Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last Tuesday.Denis Balibouse/Reuters
He beautifully invoked Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. He also misused it.
In his Davos speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that we find ourselves in the same position as the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop in Havel’s 1978 essay, who puts a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his window.
This man does not believe in the slogan, or any of the other dogmas of Soviet communism. He has no burning desire to share his passion for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The sign is there because he wants to signal compliance. His peace and comfort depend on publicly performative fealty to a totalitarian ideology.
Havel called this “living within the lie.”
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Mr. Carney said that the current international order had become a lie. He didn’t name the United States or President Donald Trump, but all his listeners had them in mind.
He said that economic ties were being weaponized by superpowers to impose upon the weak, and that the response – from leaders of nations to titans of industry – had been to pretend that it wasn’t happening. To go along to get along.
But, said Mr. Carney, “you cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
He said that we have to “stop pretending” that the world as it was is the world as it is. We have to talk about objective reality – rather than saying obsequious things about a certain president, in the hope that we will be rewarded with the quiet enjoyment of yesterday’s economic and security benefits.
“It is time,” he said “for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Mr. Carney is mostly right.
But it’s important to understand what he’s right about, including the extent to which Havel’s situation applies to our own – and the many ways it does not.
If by “take their signs down,” Mr. Carney means that the free world has to stop pretending that the insane and threatening things Mr. Trump has said and done are not, in fact, insane and threatening, then he’s absolutely correct. We have to dare to call out Trumpian falsehoods and threats, in the hope of defeating them.
We must “live within the truth,” as Havel put it.
Mr. Carney said that means we must “stop invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised.” He said we must recognize that superpowers are pursuing their interests “using economic integration as coercion.”
So far, so true.
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But there are huge differences between our situation and that of Havel’s man in 1970s Eastern Europe, dutifully putting up a poster from the communist government, exhorting the advance of the global dictatorship of the proletariat.
That poster was a lie, full stop. The people of Czechoslovakia had not benefited from the Soviet imposition of communism, ever. It had not stopped working; it had never worked. It had been non-viable, and widely unwanted, from day one. It always had been maintained at the barrel of a gun.
Mr. Carney’s speech suggested that the old American-led international order was somewhat like that, with fibs in the system that had now grown into full-blown lies.
That gets something very wrong about what Mr. Trump has done, and is doing.
NATO is a truly voluntary alliance. Joining NATO was not supporting a lie.
The 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was not a lie that we had to pretend to like because the hegemon next door would send troops to occupy our country, as the Soviets did to Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Our deals with the Americans were freely chosen, freely accepted and largely mutually beneficial. No lie.
Pre-Trump America didn’t always live up to its best principles but neither do any countries, or human beings. This is not what Havel’s “living a lie” was about.
He was talking about a system where the principles themselves are a lie, and where ideology demands that a naked emperor be treated as fully clothed.
The lie of communism for Havel was that you had to pretend it was helping you while it was harming you; that it was giving when it was taking; that it embodied freedom while crushing it.
It was an Orwellian ideology of make believe, where everyone pledged allegiance to untruths.
Mr. Trump is the complete opposite, and not just because he’s from the right rather than the left. He is a non-ideologue. He is what Havel would have classified as an old-style dictatorship.
He takes from others to the extent of his wants, and to the extent that he can. He demands obedience, but unlike left-wing ideologies of the past, or wokeism in the present, there is no elaborate ideology to provide his followers with a philosophical justification for going along. There is just raw power. Obey, or else.
And that, paradoxically, is a reason for hope. The ideals of the old world and the old America, are still there. They have been buried; they have not been proven false. We can still acknowledge their truths.
That they live in our heads means they are not dead. Not yet.