rather than reality? 

Trivialization of life. 


Hamas boasted that they began planning Oct 7 four years ago- 
no shit.

Remember the ignored voices from Israel? Remember the ignored teachers, artists, doctors, scientists, people with no credentials or phds to their name.  Those who died alone? Those who used fear to create the illusion of scientific reality or social reality? 

Rememember the facts that weren’t true or how sunlight was - or wasn’t the best disinfectant? 

Remember how nice people got the most flies with their honey,  but they still caught only flies? 

Remember.  

When  you point fingers at politicians and governments. 

Remember how many them - the truth and the people because they, like all those on the ground 


in the Freedom Movement, (not only writing or whispering online) but THERE face to face, in your face,  

trying to be seen and plead to humanity) were and are ignored as movement became more vital than the truth that inspired…

…truth itself.

Remember that as blame and demands of accountability are declared. Where should this accountability begin? I’ve my thoughts. 

More than if I’m honest I’ve demands- not that anyone will listen to them, and thank goodness for that.  


I’m not deluded that I could hope for such a power, nor would I want it. No one should. 

It weighed heavy for those at Nuremberg who had to find a word for crimes before never seen. Did you forget?

Some of you did. 

Dead Jews are useful when they serve what you wish to have.

For some of you….this is how clear as day and stark to face for many of us -Jew and not alike

There are those who fall into mob mentality and then…there are those, who know their own ineptitude, and jump at the chance to fuel it.

“Unable to create art they will see their failure as creators only as a failure of the world.” Wrote the Weimar born LA poet Bukowski.

He knew a thing or two about what can happen to a society struck by the horrors we are seeing far too closely now.

When I say we are ALL Jews now - this isn’t glib.

Is this literal? Of course not. But if you are laser focused on such a false reality as literalism then - I’m not speaking to you, but about you.
We are all Jews now.

The War On Memory - the Con in Consensus.

“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on.

This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class;

the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available;

the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed;

the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus.

It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie.

It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” -The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel

The Hypocrisy of the Post-Totalitarian System

“Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system,

that is, so they may become agents of the system's general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust by Mephistopheles.

More than this: so they may create through their involvement a general norm and, thus, bring pressure to bear on their fellow citizens.

And further: so they may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and, ultimately,

so they may-with no external urging-come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society.

By pulling everyone into its power structure, the posttotalitarian system makes everyone an instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality of society.

Everyone, however, is in fact involved and enslaved…

Differing positions in the hierarchy merely establish differing degrees of involvement: the greengrocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has very little power. The prime minister, naturally, has greater power, but in return he is far more deeply involved.

Both, however, are unfree, each merely in a somewhat different way.

The real accomplice in this involvement, therefore, is not another person, but the system itself.

Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt, but it gives no one unlimited responsibility and guilt, nor does it completely absolve anyone.

Thus the conflict between the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflict between two socially defined and separate communities; and only a very generalized view (and even that only approximative) permits us to divide society into the rulers and the ruled.

Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can still be drawn according to social class.

In the post-totalitarian system, this line runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.

What we understand by the system is not, therefore, a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it, something which may seem impossible to grasp or define

(for it is in the nature of a mere principle), but which is expressed by the entire society as an important feature of its life.

The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history,

nor is it history somehow gone off its rails. Neither is it the product of some diabolical higher will which has decided, for reasons unknown, to torment a portion of humanity in this way.

It can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system.

There is obviously something in human beings which responds to this system, something they reflect and accommodate, something within them which paralyzes every effort of their better selves to revolt.

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way.

Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person.

In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence.

Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism.

In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities.

It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.

In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the posttotalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society.

Is it not true that the farreaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to

sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity?

With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference?

And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an insulated caricature of modern life in general?

And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?” -Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel

The Essence of Power

“As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual.

In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically.

Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether.

Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system:

a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence.

As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength.

It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such.

Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context.

Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it.

This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself.

It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.” -‘The Power of the Powerless’ by Vaclav Havel

The Interplay of Ideology and Power

Funeral for a Chicken - The Absurdity of What Matters 🧵

As I sit writing this, America is somehow trying to turn Joe Biden into John Kennedy. Sure, he lacks the charm, Jill is no Jackie and Hunter no John John, but he’s Irish Catholic so somehow they figure they’ll make the fear of nuclear Armageddon replace Avalon

without a single chord of Oh Danny Boy. So, it really shouldn’t surprise me that I woke up this morning with the words “She didn’t make it” and “they asked me to help with the funeral” before I had my first sip of coffee or wiped the sleep out of my eyes. Oh. Did I mention?

She is Brady, a 6 year old  that was mauled by a dog yesterday…she’s also a chicken.

While the south west gulf coast of florida is still reeling from the pain of a natural disaster that’s being, as is the way of things in the new 20s,  sucked for every political point it can be - human lives (and chickens) be damned I find myself thinking about how lucky I am to

be in a small strip of Florida that was somehow spared (some say through ancient native blessings) of the storm despite predictions…and sadistic lamentations of the media that destroyed my last home.

Somehow here, we have the luxury of chicken funerals and, I had the luxury to give a friend a ride to see his father off with another hug before he returns to Texas.  Brady’s funeral has to wait.

Life going on - even in the New Avalon. Maybe, just maybe, nothing really has ever been more important than a funeral for a chicken.

Chicken Funerals and the End of the World

🧵from https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML
“The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. 

A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, 

no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person.

The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.

Living within the truth, as humanity's revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility. 

In other words, it is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self-serving: the risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not. 

In this regard, as I stated previously, it is an all-or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow, be it only in the form of general gratitude. 

(By the way, the representatives of power invariably come to terms with those who live within the truth by persistently ascribing utilitarian motivations to them-a lust for power or fame or wealth-and 

thus they try, at least, to implicate them in their own world, the world of general demoralization.)


If living within the truth in the post-totalitarian system becomes the chief breeding ground for independent, alternative political ideas, then all considerations about the nature and future prospects of these ideas must necessarily reflect this moral dimension 

as a potitical phenomenon. (And if the revolutionary Marxist belief about morality as a product of the "superstructure" inhibits any of our friends from realizing the full significance of this dimerision and, in one way or another, from including it in their view of the world, 

it is to their own detriment: an anxious fidelity to the posculates of that world view prevents them from properly understanding the mechanisms of their own political intluence, thus paradoxically making them precisely what they, as Marxists, so often suspect others of 

being-victims of "false consciousness.") The very special political significance of morality in the post-totalitarian system is a phenomenon that is at the very least unusual in modern political history, 

a phenomenon that might well have-as I shall soon attempt to showfar-reaching consequences.” -Vaclav Havel from Power of the Powerless
