Vaclav Havel is important today, not only as a writer/ playwright but also as a statesman. Tweets coinciding with his 80th birth anniversary recently brought to my mind this leader (quite inspiring in this dispiriting times of Kim Jong- uns, Donald Trumps, Rodrigo Dutertes and Narendra Modis) and spurred me to read his powerful political essay The Power of the Powerless. 
I first came across Havel (like Kundera, Kazantzakis and such greats) in the columns of late Malayalam critic M.Krishnan Nair.

In the essay Havel cites the example of a fruit and vegetable shop manager who places in his window the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" Havel says the manager is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan. He does it (places the slogan along with vegetables in his window) because everyone does it.
The the sign, Havel notes, helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology!

Ideology, according to Havel 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. 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."

Now, more excerpts from The Power of the Powerless.

"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."

"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 in formation 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."

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* Post-totalitarian (different from the traditional dictatorships) system is the system we live in today. The term dictatorship `tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system,' Havel says. He expatiates the factors that distinguish classical dictatorship from post-totalitarian system.

Going by the description of Havel's biographer John Keane it is:  "Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments...themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'.."

The New York Times in its obituary dated December 18, 2011 described Havel as the Czech writer and dissident "whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power."