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Today, Canadian PM Mark Carney referenced former Czech president and Stan Grof supporter, Vaclav Havel, in his Davos speech.
“In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. And in it, he asked a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!" He doesn't believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.
Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this "living within a lie." The system's power comes not from its truth but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.”
In case you didn’t know it already, Carney is a “socially liberal fiscal conservative” — I guess he had to really make sure everyone at Davos knew it.
Who is Havel?
From the Guardian,
“He was the symbol of 1989, the anti-communist playwright who helped free his country – and the rest of eastern Europe– from Stalinist tyranny and who put the countries that lay behind the iron curtain on the road to democracy…
No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first…
Havel, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur whose companies were nationalised when the communists came to power, showed little concern for the plight of ordinary people who lost out in the change towards a market economy. And there were losers aplenty. While the years following the liberation of eastern Europe from communism by Havel and his fellow dissidents are routinely portrayed in the west as one big success story, the reality is rather different. A 2009 Lancet study concluded that as many as 1 million working-age men died due to the health problems brought on by mass privatisation. As economies across eastern Europe were restructured so inequalities and social divisions grew. A 2011 OECD report found that Havel's Czech Republic had the joint-second largest rise in income inequality in OECD members since the mid-1980s.
Havel's true political allegiances came to the fore during his years as president. Like fellow dissident Lech Walesa, he supported the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In 2002, he sided with the rightwing Republican hawks on Iraq.
Lauding Havel is not only doing a disservice to the millions of ordinary people in eastern Europe who have not been served well by his politics, but to the innocent men, women and children killed by the western military adventures he supported. While Havel was a man of undoubted talent and intellect, it's time we stopped eulogising people simply because they were anti-communist dissidents, and instead look at the bigger picture.”
Havel and Grof
In 2007, Havel’s foundation presented Grof with a lifetime achievement award. The decision was controversial, with critics highlighting Grof’s promotion of repressed memory pseudoscience. Havel doubled down on his support for Grof, noting he always believed that “something can return from this greater memory to our own consciousness”. Like most Grof supporters, Havels support for Grof seems to stem from his affirmation of pre-existing beliefs about the nature of reality and memory.
From the Winter 2007 MAPS Bulletin:
“Not everyone was pleased about the awarding of the Havel prize to Dr. Grof. Priests and psychiatrists were quoted in a Prague newspaper that day saying the foundation had made an “embarrassing mistake,” and a Czech skeptics’ society accused Dr. Grof of “propagating absurd ideas” by claiming that breathwork enables participants to re-experience past lives and their own birth. But such criticisms were dismissed later in the evening by Havel himself, in his speech to the packed auditorium.
“This prize is for visionaries, for explorers, for people who overstep boundaries and notice new and unpredictable connections,” said Havel. Such researchers take risks, he noted, because they’re often attacked by “hard traditionalists who can’t imagine that science could step beyond its own limits. These people can even be fanatical opponents to anything that is outside traditional thinking. In the name of rationality, they sometimes actually fight against new ideas.”
“I’ve always believed that what happened once can’t be erased, that the whole history of our planet, and the cosmos, is being written somewhere, that Being has its own memory,” Havel continued. “The work of Dr. Grof showed me that sometimes, something can return from this greater memory to our own consciousness. And that we can surprisingly experience, maybe only for a few minutes, something that happened a long time ago, or in faraway places, that we couldn’t know by other means.”
Havel and his wife Dagmar presented Dr. Grof with a stylized staff of St. Vojtech, the patron saint of Bohemia. Afterwards, Dr. Grof said he was deeply moved by the ceremony. It brought his work back to his birthplace, he noted, and it was an honor to be recognized by a statesman and philosopher he greatly admires.
“And then [there was] the tremendous surprise that Vaclav Havel had the courage to appreciate research in something that’s so controversial. It’s extremely important in terms of other people taking a second look, because of who he is. I hope that it can ultimately help the field.”"
I’ll leave this without my analysis for now — make of it what you will.
