The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel [REDUX] w/Harvey Seifter & Jesan Sorrells

0:01 Beautiful. All right. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast, bonus episode with Harvey Seifter. We're going to be talking about Václav Havel's essay, The Power of the Powerless Redux, in 3, 2, 1.

0:26 Hello, my name is Haysan Sorels, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. No episode number on this one. This is a bonus episode today. I want to open up before we really get started and jump in with an excerpt from the essay we're actually going to be Recovering from a previous episode today. And I quote from the writer. The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window among the onions and carrots the slogan Workers of the World Unite. Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?

1:12 Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean? I think it can be safely assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our green grocer from the enterprise headquarters, along with the onions and the carrots.

1:49 He put them all under the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there would be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window. Someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life. quote unquote, in harmony with society, as they say.

2:23 Obviously, the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit. He does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign. And as such, it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: I, the greengrocer XY, live here, and I know what I must do.

2:58 I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient, and therefore I have the right to be left in peace. This message, of course, has an addressee. It is directed above. to the greengrocer's superior. And at the same time, it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those interests?

3:41 Entrance. And that is a reading from the post, the essay that we are going to cover today, an essay actually that we've covered on this show in episode number 102 with our guest co-host at the time, Libby Unger. And you can go back and listen to that episode. This essay tied in with thoughts we had around War and Peace, City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo, and of course, our thoughts we had about the author and the UAW and the nature of what really Labor Day means when we really celebrate that day at the end of the summer.

4:26 However, it's been a couple of years since we've looked at this essay on this podcast, and our guest co-host today actually reached out to us and said, hey, uh, wouldn't it be interesting to talk about this again? Thus, this is a Redux episode. Think like Francis Ford Coppola when he, uh, when he did that movie Apocalypse Now, and then he re-released it with a bunch of extra items and he called it Apocalypse Now Redux. Or think about The Godfather, one of my favorite movies that of course starts off with the opening line, I believe in America.

5:03 Which, by the way, I do too. That was even re-released probably about 20 years ago with some extra bonus footage. Well, this is what we are doing today, but we're doing it in a little bit of a different way with a new guest co-host. Now, this essay is really important And I want to emphasize this up front in addressing the idea of holding individual conscience pure and resisting societal overreach, whether in a society that claims to be quote unquote free and democratic, but is not in practical terms, or in a society that refuses to recognize its own growing tyrannical Tendencies, even those at the cultural and social level, which, by the way, is where they always start before they are hardened into public policy and then into law that needs to be enforced by someone.

6:13 We're going to talk about a lot of this. We're going to revisit some of the questions that we had a couple of years ago when we looked at this essay. And of course, we're going to do this, as I said before, with a new guest co-host today that I want to bring on in just a moment. So you may be wondering what this essay is. Well, today we are going to be covering The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel. Leaders, it's been a couple of years since we read this, but the, the winds and the tides Have shifted a little bit.

6:50 And now we're in a little bit of a different space where being a dissident or cosplaying being a dissident doesn't have as much social utility as it previously did. But all the social utility still hasn't drained completely out of the pool. So it's worthwhile for us to pay attention to it. By reading this episode, by reading this essay today.

7:19 And to join us in our conversation, to walk along our path, walk along our journey, is our returning— well, not even our returning, our new co-host, as I said before, Harvey Seifter. Now Harvey's going to introduce himself. He's going to talk a little bit about himself. So I'm going to get out of the way and let him do that. But I would like to welcome him to the show. So how you doing today, Harvey? How's it going? Doing great, Jesan, and thank you so much for having me on the show today. And thanks so much for focusing, taking the time, coming back to The Power of the Powerless and Havel's work, because I think it's so important for our time and really for all time.

7:57 Absolutely. And it's hyper important, I think, for leaders, because leadership really has to think clearly. One of the things that we talked about recently in our covering of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the tragedy, or maybe not the tragedy, the life of Henry V. We talked a lot about category errors. And I think one of the challenges of our time is that leaders in particular, but this whole, but folks and individuals in society in general, because we are bombarded with so much information, are challenged by making errors of category.

8:33 We don't actually know how to qualify things and put them in their right boxes. And so there's a lot of cultural confusion. And Havel, in his essay, doesn't suffer from any of this. He doesn't suffer from categorical confusion. He knows the categories. He understands the boxes. He's asking the questions. And this is, this serves as a sort of beacon for leaders, I believe. And that's why we're revisiting this. One of the many reasons why we're revisiting this as well. So, Harvey, why don't you tell folks about who you are and about what you do?

9:04 Okay, terrific. Thank you. So, um, maybe the best way to, to, to kind of put this all together is to start with the beginning, which is that I learned to read music before I learned to read English. It was my first language. Uh, classically trained violinist, uh, conductor, uh, played in orchestras, conducted orchestras. In college, I started hanging out with the rougher crowd, so I did theater. And so music and theater were kind of the— were the starting point for me with, with, with, with pretty much everything.

9:36 But, um, had a considerable career in theater, directing, producing, directing theaters. I was the director of Theater for the New City in New York in the '80s in the East Village. I was its executive director and then went out to San Francisco, the Magic Theater, and so did hundreds of new plays, experimental work, all different kinds of— Along the way, I found myself as the director of a really remarkable orchestra called Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. So Orpheus is one of the world's great orchestras.

10:09 It's also known as the conductorless orchestra. It's the only orchestra in the world that rehearses and records and performs all of its work without a conductor. And in that process, I began to discover all kinds of things about how orchestras work, how music is made, and how ensembles work, but more broadly about how teams work, how collaboration can happen. And I began to discover that there were things in the way that the orchestra worked that had really powerful implications for organizations, for businesses, and precisely the direction that the world was moving.

10:40 So I started— began to explore that in a structured way, set up a laboratory in the City University, taught a bunch of courses in organizational psychology and leadership with the orchestra. Eventually, we began to form a management consulting practice. We, we, as we barnstormed the world with our concerts and performed all over, uh, in great concert halls by night, we essentially rehearsed those pieces by day in front of Fortune 500 audiences as process demonstrations. After some years of doing that, I kind of came to the conclusion that there was something really important that was happening here beyond just what you could learn from the conductorless orchestra.

11:19 More broadly, what you could learn from art and from artistic skills and processes, practices that could have a really powerful set of impacts and implications for a pretty broad range of human endeavor. Began— I wrote a book about it. There was a Harvard case study about this. There are a lot of different things that began to grow from it. And then eventually I formed a partnership with the National Science Foundation. I formed my first organization, the Art of Science Learning, as a research center funded by the National Science Foundation and gathered lots of data, did lots of experimental studies and research looking at what is the actual impact of the arts and arts-based learning on leaders, on innovation, on creativity, on the way people think, the way people behave, their resilience, their empathy, all of these different kinds of things.

12:05 And then eventually began to also scale that into organizations, developed a partnership with GE, and we, we set up an arts-based learning center on the Crotonville campus, scaled it across the GE Global Leadership Platform, working with And that's 35,000 leaders all over the world. So that's a little bit about my background and work. I formed my second organization, Creating Futures at Work, to continue to bring it into organizations. It's also, among other things now, we also do incubators for innovation.

12:37 We have a whole network of coaches around the world that we've certified and trained in our techniques and also some of the assessment tools that we've gathered. It all has come together in recent years in those areas, but also with an increasing focus on ethics and the relationship between ethics, art, innovation, and the future. So let me pause here before you jump into Power of the Powerless and sort of how that book has impacted you. I wrote down several— I wrote down, took a couple of notes as you were talking, as you could tell.

13:12 So you have that strong music and theater background. And you've got The Art of Science Learning and Creating Futures That Work as both of your organizations. And we'll have links to both of those in the show notes so you can go check out Harvey's work and maybe connect with him and see if you want to bring him into your organization and do some work with him. I have a background in the arts as well. Most people don't know this because I don't necessarily trumpet it everywhere. But my bachelor's degree is in the fine arts.

13:41 I had an emphasis in printmaking and drawing, also in painting, and I did a fair bit of dabbling in sculpture. I was always more of a visual arts guy because I was hooked into comics when I was like 6 years old, and then from there I was off to the races, you know. And the thing that I have discovered in the course of my non-arts career, because I went into conflict resolution, I went into administration, and then I went into entrepreneurship and Now I am here in the place where I am at now, as a podcast host, you know, a book author and consultant and other, other, other things in the space of leadership development.

14:22 What I have discovered is, and maybe you share this observation as well, while the actual physical act of making a piece of visual art, I don't do on the regular basis anymore. I still have retained over the course of 20 years, the ability that the discipline of being in the arts gave me, which for me was the ability to see. And this is the way I frame it to folks who aren't in the arts. Yeah. And when I say see, I mean, observe carefully, observe closely to be able to see the inside of things. You talk about leading with empathy and engaging around empathy.

15:02 I don't frame it in those kinds of terms. in the social-emotional learning kinds of terms. I frame it more in just the observation and characterization terms, right? So not only be able to see inside of a piece of art, being able to spot a Picasso at 500 feet and know the difference between that and, you know, a Rubens or something like that, right? But also in being able to see how people engage with each other or being able to see how organizations can grow or being able to see how teams interact.

15:33 And so for me, it's a term I frame it in terms of sight. I don't know if that resonates with you, but that's where I come from in my arts background. That's incredibly powerful. It's a wonderful way of putting it, Hasan. So we do a tremendous amount of work with observation, with sight, and actually with all of the senses. And the, you know, when you work with art, you learn to see things that other people don't. You learn to see the world in ways that other people really can't. We do lots of very, very basic work.

16:02 What happens when you turn something upside down? And how does it look? What do you learn? What emerges? We work with negative space as a concept. So we work with many, many different dimensions of seeing and hearing and touching and feeling and all of the senses. And then we also work a lot with connection because that's another thing that you get by working with art. You learn to see the world in other ways. You learn to connect on levels that other people really can't. And it opens up those possibilities tremendously.

16:36 And then there's a third thing that happens once you can actually see. And once you can connect, you can create, you can build, you can make things. And it's an incredibly powerful, rich, multidimensional doorway into your own possibilities, the possibilities in the world around you. And how do you move from this realm of people think about ideas all the time? And a lot of people think that innovation is actually coming up with great ideas that other people should do. And anybody who's ever made any art of any kind knows exactly what that's not and what that is.

17:10 That's right. That's right. Well, you know, I, I tell my kids, you know, and my wife was an art educator for many, many years, you know, was a photographer, owned her own photography business for a long time. And now, you know, we homeschool our kids and we raise them in an arts an arts household, you know, reading literature. And I've talked about this on the show before, but reading literature, having deep conversations around a wide range of areas, teaching my children not what to think, but how to think has been incredibly important for myself and my wife, you know, in raising our kids to be future leaders, which is what I consistently tell them that they're always— that's what we're doing, right?

17:56 Whether they are accepting of that currently or not. It doesn't matter. Like, by default, you're going to be a leader. I hate to tell you this. The way we're— what we're pushing out of this household, sorry, it's going to default to you, right? And you're going to be equipped, by the way, in order to be able to do that, even if you don't go into the arts, even if you go into— like, one of my children is very science-oriented, extremely science-oriented. And she's going to go into either the sciences or the law, depending upon, like, sort of where her, where her track is.

18:28 Another one of my children, she is really focused on becoming the best, well, not right now, but she's becoming the best like public servant and civil servant she possibly can while also balancing that with trying to be a homemaker and all of that. I've got my older son, he's a reporter. And so journalism, I mean, getting into all of that. And then my youngest son, the, the, the, the, you know, he's, he's 9. So like the water's still, you know, forming, right? The Jell-O hasn't yet, hasn't yet. You know, the gel was still shaky in the mold, right?

18:59 So, but it's okay. It's coming along. You know, he's reading books. He's beginning to think. He's beginning to put ideas together, things like that. And so I'm saying all that to say that I think the way you framed how we move from seeing to connection to possibility to creativity, I wish more of the conversation around innovation, and we'll get, again, we'll get to Power of the Powerless here in just a moment. But I wish more of the conversation around innovation and around the desire for innovation would move from a mechanized engineering financialized sort of move to more of what you're talking about.

19:38 And this is why I love what you're doing here with both the Art of Science Learning and Creating Futures That Work. Well, you know, you're describing such a rich generative kind of environment that I've been going back now to your kids and what they're experiencing, and the ways that these things come together. And I think it was Steve Jobs who once said that he didn't really understand the distinction between an artist and a scientist because they're just all trying to answer the same fundamental questions using different ways.

20:07 But I, you know, when I first formed the Art of Science Learning and we were kind of hunting around what's the right thing to name this organization, and there's a quote by Leonardo da Vinci that I've always loved, and the quote is, study the art of science and the science of art, learn that everything connects to everything else. And that's actually how we named the Art of Science Learning. And I think these things do connect really powerfully. And art brings us that ability to see and to connect and to engage and to create.

20:38 And science brings us all kinds of powerful tools that help us to also see in fresh ways and connect and create. It helps us to measure and to ground and to make things purposeful. So when we can bring that all together, But, you know, and now to maybe segue for a minute, Havel. Havel, in the literary tradition that he grew out of, and the writers who were the early dissidents before they were even thought of as dissidents, going back to the '50s and the '60s when Havel was really just starting out in his theater and so forth.

21:14 And there was a phrase Stalin used this in the '30s. Mm-hmm. in the '30s, he called writers the engineers of souls. And there was a great friend of Havel's, a colleague, a Czech writer by the name of Skravecky, who later emigrated to Canada. And he wrote this wonderful novel, The Engineer of Human Souls. And I think of that, and I thought of that book actually as I was rereading for the 3rd time in my life, The Power of the Powerless, in order to prep for this podcast. And I, and I, my mind went back to that novel, actually, because there is this idea, okay, so systems, systems are everything.

21:54 Systems are so powerful. And we think about systems constantly. And if we can just come up with the right systems, everything will work. And we can just engineer the human soul. And of course, Havel says front and center, square on in The Power of the Powerless, systems actually are irrelevant. Systems are not the issue. You cannot improve the world by making better systems. You can improve the world by living better lives. And if you do, you will create better systems. Mm-hmm.

22:32 There's a desire in our culture And it's been a desire for a long time. I think that it really got on steroids when the commercial internet got turned on in 1989, and we didn't realize it at the time. We didn't realize just how

22:51 impactful the internet was actually going to be. We had no clue. And it's been almost 50 years since the commercial internet got turned on in 1989 by Timothy Berners-Lee. We're almost at the 50th anniversary of that. And we still don't really understand what the internet is doing. We really don't get it. And when you talk about the engineer of human souls, I look at our tools, right? And we are just as much a product of our tools as our tools are a product of us. I'm beginning to sort of mash around with this idea.

23:27 And, and I think it's a good time to begin to mash around with this idea because LLMs are coming. And that's the next steroid level up, you know, on top of the internet. And when you talk about Havel and you talk about the background that he came out of, and by the way, I got to be honest, and I mentioned this in the previous episode too, episode number 102, when we talked with Libby Unger, I always confuse Havel with, or at least I always used to confuse him with Lech Walesa. I always used to confuse the 2 guys in my head, you know, and it's because when he was, when the fall of the Soviet Union happened, happened in '89.

24:04 You know, I was like 10 years old when this happened, you know. So I remember sitting on the floor watching it on television, and my father was kind of going crazy because he— I mean, nobody in that generation at that time thought, right, that it would ever— that the Berlin Wall would ever— that was—

24:20 people today, 40 years later, don't understand how revolutionary that actually was when it happened. No. So that, I mean, that's That moment, I'm sorry, I didn't— Yeah, no, no, no, you're right. That, that moment was the moment. Incredible. For me, that moment was the moment and that broader moment of just when that was emerging. That's when I actually read Power of the Powerless for the first time. I got to know Havel as a playwright because my background is in theater and I was interested in his plays and I began to read them and, and I began to really find myself drawn to these strange worlds that they were talking about that I sort of got.

25:02 and sort of didn't. And this incredible hollowness in his characters, not in the characters themselves, but in the lives that they were living and the disconnect between those lives and what these characters were trying to actually do and feel and emerge and experience. That I scratched my head at that and wondered, what is all of that? And then a couple of years later, in around 1984, '83, '84, I, I got a fellowship, uh, from the Goethe Institute, and I went and spent time in, in Europe for the first significant time, for the first time.

25:38 And I, and I went to, to Germany. I was doing work in theater, and part of that took me to East Germany back in the bad old days. So I was spending time in East Berlin, and I saw this up front and very close. And I mean, incredible things to see and to experience, but but raising even more questions. I remember that when I was in East Berlin at that time, so because I was a Western minor dignitary of sorts and on an official visit and so on and so forth, so they set me up to have lunch with the Deputy Minister of Culture for East Berlin.

26:17 And so in old East Berlin, where life was kind of grim and kind of that way. But it wasn't— I mean, it wasn't suffering in the sense that there was a level of prosperity and reasonable comfort. I mean, people weren't going hungry. They were, you know, they could take, you know, vacations in the East Bloc and so on and so forth. But it was a very constrained and kind of hollow existence in that sense. Mm-hmm. But right in the middle of that, there was this one square where all the arts organizations And everything in East Berlin was gray and drab, and this one square, everything was gold and red and burgundy and beautifully, warmly, richly lit.

27:00 And if you put your connections together for a year, you might be able to score a couple of tickets to go with your wife to the opera and maybe have a dinner in, in, in, in, in the restaurant there and have a different kind of life. So that's where he took me, and There was a lot of drinking at that time among the people who were in official positions. And also what was happening at that time is that Dallas was really popular in American TV. Yes. And so it was illegal but universally done among

27:37 the power of East Germany that they would be watching Western TV, especially Dallas. So I was having this lunch with this guy, And all of a sudden, apropos of absolutely nothing, but after 5 or 6 beers, he looked at me very pugnaciously and he said, you know, I get a feeling of pride as a German when I watch Dallas on Western television. And there was no context then at all. So I just sort of said, yeah, exactly that kind of— what is this? What? But I figured, okay, I'll bite. And he said, I get a feeling of pride as a German because I see that an American millionaire is driving a Mercedes-Benz.

28:15 So 2 things happened to me at that moment. I registered all of those contradictions. The first, this was 5 years before the Berlin Wall fell down. But at that moment, I knew it was coming. I could just feel it. I mean, the hollowness. But the other thing was, I suddenly understood the hollowness of Havel's characters. They were all putting up these official signs that they And they were living their lives around it. And none of them believed any of it. And yeah, inauthenticity was just killing the society.

28:51 This opens up the door to something that I want to talk about, that inauthenticity, that, that hollowness, that disconnection that you're talking about. So I would assert that In the year of our Lord 2026, and I'm just using that as an appellation because that's the appellation you use, we are experiencing the same sort of hollowness that you saw in East Germany, except the hollowness is the disconnect between

29:25 the face people put online, the avatars we all walk around with. in our very online interactions that we have and the real lives we actually live with real people in real life, IRL, right? In real life. Perfectly said. I, I, that, yes. Yes. And I think the challenge for young leaders, the challenge for young people overall, but young leaders in particular. And when I say young, I do mean chronologically young. I mean the 18 to 34-year-old folks, the massive challenge that they are having right now is They don't have a dissident writer

30:05 that can express in a Václav Havel theater writer kind of way that hollowness. They don't really have that. And this is why I'll trace this to pop culture because one of the other things is I'm a huge film guy, right? We talk a lot about film on this show. And my regular co-host, Tom Libby, He and I are both film fans and film, we just, oh my God, I'm ridiculous with film, right? And where that hollowness would be exposed is in film, but the writers in the room were raised in that hollowness. And so they don't see it as being hollow.

30:48 It's just the way that it is. So you have a generation of people that are in the writer's room, and that's the millennial generation who are currently in the writer's rooms. of Hollywood television shows and movies right now being led by Gen Xers whose only response to the hollowness was to build the internet because they thought that that was the place where they were going to go. And so they built the internet with all these assumptions, but the internet turned out to not have weight to it at all.

31:15 It turned out to be hollow for as much as an impact as it has had, it turned out to be hollow. So they didn't have the gift to give the millennials other than hollowness. The millennial writers are now operating underneath that hollowness, and the Gen Z audiences that are looking for meaning

31:35 don't have a writer who has the chops or even the guts and the courage to engage with that hollowness in the way that Havel did for his generation in not only East Germany, but across Eastern Europe as well. Am I onto something here, or is this a terrible analogy? I don't think it's a terrible analogy at all, but, but I, I guess I would look at it maybe as a reverse way of thinking about, about this. So, Havel would say

32:10 each person is the master of their own fate. That actually is a line from Temptation. a really extraordinary play of his, which I directed in, in, in, in, in, in, in 1990, actually, right as all this was going on. And it's his own version of the Faust story. And it's both wildly satirical and it's, it's, it hits home very powerfully. So Havel would say

32:39 authenticity lies not in what teachers teach us, It doesn't lie in the systems that we build or the structures that we create. It lies in how we construct our lives. And construct means live. The choices that we make and how those align with who we actually are as people, as humans, as moral agents responsible for those choices and those outcomes. So Havel looked at the world around him and he said, there's 2 things going on here. One is that, that we live in a, in a, in a what he called a post-totalitarian society.

33:17 What all he meant with that is that it's a more subtle form of unfreedom where in the totalitarian society you had Big Brother who was controlling everything. And in the post-totalitarian society, through skillful manipulation of rewards and punishments and social currents and all the rest, it's simply Big Brother is simply implanted inside ourselves. So we will actually censor and regulate ourselves. Okay, so that's, that's, that's the first part of this. But the second part is Hodel, and, and, and he was very clear in, in his way of viewing it, his orientation, and it was very clear in the world that, that, that we all lived in at that time.

33:58 The locus of the worst of that was to be found in, in, in Soviet Union, East Bloc, and communist countries. That it was not exclusively there, but that, but that was sort of centered. But then he also said there's another side to it. And here the worst part isn't necessarily found in the communist countries. It's often found in the capitalist countries, or it's often found in, in, in what we think of as democratic societies. And that is the hollowness of not having a purpose, the hollowness of not having something that is more important to you than the fulfillment of basic material goods, needs, and pleasures.

34:36 Okay. And that is really kind of critical because if you look at now, fast forward to Havel a half generation later, now as the president of this country and what he was dealing with and, and, and the society that he was trying to help shape, guide, lead, help emerge. It's not just about how do you actually free yourself from the post-totalitarian constraints that we've implanted inside of ourselves and which we're encouraged to and coerced to, to a high degree. But it's also a question of what matters to us and to what extent are we actually ready to stand in that place, because that's what Havel called living in truth.

35:20 And if you do that, you have unbelievable, immense, enormous power. That is the power of the powerless.

35:33 Let me pick up with that idea of living in truth with this from Power, The Power of the Powerless. I want to go to page 49 in the essay there. We're gonna pick up there, kind of where we, where we talked about a little bit before, um, in the previous episode, episode number 102. Um, I'm gonna pick this up here. This is from part 14 of his essay. And I quote directly from Václav Havel, backing up Harvey here. The post-totalitarian system is mounting a total assault on humans, and humans stand against it alone, abandoned and isolated.

36:12 It is therefore entirely natural that all the dissident movements are explicitly defensive movements. They exist to defend human beings and the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system. Today, the Polish group KOR is called the Committee for Social Self-Defence. The word defence appears in the names of other similar groups in Poland, but even the Soviet Helsinki Monitoring Group and our own Charter 77 are clearly defensive in nature. In terms of traditional politics, this programme of defence is understandable, even though it may appear minimal, provisional, and ultimately negative.

36:46 It offers no new conception, model, or ideology, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of the word, since politics always assumes a positive programme and can scarcely limit itself to defending someone against something.

37:01 Such a view, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionally political way of looking at things. The post-totalitarian system, after all, is not the manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is something radically different. It is a complex, profound, and long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation of society. To oppose it merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come near to touching the root of the matter.

37:32 For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political line or program. It is a problem of life itself. Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity, is not only a more realistic approach, Since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it concerns people's everyday lives. At the same time, and perhaps precisely because of this, it is also an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the very essence of things. There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

38:12 It seems to me that today this provisional, minimal, and negative program, the simple defense of people, is in a particular sense, and not merely in the circumstances in which we live, an optimal and most positive program because it forces politics to return to its only proper starting point. Proper, that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided, individual people. To Harvey's point here, in the democratic societies where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen.

38:43 And some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics. In our world, precisely because of the misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politics has already undergone that transformation. The central concerns of political thought is no longer abstract visions of a self-redeeming positive model. And of course, the opportunistic political practices that are in the— that are the reverse of the same coin. But rather the people who have so far merely been enslaved by those models and their practices.

39:20 Again, he's writing this in the '80s. We live in 2026 in the West, ostensibly, and we are there. We are there. This is why On the dissident alt-right, you know, online, Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless has become an essay that's been passed around like Samizdat, around and around and around. Because the recognition is, as the very online rightist people would say, we can't vote our way harder out of this problem. The problem is the system itself. It's the problem is not progressive and conservative.

40:04 The problem is not even a uniparty. The problem is the system itself. It's the nature of the thing we have. But, but Havel would say the problem is not the system. Right, right, right. He would say it's in the individuals. It's in the people. It's in the people. Right. Exactly. This is, this is, this is the, this is where we have met the enemy and he is us. And he's ourselves. That's right. He is us. And this is where I think,

40:31 now again, I want to be as broad as possible in this. This is the, the, the both the triumph and the tragedy of Donald Trump's election. So the triumph is the idea that just like in the Roman Republic, one man can save a system. That's a very Roman idea. But then the tragedy is just like in Coriolanus that we read here when we, when we covered Shakespeare, right? You know, that one man can't actually save the system. And by the way, it's not up to one man. It's up to the plebeians to save themselves and to recognize, to your point, where the problems exist in their own, in their own souls.

41:15 Thus, I get to where I'm going with this, which is in our society, we have lawn signs and bumper stickers where people proclaim, just like the greengrocer, they proclaim— We have a lot of greengrocers. Yeah, we have a lot of greengrocers. Oh my God. And, and on social media, we have a lot of meme posters who are also greengrocers. Right, right. Yep. And the lack of critical thought, which is part of the reason why I do this podcast. I do this podcast because I have critical thoughts. Right? Not critic thoughts, critical thoughts, right?

41:58 The lack of critical thought behind social signaling is a psychocultural phenomenon that we're just beginning to wrestle with at this moment in the West. This is the thing that Havel predicted.

42:12 Yeah. He predicted it because he was living in the middle of a vast environment and network built on that. It comes in cycles.

42:27 You know, this, this actually kind of makes me think, and just to kind of pause for a moment on that, although I want to get back to that point. But so everything that we've been talking about so far has been, for me, what I experienced or what I thought about or what I lived through the first time I read this book. So I read this book a second time. I came back to it. I came back to it actually first— I made my first visit to Prague around 2000, and none of this was especially particularly on my mind.

43:09 I was there with Orpheus and I was planning concerts and getting ready to do something. So I have an unusual last name. And it's sufficiently unusual that if you share the same last name, it's not— we don't have to go too far back. We can figure out the relationship. Okay, so my practice has been for many, many years. I travel to different parts of the world back before the internet was pervasive, and it wasn't really that pervasive yet in 2000 in Eastern Europe or Central Europe. So I would go to the phone book.

43:44 So I was in Prague. I had a few minutes between things, and I popped into a phone booth, and sure enough, there's a phone book there. So I looked for Seifter, particularly since I knew my grandfather actually was from there and so forth. So, so sure enough, there's a Seifter there. His name is Pavel Seifter. So I figured, okay, I reached in, dropped a couple of coins in the phone. Called up, and against all odds, somebody picked up the phone. So, and so, so there was this guy. So I, I would, I sort of started in German.

44:20 I speak Czech and lots of people speak German. So I thought I would start in German. So, so I explained, and I got as far as, ich heiße Seifter, my name is Seifter. And he said, where and when should we meet? So 20 minutes later, downstairs in Old Town Square and looking around, and I met who I learned after several hours of reconstruction was my cousin Paul, who was considerably older and who had actually, through a circuitous story, his life as an infant had been saved by my grandfather, who raised money to get him out just ahead of the Germans as they moved in in '38.

45:10 Yeah. So Pavel, who was only by chance that he was there, it was actually his daughter's apartment. He lived in London. And as the story became clear, so Pavel was a close friend and colleague of Havel. He was a signer of Charter 77. He had been in prison. He had been through all kinds of things. He spent many, many years after getting his PhD as a young man in history from Charles University, Washington windows there, for his dissidence. And then in the end, when Havel triumphed and the Velvet Revolution happened, he invited my cousin Pavel to join him in the palace.

45:59 He became his national security advisor. orchestrated the entry into NATO. And as his final job before retiring, he asked, where would you like to go? And Pavel said, I'd like to go to London. So Pavel made a visit passing. So he had such an extraordinary vantage point on all this, and that immediately triggered my thinking about The Power of the Powerless. And I went back and I read it a second time. And I really immersed myself in it deeply. And this also was, uh, when 9/11 happened. Mm-hmm. And I was sort of rereading that in that context and thinking about that.

46:39 And what does it mean to live in truth? Uh, I was actually, uh, on my way to Hong Kong when 9/11 happened. And, uh, I was in a, a quick, immediate, uh, uh, bubble of people that were, uh, experiencing this together from all over the world. And so many of them were actually not taking a perspective that, uh, that I found that I could live with because, well, maybe America had it coming to it. And all the support for Israel, all, all the other things that, that, that started emerging immediately, that also made me think a lot about what it meant to live in truth and what it meant authenticity So the book became a kind of a touchstone for me.

47:25 And the culmination of this second reading in this story came a few years later. So in 2009, I was invited by the International Leadership Association to give a keynote concert at— in Prague on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. They did their little conference there that year for that reason. And so, and I reached out to the Prague Chamber Orchestra and we developed a program together and did it at the Liechtenstein Palace. And as I dove deeply into the history, as it happened, I wasn't expecting this, but this building, this building, this magnificent building had so many strange things in its history.

48:10 Decapitated rebels and histories around that. It turned out that this building was actually then the headquarters of the German railroad that was routing the trains to Auschwitz.

48:28 This building was used by Stalin to, to, to, to be the center for political reeducation after the war, and they built in his honor the largest statue of Stalin in the world. And Havel came in, and he had many problems to deal with. This building, this palace, was not the top one on the list. But on the other hand, Sohabel believes that small spaces matter incredibly, that public choices matter incredibly, and that authenticity matters. And of course, he's an artist. And so he reflected a lot about this building and its history.

49:10 And he came to the conclusion that this building represented a really profound opportunity. He did something amazing. This whole long history of this building, it had never been used for anything that anybody could call a good purpose. He took this building and he turned it into a center for art and culture and for young musicians to learn. And by that simple act of taking Stalin's statue and the German railroads and the bloody patriots of the 17th century who were decapitated there and battle plans and the rest of it in that building and turning it into a center for art and creation, of culture, of observing the world, connecting with the world, creating in the world, building things in the world.

49:57 That took something and it also showed something. What it took was a profound act of moral imagination. And to me, that's at the heart of my second reading of this, of this. This is, this is an essay about the moral imagination. The ability to imagine a world that's different. And he did that, but he also realized something else. This is something that I think is so powerful and so important and so urgently needed in the world. He recognized people are always talking about how do we transform? How do we bridge to the future?

50:36 How do we become one with this? And what Havel is saying With that act, just as he said it in, in different words, but he said it in, in The Power of the Powerless. If you want to transform, you must first transcend. You must take that step into truth. You must transcend the environment that you're in. You have to become that other person. Once you do that, transformation is a piece of cake. That's then just how you live. But until you do that, you're nope. So that's powerful. That's, that's, that's, that's powerful.

51:19 And I would assert that while a person with an engineering background might have the moral imagination to get there, maybe a person with a financial background might have the moral imagination to get there. I would assert that only a person with a deeply artistic background has the moral imagination to get there.

51:40 That's the first thing that occurs to me. The second thing that occurs to me as you were speaking, among the many notes that I took here, this is a powerful observation.

51:54 The kind of moral imagination. That is necessary to understand that place. I'll make this even more abstract, that the physical world buttresses on and impacts the spiritual world. And I'm not talking about this in a religious context. I'm talking about this in a broad, broad context. We can get to the narrow religion if we want later on, but in a broad context, the material world and the spiritual world. interact. So I'm part of a, I'm part of a men's group. We meet on, we meet on Wednesdays. We're all Christians.

52:32 We all go to different churches and we get together and we have lunch and we talk about biblical things, right? I do this once a week, every week with these guys. I've been doing it for about a year, year and a half now. And it doesn't matter which part of the Bible we were reading, but the question that was in front of us was,

52:53 Why, or not why, does, which is a better question, does a material sacrifice, no, does a spiritual sacrifice require a material element in order to be effective? Now that's a hugely powerful question. It's almost a rabbinical question, actually. It's a hugely powerful question, right? And we only have 45 minutes for lunch. we're not going to get to the end of this question. Like, it's just not, it's just not going to happen.

53:23 Plus, we're like 4 dudes who all have different jobs in different places. Like, we got, you know, we got, you know, we're just regular schmucks, right? Just hanging out trying to figure this out, right? And it's interesting that I had this conversation yesterday with these guys and you're bringing this up today because I think what you're talking about with Havel is part of the answer to this question and what he understood was the sacrifice of this building with all of its bloody history.

53:52 That history had to be— I'm going to use a spiritual term here— it had to be atoned for, but not in the destruction of the building. Right. It had to be atoned for in the changing of the material nature of what goes on in the building. And then let people with their— you talk about individuals rather than systems and institutions. Let individuals have the freedom to come in, and freedom is the key word there. Freedom to come in, bring their spirit with them, and then the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual atonement can continue on another level that quite frankly, even Havel, myself, the guys in my group, even Harvey here doesn't really understand.

54:34 Right. We just know it works. We're just in tune with it. We know it works. We don't know why. We don't know how. As I, as I sometimes put it, or as I put it in the group conversation I was having yesterday with my, with the folks in my men's group, that's happening 1,200 levels above me. I have no idea. I don't know. I just know that like, even in the Old Testament, even in the Torah, when Abraham brought Isaac to the mountain,

55:02 And there was still, and even when Isaac was spared, and if you want to go back and read that in the book of Genesis, go back and read that. But Isaac was spared. Don't touch the boy. Not a hand goes on him. Not one. But here's a ram in the thicket. There has to be some material element that somehow ties into a spiritual sacrifice and even into a spiritual atonement. And I think that that's what Havel was getting at with the rededication of this building to something else. And I think it's only artists that get that at a deep level and understand that deep But they operate to it out of instinct.

55:34 And of course, you recognized it because you're coming out of the theater, you're coming out of music. And I don't even know if you would have articulated it that way back in the day. But I think that's what you sensed.

55:45 Yeah. Yeah, it's a rich journey. It's an incredible journey that that building was on, that he was on, that each of us are on. Right. And the moral imagination, to know that and to recognize that you're on that journey is something that I think we're, we're lacking in the West. We're lacking at an individual level. We lack it. Moral imagination. I think of moral imagination as a skill, actually. Okay. I think we don't practice it enough. And the thing is that with, with, as with all skills, you get good at it by practicing it.

56:25 Yeah. Or it'll atrophy if you never use it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so this gets into the question here that you posed, which you're posing it and Havel has posed it. So I'm going to challenge you with this question because our listeners are going to be listening to this. They're going to be going, okay, Hasan, you're going all esoteric here on me. Okay, fine. We'll tolerate some of this, but at a certain point, you got to get practical with me, right? And, you know, that's good because I am at the bottom a pragmatic guy.

56:53 I could do the abstract stuff, but at the bottom, like what works and what doesn't and do the things that work. Right. Right. Um, so what does it mean to live in truth at a practical level? Like if I'm listening to this, if I've made it this far in the episode where, you know, we're, we're, we're about an hour, we're about an hour or so in now. I made it an hour in. I've wandered down this journey.

57:19 Okay, what does it mean practically to live in truth? Because if, you know, my listeners, maybe it's a guy who's a carpenter, you know, and he's hammering nails, right? And I'm not diminishing carpenters. Well, like, that's, that's the job that he's done, right? We need carpenters. Heck, I need carpenters. I'm an amateur carpenter. I know how hard that job is. Or maybe he's a truck driver, you know, listening to this, driving across country, delivering loads. Or maybe he works in the oil and gas field.

57:44 Or maybe he's on his way on the bus or her on her way on the bus

57:50 to go do a job that maybe they weren't exactly excited about doing, but it feeds their family. Or maybe they're in a white-collar work situation where they don't have a chance to be artistic because now they're fighting a war of justifying their job, you know, to someone. Who sold their boss on an AI solution for what they're doing. And they've been thinking they've been bringing practical value. And now they're being told that they're not. What do we say to those people? Because when we say you have to, you must live in truth, that sounds very pie in the sky.

58:28 Break that down practically. What does it mean if I'm a regular person to live in truth? What does that actually mean? What does that actually look like? How do I actually do that in a meaningful way? Yeah. So it's a great question. I'm going to suggest there are actually 2 questions embedded in this. So one is the how, and the other is

58:52 how much of this do I have to do? And that's kind of an important question too, because there's always a cost. And so, so what do we mean? But let's, let's, let's start with the how. So for Havel, the definition is really simple.

59:16 Do you know who you are? Do you recognize what matters to you?

59:26 Really? And of course, that question has been in Western philosophy since the Greeks from the beginning. It's been— Yeah, Plato, Plato was writing down Socrates and stuff, struggling with that going all the way back. Yeah, please. Exactly. But what he's really asking, go back to our greengrocer here, is, so do you actually care about workers of the world uniting? Okay. If you do, then, you know, that's a reasonable starting point for why you should put this out of there quickly. And if you don't, Then there are all kinds of issues and problems and questions.

1:00:06 But Havel is basically saying, okay, now look at the, look at the negative space agreement. Look at, flip that assumption on its head. He's saying, okay, you don't care about that, but you're going to put a sign up. What, what's the price to you? What's the cost?

1:00:28 And that comes back to who are you? If you don't believe it, but you're putting it up, there is a cost to it. Now you have to weigh that against the practical costs of not doing it and not compliance and all of that. So it doesn't lead to a simple, so you must do it because that's the law. But what it does lead you to is recognizing, okay, I'm, I'm not living, I'm not living aligned with with who I am, with what I believe, with what I think, with what I want to do. So it kind of starts there for him.

1:01:09 I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. That's my observation here. I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. Yes, I think you're right. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah. Okay. And I think that's also part of what we're still wrestling with because just like we haven't, you mentioned 9/11. We haven't fully wrapped our arms around 9/11 in any kind of meaningful way. And I will be saying this for the rest of my life. We really haven't wrapped our arms around 9/11. And this year, I mean, this is 2026.

1:01:35 This is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Yep. You know, we really fully haven't, we haven't wrapped our arms around that. And then COVID to happen inside of this, what has been a very wild fourth turning, a wild fourth turning moment in our history. Um, no major civil war, weirdly enough, but there's been a lot of, there've been a lot of Donnybrooks, been a lot of things around it that could substitute for that if they were looked at in a different context. Um, but COVID, we still haven't really, we haven't wrapped our arms around that with COVID either, because there were costs to not masking, just like there were costs to putting on the mask.

1:02:19 There were costs to not taking, as I put it on my show, and this is my language, not others, not Harvey's, this is mine, not taking the jab and consequences to taking the jab. Right. There were consequences to that. And there were costs, as I tell my children all the time. And as I tell other folks when they're, if they will listen, I just had 4 conversations about this in different contexts yesterday. Everything costs something. Everything costs something. And those costs are difficult. So when Havel became— actually went to power, and almost immediately he was confronted with something which he hated.

1:03:03 He didn't like being confronted with this at all, which is now, okay, he's the universally acclaimed hero of the revolution and And power to the powerless, to now power to society and to good and all of these things. And immediately his new country that he's installed in, president of, so it's called Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs don't want to be with the Slovaks and the Slovaks don't want to be with the Czechs. Little problem. Mm-hmm. And Havel looked at the whole situation, and he was absolutely horrified because he basically said, as a student of history, as a citizen, as somebody who's thought deeply about, about all of these things, this was insanity.

1:03:53 This was a country that was barely now getting to its feet, and, and one half was considerably richer than the other. They're going to split apart and go separate ways at this moment. It's, it's crazy. It's insane. Bad things will come of it. Our whole trajectory is going to be knocked in its path, and many bad things will come of it. And it's not my place to say that it shouldn't happen. So this is what they want to do. So this is what was meant by them as they had been fighting for this freedom.

1:04:35 It was also the freedom to separate and the freedom to go their separate ways. And he spent months wrestling with this. And then in the end, he just— okay, so let's, let's, let's, let's show the world that we can do this peacefully, democratically. Let's have a vote. Let's, let's, let's, let's make sure that, that no blood is spilled in the process of doing it. And if that's the vote, Then I hate it and I'll sign it.

1:05:06 Yeah, I mean, you didn't need— in the mid-1990s, you didn't need a, you didn't need a 2-parter in Eastern Europe. The, you know, the Serbians and the Croats are already putting on a show. You didn't need a second show. Exactly. It could have so easily gone that way. Right. So You know, these choices about what is, what does it mean to live in truth? It, it, it meant in, in his case, the actual truth behind all the slogans is that he had no alternative to do but to do what he did, much as he hated it.

1:05:44 So this gets to your second question that you said was embedded in my, my larger question, which is, how much of this do I have to do? And so if I'm the carpenter or the truck driver or the mom or the dad or the pastor or the rabbi, or even in our culture today, the imam or the mayor or the whatever, and I see myself as being not even a cog in the system, the system doesn't even know who I am.

1:06:21 How much of this do I have to do? Even though I look around and I see all— because I'm not ignorant and I'm not blind. I see what's happening. I may not be able to categorize it correctly. I may understand that there are moral implications to it and they may morally unsettle me, but I may not have the words or the language to describe what that moral unsettling is. I may make category errors repeatedly in my own mind and not even be able to explain myself Clearly, or if I can explain myself clearly, it's only about things that I'm passionate about, or I've had direct experience, which to me may not translate up, may not scale up the hierarchy.

1:06:58 If I am this person, if I'm the avatar that I'm building as the straw man for this argument, or for this question, not argument for this question. Harvey, how much of this do I actually have to do? My kids got to eat. I've got to eat. I've got a mortgage to pay, Harvey. Yep. Yep. And this, this is, this was such a powerful theme for Havel himself. One of the last plays that he wrote before the revolution and before he pretty much left behind for the most part his playwriting career for something very different was a play called Largo Desolado.

1:07:37 And in that play, The hero of that play, or the antihero of that play, was a great dissident hero who was, had been let out of prison, but was now being constantly shadowed and warned, step out of line and you're going back. And he'd had 10 years in there already. So he knew what was waiting. If he did, he got himself a tenner, as, uh, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have said. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there he is. And, um, And now all of, all of the other dissidents are gathering around his apartment saying, stand up to it.

1:08:09 And he's like, I don't want to go back. I've done this. You know, I support you. I love you. But I just want to live the rest of my life. And Havel writes with such understanding of both sides of that. These are complicated. These aren't black and white things. Nothing that Havel ever wrote or said or believed or did was to paint, to point a finger. We do so much of that today. And the internet culture just sort of fuels that in so many different ways. But he would never say, oh, here's the purity test, and you've got to do that.

1:08:49 Yeah. Then you have to do that. Yeah, it was the opposite of that. What Hubble would actually say is, find what you can do. Find what you can do that actually aligns you with yourself

1:09:06 and do that and do it privately, but not solitarily if you could avoid it. He made that big distinction between private and solitary. So sometimes you have to do things solitary and some things are by their nature solitary pursuits. But he was so interested in these private spaces that we share with as these small spaces, these natural communities that grow together as people find what they can do, what they want to do, what aligns themselves, what allows them, to the extent that they can, to live in truth.

1:09:40 What Havel would say is that the moment that you start doing that, you set things in force in yourself, in your little community, and the broader society. And if that's what you can do, that's wonderful. You have actually done something very powerful. And it's, and we know that it's powerful because if, if, if, if anybody from the government in that case, or the system finds out that you're doing it, they'll let you know that it's powerful by the way they react against you. All right, let me, I got to go to the restroom.

1:10:10 Let me pause here. Okay, good. We'll come back. Very good.

1:10:16 Beautiful. All right, we're back. So, you know, the, the question of what does it mean to live in truth? How do we do that? And how much of this do we actually have to do in a real way? You know, there's something that occurred to me just now as you said that. Yeah. And that, how much do we need to do? So one of the things that I think is, I don't know if Havel ever said this explicitly, but it comes through so much in everything that he He wrote in, in his entire life. And I think it's, it's, it's, it's a subtext theme of The Power of the Powerless, the why we do it.

1:10:56 We don't live in truth, Ahlen would say. I think we're not living in truth because it's good for society. We're not living in truth because it's good for you. We're doing it because it's good for us. It's actually the only way to live that's good for us. And I think that that's kind of the heart of the question. How much?

1:11:27 When we think about dissident movements, people tend to think about it in terms of, um,

1:11:37 To his point earlier, politics, right? We tend to think about it in terms of political framing, right? And he even says in his, in his essay, you know, every society, of course, requires some degree of organization. Yet if that organization is to serve people and not the other way around, then the people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.

1:12:02 And I look at The consternation that has occurred over the last couple of years, um, around the dynamics of what in America we are now calling socialism at a political level, which tie directly back into the dynamics of protesting the government. Which tie directly back into the dynamics of political polarization that started online and then has now spilled out into real life. But let's, let's, let's, let's draw a sharp distinction between, between

1:12:49 socialism and protestism. Okay, so go ahead. Let's draw a sharp distinction. Yeah, let's do that. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I think it's important because I think it's ignored a lot. Okay. So, so Havel talks a lot in The Power of the Powerless. What does it actually mean to be a dissident? And, and he makes it very clear that the stance of a dissident is not, not something that he's actually particularly advocating for or against. It's not— he doesn't find the kind of the moral force or the moral authority or the imagination.

1:13:28 Dissidence. He finds it in the truth. He finds it in living the truth. If that leads him to dissent and dissident behavior, that's where it leads. Okay, then I'm going to ask you a very New Testament question.

1:13:47 That is at the root of some of our challenges in that, and I'm glad you drew the sharp distinction there, but in the muddying of the categories and the lack of distinction that has occurred and has been allowed to occur in our culture over the last 20 years that has led us to the point where we are now. I'm going to ask you this question. Pontius Pilate asked this of Jesus before he was crucified. It's one of the greatest questions in the New Testament. What is truth?

1:14:18 This, the, this is the thing that is at the root of the problems in our time. Because it is. We've wound up at the Nietzschean cul-de-sac after the death of God. And the Nietzschean cul-de-sac is, okay, you killed God. You've said that texts don't matter, right? That's Derrida. You've said that the Foucaultians have won the day. Everything's power. Everything is power, right? There is no truth. There's just who's on top, who's on bottom. And if you're on the bottom and you're oppressed, you have a moral, I would assert, that's the strength of it now, a moral duty to upend the oppressor, to attain power so that you could oppress them.

1:15:08 We've wound up in that Nietzschean cul-de-sac. And what drove Nietzsche crazy, and we've covered Thus Spake Zarathustra, we've talked about Nietzsche on this podcast extensively. You can't get away from him. What drove Nietzsche crazy was he couldn't figure out how we could make our own truth without a transcendent, without an appeal to a transcendent. Right. Okay. That's what's tying us into knots. We want to appeal to politics or to power or to policy or to oppressor-oppressed binaries. But that's not where truth lies.

1:15:47 So the question, I guess, for us here is if we're reading Power, The Power of the Powerless, right? And Havel is confronting us with what this means, right, to live in truth. But I don't even know where truth is because I don't know what it is. I'm haunted by the Pontius Pilate question. And by the way, my friends aren't giving me any answers. My social media feed isn't giving me any answers. Right. My, my education isn't giving me any answers. My mass media popular culture isn't giving me any answers.

1:16:20 As a matter of fact, the answers that I'm getting from the vast majority of those inputs are either the Foucauldian answer, the Derridean answer, or some variation of postmodernism. That's a weird combination of both of those. And so what do I have if I sense that truth is missing? What else do I have? Now, I will say, for me, I'm asking you this question. I will say, for me, the answer is, as a person who is a, who is a Bible-believing Christian and tries to walk that out in all kinds of practical ways, I say truth lies in the biblical corpus.

1:16:53 It's the one book that even Nietzsche couldn't overcome. He couldn't step over it. He tried to, and every other thinker in the West in the last 200 years has tried to, and it beats everybody. I said this on the podcast about the tragedy of, of, or not the tragedy, but the life of Henry V. It's the book that's at the bottom. And we keep butting our heads against that book at the bottom of the Western culture, and we cannot dig past it because that's where the transcendence lies. Even if you don't believe in it, it's still where it lies.

1:17:25 It's still where it lies. So your belief is irrelevant. Doesn't matter. All that matters is that's where the answer to what is truth is. It's in that. It's in that. It's in that document that we can't get past. Now, other folks will come from a different perspective. I'm sure you will come from a different perspective on this. But at the end of the day, we have to have a lodestone. We have to have an anchor because without that, we are running, we have, we've run an 80-year experiment of what it looks like to be disconnected from the anchor of truth.

1:17:59 And the end result of that in 2026 is we just float away. We're just floating around, just doing stuff, right? You can't build a dissident movement with no anchor.

1:18:14 You have to be anchored to something. And I'm not even talking about building a dissident movement. I'm just saying that at the base level, if you really wanted to do that, that, right? If you want to live in truth, you have to know what truth is. You have to anchor yourself to something. And I think this is what people struggle with in our time. I think one of the problems that immediately comes up for people, and we see it all over society, you know, there's this phrase that's the— that I wonder, it would be interesting to look at the Google history of this phrase a little bit, how it, how it's emerged, how it's been used.

1:18:47 But this phrase, my truth.

1:18:53 So, so I have an enormous problem with it. It's a phrase that I think kind of lies, lies at the heart of a lot of these things. And yet, one of the reasons why— I mean, it's, it's seductive and appealing, because if we can all have our own truths, and that's kind of nice, right? Mm-hmm. on a certain level.

1:19:17 But there, what there is, once we start down that road, there's kind of no way past it. Right. So people live the bulk of their lives in a realm of needs, power, Opportunities,

1:19:44 what they have to do, what they feel that they have to do, what they want to do in order to gain more of the things that they want to have, which is how Hubble would put it. All of the material dimensions of it. So if there's no anchor, to use your word.

1:20:07 If there is no anchor, then,

1:20:11 then the whole phrase of living in truth doesn't actually have much meaning. Right. Existence becomes extremely hollow. Right back to where we were at the start of the conversation. So meaning comes from some

1:20:32 transcendent belief of some kind in something. Uh, some of those transcendent beliefs can take people to some pretty strange places. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. But some, some could take them to some pretty horrible places. Um, and yet we kind of can't avoid the, the essential need for that because If we don't have that, all we have are the engineers of souls and optimizing our material return and so on and so forth. So, okay,

1:21:10 if Havel believed in the— not just the importance, the central role that spirituality has— he believed very much in the importance of and the interconnection between religion, culture, belief, spirit. But he also believed very much in science, believed very much in rationality, believed in causal relationships, and all, all, all, all of those kinds of things. What he didn't believe in was dogma. Right. Um, I think, and sometimes he uses the word dogma, especially in his, in his theater. Uh, in his political writing, he talks more about systems, but he means them roughly interchangeably, um, because systems exist to, to, to, to, to, to, to propagate dogma.

1:22:10 Right. So

1:22:14 If we come back to the question of living in truth, what that actually means, it means that if you have that anchor, some transcendent belief, you need to try to find some way to embody that in your life.

1:22:35 If you have that anchor. Yeah. If you don't have that anchor— If you don't, if you have much— if your anchor is my truth, Yeah. No, then you have no anchor. You're in a lot of trouble. Yeah. And by extension, we were all in a lot of trouble. We're all in a lot of trouble, right? This is that idea of, of 1 million ants, right, on the march, right?

1:23:04 Like, if, if, if as an individual, right, Stalin infamously said, you know, you kill one man, you're a murderer. Kill a million, you run a country. That's the Hasan paraphrase.

1:23:18 And, and I don't, I don't think Stalin would object to that, actually. Yeah, I don't think so. I think he'd be perfectly fine with that. And that's what made him a monster. I think that if I'm one person, And I am surrounded culturally because I can only swim in the water I'm in, right? I could hear this and I can think, okay, what is truth? What actually is that thing right now? That's going to send you, if you ask that question and you search for the meaning honestly, that's going to send you on a journey.

1:23:56 And I think a lot of people, by the way, Let me be very clear. I think a lot of people have gone on this journey and are continuing to go on this journey. I think more people than we're even aware of, right? However, the people who scream the loudest and get the most internet ink spilled on them are the people who, to your point earlier, are trapped in the cul-de-sac of the my truth, right? You know, sort of idea. And The, the challenge of our time is that multiple people decentralized and disconnected, but all understanding the same thing can make a difference.

1:24:40 Um, they're generals without an army or an army without any generals, you know? Absolutely. And they're actually the only thing. can make a difference. Right. And so I, I take heart because I think that the most— if we're going to go back to this word dissident for just a minute, I think the most dissident act you can do is raise your children to believe in an anchor of truth. Yeah. I, yes, absolutely. By the way, I am not— I, yes, I admitted already, I'm a partisan for Christianity. That's my partisanism.

1:25:14 If you're Jewish or you're Muslim or some— okay, we can have those kinds of discussions. Those are discussions that are interesting to have. But I personally, I go, you got to go, you got to stick with one of the big 3. Anything outside of the big 3, the big religious traditions, you're going to struggle with a little bit. So, so I, I guess I see it a little differently in that. Yeah, that's okay. So I, I don't necessarily

1:25:43 I'm much more concerned with the degree of alignment, first of all, between what a person actually lives and what they say they do. And what they say they do. Yeah. And what that does. But also, these, these great faiths have significant points of alignment. And not only the Western Um, they're not all the same. The differences are really important. We could have really great discussions about all of the differences. Uh, and even, even within the faiths, they have discussions about differences. Absolutely.

1:26:22 Within any given gathering of 3 people, any of the faiths, there will be significant differences. But, but still, we can, we we can align around some basic things. Yeah. To a pretty high degree. And those things are fundamental to your earlier point. What is truth? What do we mean? So we've kind of described what it's not, right? Not my truth. It's not your truth. That's the cul-de-sac, as you call it. It's the big trap, I think. But what What is it? So there's the internal truth. And there's maybe the eternal truth, right?

1:27:06 So the, the internal truth is, most of us know, when we are

1:27:17 not aligned with who we are,

1:27:21 we may not recognize it, because we do a lot to dull ourselves from that realization. costs we spend most of the time not necessarily actually aligned with who we are. So we don't want to think about that. And also because society puts lots of distractions in the way, it's not terribly useful to most forms of social organization that we live for us to be thinking about that. So there are lots of reasons why we don't think about that. But, but that, but that internal compass is incredibly important.

1:27:56 It is at the core of what Hamlet is actually talking about. Yeah, find someplace where, where, where, where you know that you're not living aligned with who you are. Identify that place. And this gets back to the idea that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was talking about, you know, in, you know, in the face of living in a society that's full of liars, basically, The person who says the truth is the most dangerous person, right? To a certain degree, you know, writers who wrote about and wrote about in the aftermath of the Holocaust noted this as well on multiple sides, noted this as well.

1:28:46 We have talked on this show about some of the failures of not appealing to truth. In particular, I think one of the greater failures of the 20th century was, was by the folks who prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials, not appealing to a transcendent truth. International law isn't transcendent enough. It's just not. It's just not a big enough judge. And I don't need to go deeply into that. We've covered that a lot on this show. You can go back and listen to other episodes where I've talked about that. But this is one of the— it's one of my bugaboo things about the 20th century.

1:29:20 I think we had a moment. We still have an unfinished conversation. We do about the banality of evil. Evil banality. Yes, we do. We do. We do. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Harvey and I got a little, got a little bit into it. I never actually told the story of how I met Harvey. One of the, one of the first conversations we had, we kind of got a little, got a little sparky about that because Harvey and I, while we may unite around, while we may unite around a shared faith tradition in some ways, we're going to have some differences in that, in that space.

1:29:50 And that's okay, by the way. That's, and you know what, and actually, Harvey, hearing your story today of meeting Paulo and sort of all of that, that gives me more context to what you were saying in that, in that conversation around Eichmann. And I still think there's— Hannah Arendt landed on something. that I think is incredibly uncomfortable that we actually have to deal with. But we could talk— we talk about that another time. What I think is wonderful in all of this, though, is so there is that internal question, but then there's also what you brought up earlier, which is the eternal question, the transcendent question.

1:30:27 And, you know, if we think about ethics, Mm-hmm. We think about it as a way of not just thinking and the codification of it in laws and norms and all the rest of it, a way of feeling, way of being, way of sensing the world, which is aligned with and oriented towards maximizing human good and maximizing flourishing, minimizing harm. Are. Basic things like that that bring together lots of different faith traditions.

1:31:08 Um, when I think about that as a point of departure, and, and again coming back to Havel and The Power of the Powerless and his, his career, that's essentially what, what he did. He didn't try to come up with universal truths. Mm-hmm. He tried to encourage individuals to come together in little ways in, in society and embody living in truth and embody those moral values and find a way to, to, to, to put that at the center. His point is that as you start to live that way, the larger systems You build them, they grow.

1:31:53 It becomes who you are. It connects other people. Movements form out of that. All of these things happen. But, you know, Powell was very much, and this goes very much to one of the reasons why he was not a socialist. He was never a socialist. He was so progressive in so many ways in the real sense of that word. But there was nothing socialist about him. He actually believed that this starts with the individual. It starts with the individual person and their dignity and their choices and their free will and how they exercise that and how they align with who they really are, and then how they gather others in personal ways, in private connections, and then the things that build with that.

1:32:45 And I think this is at the core of what we need to take from Václav Havel's essay, The Power of the Powerless. By the way, available for free on the internet. Right. Go out, download it, read it, absorb it. It's only 80 pages. You can do it in a sitting, maybe a couple of sittings. If your attention span is not that sharp, you can work your way into it. What I always tell folks is just watch one less Netflix episode of something. You know, just, just those guys at Netflix, they've got theirs. You need to get yours.

1:33:16 That's what my grandmother would say. She was right. But, but go out, download it, read it. If you want to buy a copy, absolutely go buy a copy. Go help, go help us, go help support somebody with your money on this.

1:33:33 I love it how you brought up ethics, Harvey. And in our close here, as we wrap up, because we got to turn the corner, we got to wrap up here. I love how you brought up ethics, and I wanted to, I wanted to visit this because this is something you brought up initially. And, you know, we're involved in an organization called the World Ethics Organization, doing various things with them. And Richard Messing's been on our show before. He's going to be on our show again. He's coming up, coming up in a, coming up in a couple of weeks.

1:33:58 He's going to be on talking about the builder's stone, which is going to be an interesting conversation for us to, for us to have.

1:34:13 Ethics. One of the things that has struck me about people in our time is we,

1:34:21 we make a fundamental, very often, category error between what is ethical and what is moral. Now, I'm not saying those things don't overlap. Very often they do. But I'm saying understanding the distinction with the difference between what is ethical and what is moral is,

1:34:40 and the benefit to other parties that comes from that confusion is something that is a real trap, I think, for leaders. And I'm thinking specifically of a conversation I had with somebody, a person that you and I both know. Actually, I won't say who it was, but a person that you and I both know. About a very sensitive topic and a category error literally in this, and this is a highly educated person. He literally made the category error in the conversation and I caught it and I called him out on it.

1:35:12 I said, this is not, I didn't use the term category error, but I said like, I think you're mis— you're mixing 2 things together here. While I understand your outrage about this thing in this way, you have it in the wrong box. And because you have it in the wrong box, you are walking down the road to other wrong conclusions that are actually going to be deleterious to other kinds of things that you want to do with other people. And of course, he did not accept that. He thought that that was, that I was incorrect, that my categories were incorrect, and that, and that somehow I was trying to draw him into, like Br'er Rabbit, I was trying to draw him into a tar baby of nettles, right?

1:35:49 And, uh, And yes, I know I mixed my metaphors there, folks. I realize what I just did. But, but my point is— It was quite vivid. It was quite vivid. It was, it was, I'm building, I'm building a word image here. You know, remember I said visual arts, right? I'm building, I'm building things here with the words. But my point is that in ethics, how do we as leaders, and let's close with this, how do we as leaders avoid category errors? About what is ethical. Not even, no, not even what is ethical, about how to apply, there we go, ethical thinking.

1:36:25 Because to your point, Havel is really interested in that, and he's really interested in that idea of what is ethical. And I loved how you talked about embodiment, right? Embodiment is huge, right? The body matters. The material world matters. Whether it's a physical building where horrific atrocities have happened, And now it gets transformed into something else by, by an act of moral imagination, or whether it's a mom and a dad, you know, sitting down with a child and reading to them every night.

1:37:00 There's ethical pieces to all of this. And so I want you to speak to some of that. How do leaders suss that out and then apply that? in their, in their lived lives and their organizations, the teams, the cultures that they are in. Let's, let's close with that. Yeah. So it's, it's a great place to close here.

1:37:22 So knowing who we are, spending the necessary time to kind of revisit that, to reflect on it, to explore it, to explore it in different ways. We do so much of our exploration in a cognitive kind of way. And that's necessary but not sufficient. I mean, it, it kind of strips away the— all of the sensory dimensions to it, all of the body dimensions, all of the social dimensions. It— so knowing who we are is a starting point.

1:38:02 Um, leaders who actually look at not just the broad canvas of their, the impact of their actions. So yes, the con— in Powell's case, the countries, maybe our companies and the different, the social forces, systems, all of that kind of thing. But the personal individual aspects of how we live them in, in, in, in, in, in the moments of our lives, how we actually inhabit the

1:38:36 I think so much of what it takes to lead lies in

1:38:45 really simple ethical dimensions. So we do, so you know that I've done a lot of research on sort of the impact of the arts. Yeah. What that does for leaders. And different ways in which engaging in the arts develops our sense of engagement, connection, authenticity, resilience, empathy. And I want to say a word or two about empathy because it's easy because of some of the ways that empathy is used or misused to skip by actually just how vital it is. Because essentially, without empathy, we have no capacity to actually understand other people.

1:39:32 Yep. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty fundamental. Yes. So, and without empathy, and we always talk about behavioral empathy, so it's not just a matter of how I feel, but what do I do with those feelings? How does that translate into our choices or actions? behaviors. Awesome. Okay. So there are all these things we know in the arts. So a few years ago, we had a series of discussions with, with ethicists around the world. You were part of one of those conversations. Mm-hmm. And when we put all of those together and just look at what the ethicists told us, they came up with a series of attributes.

1:40:11 Question was, what makes an ethical leader? They were virtually identical. with what the research shows the arts produce in people. So in other words, when we work with the arts, we actually do that first because we love art and we want to create things. Second, we do it in our work because we believe that it leads to innovation, creativity, and all kinds of fantastic outcomes and growth in skills and qualities and purposes in people. But in the process of doing that, we're actually also developing the capacity, or at least the behaviors and the attributes that lead to the capacity of ethical leadership.

1:40:53 So it's a little bit of a roundabout way of coming back now to the point here. But the point, the point is clear, that as leaders, these are the things that are actually going to matter much more than the things that we often think This policy and that policy, this structural change, this oppressor and this oppressed, whatever, however we frame these things, Habermas would look at all of those and say, that's, that's all very interesting. And maybe it's also all very beside the point. The point is much more me.

1:41:30 Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be? How am I going to do that? How am I going to connect with others? How do I see it? How do I shape it? All of those things. These are not the things that we necessarily think of all the time when we talk about, about leadership. And yet those are the fundamental questions about leadership. What does it take to be somebody who was washing windows

1:41:57 and become instead the president of a country that was in itself an exemplar that was reshaping the way that the world understands these things. Mm-hmm. The power of the powerless is, is, is, is, is incredibly resonant in all of us. It's only resonant— it's only resonant in us if, if, if we activate it. We start with awareness, we move through embodiment, because that's actually how we feel these things as well as, as think about them. And when we use that to, to see the world, to connect with the world, to create the world, to impact and shape the world.

1:42:38 So when I think of all of those things,

1:42:43 we work with leaders a lot. We work with them around the world. We do that so that we can help them become more innovative. Why does it matter? Because the world is changing so radically, so profoundly, so constantly. That if you can't innovate, you can't possibly lead because you can't anticipate the future. And we can only lead people into the future. We can't lead people into the past, and they're not going to stay where they are. So this is pretty critical. And we talk a lot about future readiness.

1:43:16 That's why we talk about it. So I, I think that it's easy to think about future readiness as, okay, so future, the new technology, AI, what are we going to do with that? And, you know, all of these relate, all of them connect directly and intimately, but they kind of come back to the core of the individual. And that's where, where I see it. And that's why we work so, so much with individuals and then individuals as they come together in teams, which are of course the kinds of small communities that

1:43:56 Great and powerful closing ideas from Harvey Seifter. Please connect with Harvey through The Art of Science Learning and Creating Futures That Work. We're going to have links to all the places where you can connect with Harvey and check out his work in the show notes below the player, uh, that you may be listening to this podcast or watching this podcast on. I want to thank Harvey for coming on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today. And with that, well, we're out. Thanks, Hades.

1:44:35 See you next time.