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

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Beautiful. All right. Leadership Lessons from

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the Great Books Podcast, bonus episode with Harvey

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Seifter. We’re going to be talking about Václav

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Havel’s essay, The Power of the

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Powerless Redux, in

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3, 2, 1.

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Hello, my name is Haysan Sorels, and

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this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

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podcast. No episode number on this

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one. This is a bonus episode

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today. I want to open up

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before we really get started and jump in with

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an excerpt from the essay we’re actually going to

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be Recovering from a previous episode today.

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And I quote from the writer. The manager of a fruit and

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vegetable shop places in his window among the onions and

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carrots the slogan Workers of the World Unite.

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Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?

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Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers

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of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an

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irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals?

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Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might

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occur and what it would mean? I

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think it can be safely assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never

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think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to

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express their real opinions. That poster was

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delivered to our green grocer from the enterprise headquarters, along

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with the onions and the carrots. He put them

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all under the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because

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everyone does it, and because that is the way it

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has to be. If he were to

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refuse, there would be trouble. He could be reproached for not

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having the proper decoration in his window. Someone might even accuse him of

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disloyalty. He does it because these things must

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be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the

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thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil

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life. quote unquote, in harmony with society,

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as they say. Obviously, the greengrocer

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is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit.

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He does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint

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the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his

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action has no motive or significance at all, or that

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the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is

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really a sign. And as such, it contains a subliminal but

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very definite message. Verbally,

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it might be expressed this way: I, the greengrocer XY, live

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here, and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of

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me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient,

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and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.

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This message, of course, has an addressee. It is directed above.

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to the greengrocer’s superior. And at the same time, it is a shield that

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protects the greengrocer from potential informers.

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The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted

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firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It

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reflects his vital interests.

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But what are those

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interests?

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Entrance. And that is a reading

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from the post, the essay that we are

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going to cover today, an essay actually that we’ve covered on this show in

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episode number 102 with our guest

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co-host at the time, Libby Unger. And you can go back and listen to that

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episode. This essay tied in with

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thoughts we had around War and Peace,

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City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo,

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and of course, our thoughts we had about the author

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and the UAW and the nature of what really

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Labor Day means when we really celebrate that

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day at the end of the summer. However, it’s been a couple of

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years since we’ve looked at this essay on this podcast, and

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our guest co-host today actually reached out to us and

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said, hey, uh, wouldn’t it be interesting

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to talk about this again? Thus, this is a

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Redux episode. Think like Francis Ford Coppola when he,

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uh, when he did that movie Apocalypse Now, and then he re-released it with a

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bunch of extra items and he called it Apocalypse Now Redux. Or

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think about The Godfather, one of my favorite movies

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that of course starts off with the opening line, I believe

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in America. Which, by the way, I do too.

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That was even re-released probably about 20 years ago

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with some extra bonus footage. Well, this is

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what we are doing today, but we’re doing it in a little bit of a

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different way with a new guest co-host.

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Now, this essay is really

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important And I want to emphasize this up front in

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addressing the idea of holding individual conscience

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pure and resisting

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societal overreach, whether in a society that claims to

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be quote unquote free and democratic, but is not

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in practical terms, or in a society that refuses to

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recognize its own growing tyrannical

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Tendencies, even those at the cultural

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and social level, which, by the way, is where they always

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start before they are hardened into public policy

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and then into law that needs to be enforced

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by someone. We’re going to

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talk about a lot of this. We’re going to revisit some of the

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questions that we had a couple of years ago when we looked at this essay.

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And of course, we’re going to do this, as I said before, with a new

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guest co-host today that I want to bring on in just a moment.

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So you may be wondering what this essay is. Well, today we are going to

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be covering The Power of

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the Powerless by Václav Havel.

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Leaders, it’s been a couple of years since we read this, but the,

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the winds and the tides Have shifted a little bit.

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And now we’re in a little bit of a different space where

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being a dissident or cosplaying being a dissident

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doesn’t have as much social utility

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as it previously did.

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But all the social utility still hasn’t drained completely out of the pool.

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So it’s worthwhile for us to pay attention to it. By reading this

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episode, by reading this essay today.

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And to join us in our conversation, to walk along our path,

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walk along our journey, is our returning—

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well, not even our returning, our new co-host, as I said before, Harvey

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Seifter. Now Harvey’s going to introduce himself. He’s going to talk a little bit about

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himself. So I’m going to get out of the way and let him do that.

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But I would like to welcome him to the show. So how you doing today,

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Harvey? How’s it going? Doing great, Jesan, and thank you so much for having me

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on the show today. And thanks so much for focusing,

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taking the time, coming back to The Power of the Powerless and

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Havel’s work, because I think it’s so important for our time and

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really for all time. Absolutely. And it’s hyper important, I think, for

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leaders, because leadership really has to think

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clearly. One of the things that we talked about recently in our

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covering of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the

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tragedy, or maybe not the tragedy, the life of Henry V. We talked a lot

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about category errors. And I think one of the

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challenges of our time is that leaders

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in particular, but this whole, but folks and individuals in

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society in general, because we are bombarded with so much information,

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are challenged by making errors of category. We don’t

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actually know how to qualify things and put them in their right boxes.

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And so there’s a lot of cultural confusion. And Havel, in

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his essay, doesn’t suffer from any of this. He doesn’t suffer from categorical

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confusion. He knows the categories. He understands the boxes. He’s

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asking the questions. And this is, this serves as a

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sort of beacon for leaders, I believe. And that’s why we’re

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revisiting this. One of the many reasons why we’re revisiting this as well.

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So, Harvey, why don’t you tell folks about who you are and about what you

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do? Okay, terrific. Thank you. So, um,

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maybe the best way to, to, to kind of put this all

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together is to start with the beginning, which is

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that I learned to read music before I learned to read English. It was my

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first language. Uh, classically trained violinist, uh,

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conductor, uh, played in orchestras, conducted

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orchestras. In college, I started hanging out with the rougher crowd, so I did theater.

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And so music and theater were kind of the— were the starting point for me

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with, with, with, with pretty much everything. But, um, had a

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considerable career in theater, directing, producing,

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directing theaters. I was the director of Theater for the New City in New

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York in the ’80s in the East Village. I was its executive director

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and then went out to San Francisco, the Magic Theater, and so did

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hundreds of new plays,

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experimental work, all different kinds of— Along the way,

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I found myself as the director of a really remarkable

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orchestra called Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. So Orpheus is one of the world’s

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great orchestras. It’s also known as the conductorless orchestra. It’s

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the only orchestra in the world that rehearses and records and performs all of its

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work without a conductor. And in that process, I began to discover all

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kinds of things about how orchestras work, how music is made, and how

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ensembles work, but more broadly about how teams work, how

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collaboration can happen. And I began to discover that there were

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things in the way that the orchestra worked that had really

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powerful implications for organizations, for businesses, and

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precisely the direction that the world was moving. So I started—

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began to explore that in a structured way, set up a laboratory in the City

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University, taught a bunch of courses in organizational

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psychology and leadership with the orchestra. Eventually, we began

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to form a management consulting practice. We, we,

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as we barnstormed the world with our concerts and performed all over, uh,

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in great concert halls by night, we essentially rehearsed those

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pieces by day in front of Fortune 500 audiences as

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process demonstrations. After some years of doing that, I

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kind of came to the conclusion that there was something really

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important that was happening here beyond just what you could learn from the conductorless

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orchestra. More broadly, what you could learn from art

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and from artistic skills and processes, practices that could have

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a really powerful set of impacts and implications for a pretty

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broad range of human endeavor. Began— I wrote a

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book about it. There was a Harvard case study about this. There are a lot

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of different things that began to grow from it. And then eventually I formed a

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partnership with the National Science Foundation. I formed my first organization,

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the Art of Science Learning, as a research center funded by the National Science

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Foundation and gathered lots of data, did lots of experimental studies

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and research looking at what is the actual impact of the arts and

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arts-based learning on leaders, on innovation, on

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creativity, on the way people think, the way people behave, their resilience, their

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empathy, all of these different kinds of things. And then eventually began to

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also scale that into organizations, developed a

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partnership with GE, and we, we set up an arts-based

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learning center on the Crotonville campus, scaled it across the GE

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Global Leadership Platform, working with And that’s 35,000 leaders

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all over the world. So that’s a little bit about my background and work. I

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formed my second organization, Creating Futures at Work, to continue

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to bring it into organizations. It’s also, among other things now,

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we also do incubators for innovation. We

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have a whole network of coaches around the world that we’ve certified and

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trained in our techniques and also some of

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the assessment tools that we’ve gathered.

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It all has come together in recent years in those areas, but

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also with an increasing focus on ethics and the

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relationship between ethics, art, innovation,

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and the future. So let me pause here

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before you jump into Power of the Powerless and sort of how that book has

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impacted you. I wrote down several— I wrote down, took a couple of notes as

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you were talking, as you could tell. So you have that strong music

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and theater background. And you’ve got The Art

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of Science Learning and Creating Futures That Work as both of your organizations.

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And we’ll have links to both of those in the show notes so you can

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go check out Harvey’s work and maybe connect with him and see if you want

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to bring him into your organization and do some work with him. I

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have a background in the arts as well. Most people don’t know

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this because I don’t necessarily trumpet it everywhere. But my

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bachelor’s degree is in the fine arts. I had an emphasis in printmaking

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and drawing, also in

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painting, and I did a fair bit of dabbling in sculpture. I was always more

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of a visual arts guy because I was hooked into comics when I was

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like 6 years old, and then from there I was off to the races, you

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know. And the thing

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that I have discovered in the course of my non-arts

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career, because I went into conflict resolution, I went into

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administration, and then I went into entrepreneurship and Now I am

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here in the place where I am at now, as a

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podcast host, you know, a book author and consultant and other,

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other, other things in the space of leadership development. What

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I have discovered is, and maybe you share this observation as well,

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while the actual physical act of making a piece of visual art,

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I don’t do on the regular basis anymore.

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I still have retained over the course of 20 years,

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the ability that the

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discipline of being in the arts gave me, which for me was

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the ability to see. And this is the way I frame it to folks who

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aren’t in the arts. Yeah. And when I say see, I mean,

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observe carefully, observe closely to be able to see the

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inside of things. You talk about leading with empathy and engaging around empathy.

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I don’t frame it in those kinds of terms. in the social-emotional learning

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kinds of terms. I frame it more in just the observation and

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characterization terms, right? So not only be able to see inside of a

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piece of art, being able to spot a Picasso at 500 feet and know the

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difference between that and, you know,

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a Rubens or something like that, right? But

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also in being able to see how people

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engage with each other or being able to see how organizations can grow or being

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able to see how teams interact. And so for me, it’s a term I frame

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it in terms of sight. I don’t know if that resonates with you, but that’s

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where I come from in my arts background. That’s incredibly powerful.

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It’s a wonderful way of putting it, Hasan. So we do a tremendous

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amount of work with observation, with sight, and actually with all

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of the senses. And the, you know,

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when you work with art, you learn to see things that other people don’t. You

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learn to see the world in ways that other people really can’t. We

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do lots of very, very basic work. What happens when you turn something upside

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down? And how does it look? What do you

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learn? What emerges? We work with negative space as a concept.

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So we work with many, many different dimensions of

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seeing and hearing and touching and feeling and

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all of the senses. And then we also work a

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lot with connection because that’s another thing that you get by working with art.

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You learn to see the world in other ways. You learn to connect on levels

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that other people really can’t. And it opens up those possibilities

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tremendously. And then there’s a third thing that happens once you can actually see.

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And once you can connect, you can create, you can build, you can make

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things. And it’s an incredibly

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powerful, rich, multidimensional doorway into

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your own possibilities, the possibilities in the world around you. And how do

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you move from this realm of people think about ideas all the

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time? And a lot of people think that innovation is actually coming up with great

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ideas that other people should do. And anybody who’s ever made

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any art of any kind knows exactly what that’s not and what

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that is. That’s right. That’s right. Well, you know, I,

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I tell my kids, you know, and my wife was an

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art educator for many, many years, you know, was a photographer,

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owned her own photography business for a long time. And now,

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you know, we homeschool our kids and we raise them in an arts

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an arts household, you know, reading

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literature. And I’ve talked about this on the show before, but reading

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literature, having deep conversations around a wide

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range of areas, teaching my children not what to think,

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but how to think has been incredibly important for myself and my wife, you know,

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in raising our kids to be future leaders, which is what I consistently

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tell them that they’re always— that’s what we’re doing, right? Whether they are

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accepting of that currently or not. It doesn’t matter. Like, by

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default, you’re going to be a leader. I hate to tell you this. The way

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we’re— what we’re pushing out of this household,

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sorry, it’s going to default to you, right? And you’re going to be

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equipped, by the way, in order to be able to do that, even if you

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don’t go into the arts, even if you go into— like, one of my children

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is very science-oriented, extremely science-oriented. And

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she’s going to go into either the sciences or the law, depending

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upon, like, sort of where her, where her track is. Another one of my

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children, she is really focused

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on becoming the best,

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well, not right now, but she’s becoming the best like public servant and civil servant

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she possibly can while also balancing that with trying to be a homemaker and all

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of that. I’ve got my older son, he’s a reporter. And so

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journalism, I mean, getting into all of that. And then my youngest son, the,

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the, the, the, you know, he’s, he’s 9. So like the water’s still, you know,

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forming, right? The Jell-O hasn’t yet, hasn’t yet. You know,

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the gel was still shaky in the mold, right? So, but it’s okay. It’s coming

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along. You know, he’s reading books. He’s beginning to think. He’s beginning to put ideas

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together, things like that. And so I’m saying

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all that to say that I think the way you

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framed how we move from seeing to connection to

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possibility to creativity, I wish

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more of the conversation around innovation, and we’ll get, again, we’ll get to Power of

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00:19:24,068 –> 00:19:27,212
the Powerless here in just a moment. But I wish more of the conversation around

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innovation and around the desire for innovation would

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move from a mechanized engineering

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financialized sort of move to more of what you’re talking

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about. And this is why I love what you’re doing here with both the Art

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of Science Learning and Creating Futures That Work. Well, you know, you’re

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describing such a rich generative kind of environment

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that I’ve been going back now to your kids and what they’re

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experiencing, and the ways that these things come together. And I think it

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00:19:56,317 –> 00:19:59,810
was Steve Jobs who once said that he didn’t really

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understand the distinction between an artist and a scientist because they’re just all

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trying to answer the same fundamental questions using different

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ways. But I, you know, when I first formed the Art of Science Learning and

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we were kind of hunting around what’s the right thing to name this

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organization, and there’s a quote by Leonardo da

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Vinci that I’ve always loved, and the quote is, study the art of

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science and the science of art, learn that everything

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connects to everything else. And that’s actually how we named the Art of Science

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Learning. And I think these things do connect really powerfully. And art

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brings us that ability to see and to

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connect and to engage and to create. And science brings

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us all kinds of powerful tools that help us to also see in fresh

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ways and connect and create. It helps us to measure and to ground

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and to make things purposeful. So when we can bring that all together, But,

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you know, and now to maybe segue for a minute,

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Havel. Havel, in the literary

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tradition that he grew out of, and the

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writers who were the early dissidents before they were even thought of as

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dissidents, going back to the ’50s and the ’60s when

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Havel was really just starting out in his theater and so forth. And there was

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a phrase Stalin used this in the ’30s. Mm-hmm. in the ’30s,

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he called writers the engineers of souls.

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And there was a great friend of Havel’s, a colleague, a Czech

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writer by the name of Skravecky, who later emigrated to Canada. And he

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wrote this wonderful novel, The Engineer of Human Souls.

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And I think of that, and I thought of that book actually

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as I was rereading for the 3rd time in my life, The

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Power of the Powerless, in order to prep for this podcast.

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And I, and I, my mind went back to that novel, actually, because

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there is this idea, okay, so systems,

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systems are everything. Systems are so powerful. And

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we think about systems constantly. And if we can just come up with the right

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systems, everything will work. And we can just engineer the human soul.

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And of course, Havel says front and center, square on in The

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Power of the Powerless, systems actually are

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irrelevant. Systems are not the issue.

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You cannot improve the world by making better systems.

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You can improve the world by living better lives. And if you do,

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you will create better systems. Mm-hmm.

356
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There’s a desire in our culture

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And it’s been a desire for a long time. I think that it really got

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on steroids when the commercial internet

359
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got turned on in 1989, and we didn’t realize it at the time.

360
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We didn’t realize just how

361
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impactful the internet was actually going to be. We had no clue.

362
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And it’s been almost 50 years since the commercial internet got turned on in

363
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1989 by Timothy Berners-Lee. We’re almost at the 50th anniversary of that.

364
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And we still don’t really understand what the internet is doing. We really

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don’t get it. And when you talk about the engineer of

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human souls, I look at our tools, right? And

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we are just as much a product of our

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tools as our tools are a product of us. I’m beginning to sort of

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mash around with this idea. And,

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and I think it’s a good time to begin to mash around with this idea

371
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because LLMs are coming. And that’s the next steroid level up,

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you know, on top of the internet. And

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when you talk about Havel and you talk about

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the background that he came out of, and by the

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00:23:47,724 –> 00:23:50,401
way, I got to be honest, and I mentioned this in the previous episode too,

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00:23:50,609 –> 00:23:54,168
episode number 102, when we talked with Libby Unger, I always

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00:23:54,168 –> 00:23:57,711
confuse Havel with, or at least I always used to confuse him with Lech

378
00:23:57,743 –> 00:24:00,949
Walesa. I always used to confuse the 2 guys in my head, you know, and

379
00:24:01,045 –> 00:24:04,733
it’s because when he was, when the fall of the Soviet Union happened, happened in

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00:24:04,733 –> 00:24:07,792
’89. You know, I was like 10 years old when this happened, you know. So

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I remember sitting on the floor watching it on television, and my father was kind

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of going crazy because he— I mean, nobody in that generation at that time thought,

383
00:24:15,107 –> 00:24:18,168
right, that it would ever— that the Berlin Wall would ever— that was—

384
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people today, 40 years later,

385
00:24:24,414 –> 00:24:27,486
don’t understand how revolutionary that actually was when it happened.

386
00:24:28,068 –> 00:24:31,557
No. So that, I mean, that’s That

387
00:24:31,557 –> 00:24:35,180
moment, I’m sorry, I didn’t— Yeah, no, no, no, you’re right. That, that moment

388
00:24:35,341 –> 00:24:38,931
was the moment. Incredible. For me, that

389
00:24:38,931 –> 00:24:42,763
moment was the moment and that broader moment of just when that was emerging.

390
00:24:43,340 –> 00:24:46,562
That’s when I actually read Power of the Powerless for the first

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00:24:46,562 –> 00:24:50,185
time. I got to know Havel as a playwright

392
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because my background is in theater and I was interested in his plays and I

393
00:24:54,016 –> 00:24:57,703
began to read them and, and I began to really find

394
00:24:57,703 –> 00:25:01,021
myself drawn to these strange worlds that they were talking about that I

395
00:25:01,614 –> 00:25:05,366
sort of got. and sort of didn’t. And

396
00:25:05,639 –> 00:25:09,375
this incredible hollowness in his characters,

397
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not in the characters themselves, but in the lives that they were living and the

398
00:25:13,641 –> 00:25:17,345
disconnect between those lives and what these characters were

399
00:25:17,345 –> 00:25:21,065
trying to actually do and feel and emerge and experience. That

400
00:25:21,819 –> 00:25:25,556
I scratched my head at that and wondered, what is all of that? And then

401
00:25:25,780 –> 00:25:29,532
a couple of years later, in around 1984, ’83,

402
00:25:29,613 –> 00:25:33,381
’84, I, I got a fellowship, uh, from the Goethe Institute,

403
00:25:33,685 –> 00:25:37,485
and I went and spent time in, in Europe for the first significant time,

404
00:25:37,549 –> 00:25:41,365
for the first time. And I, and I went to, to Germany. I was doing

405
00:25:41,462 –> 00:25:45,053
work in theater, and part of that took me to East Germany

406
00:25:45,165 –> 00:25:48,741
back in the bad old days. So I was spending time in East Berlin,

407
00:25:49,318 –> 00:25:52,926
and I saw this up front and

408
00:25:52,926 –> 00:25:56,614
very close. And I mean, incredible things to see and to

409
00:25:56,614 –> 00:26:00,257
experience, but but raising even more questions. I remember

410
00:26:00,322 –> 00:26:03,661
that when I was in East Berlin at that time, so because I was

411
00:26:04,239 –> 00:26:07,595
a Western minor dignitary of sorts and on an

412
00:26:07,708 –> 00:26:11,240
official visit and so on and so forth, so they set me up

413
00:26:11,561 –> 00:26:14,869
to have lunch with the Deputy Minister of Culture

414
00:26:15,174 –> 00:26:17,984
for East Berlin. And so

415
00:26:18,851 –> 00:26:22,126
in old East Berlin, where life was

416
00:26:23,042 –> 00:26:26,807
kind of grim and kind of that way. But it wasn’t— I

417
00:26:26,807 –> 00:26:30,589
mean, it wasn’t suffering in the sense that there was a level

418
00:26:30,589 –> 00:26:34,355
of prosperity and reasonable comfort. I mean, people weren’t going hungry. They were, you

419
00:26:34,355 –> 00:26:38,169
know, they could take, you know, vacations in the East Bloc and so

420
00:26:38,185 –> 00:26:42,030
on and so forth. But it was a very constrained and kind of

421
00:26:42,030 –> 00:26:45,604
hollow existence in that sense. Mm-hmm. But right in the middle of that, there was

422
00:26:45,620 –> 00:26:49,129
this one square where all the arts organizations

423
00:26:49,803 –> 00:26:53,016
And everything in East Berlin was gray and drab,

424
00:26:53,883 –> 00:26:57,642
and this one square, everything was gold and red and burgundy and

425
00:26:57,754 –> 00:27:01,448
beautifully, warmly, richly lit. And if you put your

426
00:27:01,448 –> 00:27:04,885
connections together for a year, you might be able to

427
00:27:05,142 –> 00:27:08,338
score a couple of tickets to go with your wife to the opera and maybe

428
00:27:08,355 –> 00:27:12,113
have a dinner in, in, in, in, in the restaurant there and have a

429
00:27:12,113 –> 00:27:15,792
different kind of life. So that’s where he took me, and There was

430
00:27:15,970 –> 00:27:18,821
a lot of drinking at that time among

431
00:27:19,933 –> 00:27:22,881
the people who were in official positions.

432
00:27:24,310 –> 00:27:27,934
And also what was happening at that time is that Dallas

433
00:27:27,966 –> 00:27:31,478
was really popular in American TV. Yes. And

434
00:27:31,849 –> 00:27:35,159
so it was illegal but universally done among

435
00:27:37,552 –> 00:27:41,013
the power of East Germany that they would be watching Western TV, especially

436
00:27:41,045 –> 00:27:44,871
Dallas. So I was having this lunch with this guy, And

437
00:27:44,903 –> 00:27:48,358
all of a sudden, apropos of absolutely nothing, but after 5 or 6 beers,

438
00:27:48,939 –> 00:27:51,426
he looked at me very pugnaciously and he said,

439
00:27:52,900 –> 00:27:56,574
you know, I get a feeling of pride as a German when I watch Dallas

440
00:27:56,574 –> 00:28:00,297
on Western television. And there was no context then at all. So I

441
00:28:00,297 –> 00:28:03,209
just sort of said, yeah, exactly that kind of— what is this? What?

442
00:28:03,856 –> 00:28:07,559
But I figured, okay, I’ll bite. And he said, I

443
00:28:07,559 –> 00:28:11,140
get a feeling of pride as a German because I see that an

444
00:28:11,140 –> 00:28:13,851
American millionaire is driving a Mercedes-Benz.

445
00:28:15,820 –> 00:28:19,206
So 2 things happened to me at that moment. I registered all of those

446
00:28:19,238 –> 00:28:23,076
contradictions. The first, this was 5 years before the Berlin

447
00:28:23,092 –> 00:28:26,774
Wall fell down. But at that moment, I knew it was

448
00:28:26,806 –> 00:28:30,599
coming. I could just feel it. I mean, the hollowness. But the other thing

449
00:28:30,599 –> 00:28:34,250
was, I suddenly understood the hollowness of Havel’s

450
00:28:34,507 –> 00:28:38,031
characters. They were all putting up these

451
00:28:38,080 –> 00:28:41,820
official signs that they And they were living their lives around it. And

452
00:28:41,853 –> 00:28:45,596
none of them believed any of it. And yeah,

453
00:28:46,064 –> 00:28:49,516
inauthenticity was just killing the society.

454
00:28:51,146 –> 00:28:54,809
This opens up the door to something that I want to talk

455
00:28:54,809 –> 00:28:58,077
about, that inauthenticity, that, that hollowness, that

456
00:28:58,190 –> 00:29:00,422
disconnection that you’re talking about. So

457
00:29:02,218 –> 00:29:05,941
I would assert that In the

458
00:29:05,958 –> 00:29:09,784
year of our Lord 2026, and I’m just using that as an appellation because that’s

459
00:29:09,833 –> 00:29:12,513
the appellation you use, we

460
00:29:13,045 –> 00:29:16,264
are experiencing the same sort of

461
00:29:16,280 –> 00:29:19,016
hollowness that you saw in East Germany,

462
00:29:20,667 –> 00:29:23,463
except the hollowness is the disconnect between

463
00:29:25,730 –> 00:29:29,509
the face people put online, the avatars we

464
00:29:29,525 –> 00:29:32,845
all walk around with. in our very online

465
00:29:32,845 –> 00:29:36,476
interactions that we have and the real

466
00:29:36,524 –> 00:29:40,107
lives we actually live with real people in real life, IRL,

467
00:29:40,364 –> 00:29:43,867
right? In real life. Perfectly said. I, I, that, yes.

468
00:29:44,221 –> 00:29:47,885
Yes. And I think the challenge for

469
00:29:47,933 –> 00:29:51,436
young leaders, the challenge for young people overall, but young leaders in

470
00:29:51,468 –> 00:29:55,292
particular. And when I say young, I do mean chronologically young. I mean

471
00:29:55,790 –> 00:29:59,624
the 18 to 34-year-old folks, the massive challenge that they are having right now

472
00:29:59,846 –> 00:30:03,575
is They don’t have a dissident writer

473
00:30:05,714 –> 00:30:09,526
that can express in a Václav Havel

474
00:30:09,638 –> 00:30:11,506
theater writer kind of way

475
00:30:13,442 –> 00:30:16,379
that hollowness. They don’t really have that.

476
00:30:17,287 –> 00:30:20,953
And this is why I’ll trace this to pop culture because one of the other

477
00:30:20,953 –> 00:30:23,743
things is I’m a huge film guy, right? We talk a lot about film on

478
00:30:23,792 –> 00:30:27,494
this show. And my regular

479
00:30:27,494 –> 00:30:31,017
co-host, Tom Libby, He and I are both film fans and film,

480
00:30:31,515 –> 00:30:35,063
we just, oh my God, I’m ridiculous with film, right? And

481
00:30:35,063 –> 00:30:38,723
where that hollowness would be exposed is in film,

482
00:30:39,622 –> 00:30:42,833
but the writers in the room

483
00:30:43,491 –> 00:30:47,280
were raised in that hollowness. And so they don’t see it

484
00:30:47,280 –> 00:30:50,956
as being hollow. It’s just the way that it is. So you have a

485
00:30:50,956 –> 00:30:53,862
generation of people that are in the writer’s room, and that’s the millennial generation who

486
00:30:53,894 –> 00:30:57,379
are currently in the writer’s rooms. of Hollywood television shows and

487
00:30:57,379 –> 00:31:01,122
movies right now being led by Gen

488
00:31:01,330 –> 00:31:05,105
Xers whose only response to

489
00:31:05,105 –> 00:31:08,366
the hollowness was to build the internet because they thought that that was the place

490
00:31:08,382 –> 00:31:10,840
where they were going to go. And so they built the internet with all these

491
00:31:10,888 –> 00:31:14,614
assumptions, but the internet turned out to not have weight to

492
00:31:14,662 –> 00:31:18,357
it at all. It turned out to be hollow for as much as an impact

493
00:31:18,357 –> 00:31:21,377
as it has had, it turned out to be hollow. So they didn’t have the

494
00:31:21,377 –> 00:31:25,221
gift to give the millennials other than hollowness. The millennial writers

495
00:31:25,269 –> 00:31:29,007
are now operating underneath that hollowness, and the Gen

496
00:31:29,040 –> 00:31:32,634
Z audiences that are looking for meaning

497
00:31:35,492 –> 00:31:38,608
don’t have a writer who has the chops

498
00:31:40,238 –> 00:31:43,290
or even the guts and the courage to

499
00:31:43,338 –> 00:31:47,003
engage with that hollowness in the way that Havel did for his

500
00:31:47,116 –> 00:31:50,949
generation in not only

501
00:31:50,949 –> 00:31:54,786
East Germany, but across Eastern Europe as well. Am I onto something

502
00:31:54,818 –> 00:31:58,235
here, or is this a terrible analogy? I don’t think it’s a terrible

503
00:31:58,235 –> 00:32:01,957
analogy at all, but, but I, I guess I would look at it maybe as

504
00:32:01,957 –> 00:32:05,707
a reverse way of thinking about, about this.

505
00:32:06,337 –> 00:32:08,243
So, Havel would say

506
00:32:10,988 –> 00:32:14,740
each person is the master of their own fate. That actually is a

507
00:32:14,756 –> 00:32:18,006
line from Temptation. a really

508
00:32:18,184 –> 00:32:21,914
extraordinary play of his, which I directed in, in, in, in, in, in,

509
00:32:22,077 –> 00:32:25,563
in 1990, actually, right as all this was going on.

510
00:32:26,056 –> 00:32:29,757
And it’s his own version of the Faust story. And it’s both

511
00:32:29,871 –> 00:32:33,669
wildly satirical and it’s, it’s, it hits

512
00:32:33,669 –> 00:32:36,803
home very powerfully. So Havel would say

513
00:32:39,051 –> 00:32:42,592
authenticity lies not in what teachers

514
00:32:42,624 –> 00:32:45,886
teach us, It doesn’t lie in the systems that we

515
00:32:46,015 –> 00:32:49,772
build or the structures that we create. It lies in

516
00:32:49,788 –> 00:32:53,465
how we construct our lives. And construct means

517
00:32:53,578 –> 00:32:56,918
live. The choices that we make and how those

518
00:32:57,030 –> 00:33:00,771
align with who we actually are as

519
00:33:00,884 –> 00:33:03,340
people, as humans, as moral agents

520
00:33:04,079 –> 00:33:07,676
responsible for those choices and those outcomes.

521
00:33:07,965 –> 00:33:11,288
So Havel looked at the world around him and he said, there’s 2 things going

522
00:33:11,401 –> 00:33:15,155
on here. One is that, that we live in a, in a, in a what

523
00:33:15,155 –> 00:33:18,940
he called a post-totalitarian society. What all he meant with

524
00:33:18,940 –> 00:33:22,261
that is that it’s a more subtle form

525
00:33:22,934 –> 00:33:26,720
of unfreedom where in the totalitarian

526
00:33:26,720 –> 00:33:30,409
society you had Big Brother who was controlling everything. And in the

527
00:33:30,409 –> 00:33:33,858
post-totalitarian society, through skillful manipulation of

528
00:33:33,858 –> 00:33:37,612
rewards and punishments and social currents and all the rest, it’s simply

529
00:33:37,708 –> 00:33:40,884
Big Brother is simply implanted inside ourselves. So we will

530
00:33:41,221 –> 00:33:44,781
actually censor and regulate ourselves. Okay, so that’s,

531
00:33:45,086 –> 00:33:48,678
that’s, that’s the first part of this. But the second part is Hodel,

532
00:33:48,854 –> 00:33:52,591
and, and, and he was very clear in, in his way of

533
00:33:52,943 –> 00:33:56,776
viewing it, his orientation, and it was very clear in the world that, that, that

534
00:33:56,776 –> 00:34:00,560
we all lived in at that time. The locus of the worst

535
00:34:00,560 –> 00:34:04,377
of that was to be found in, in, in Soviet Union,

536
00:34:04,810 –> 00:34:08,594
East Bloc, and communist countries. That it was not exclusively there,

537
00:34:08,658 –> 00:34:12,285
but that, but that was sort of centered. But then he also said there’s

538
00:34:12,285 –> 00:34:16,042
another side to it. And here the worst part isn’t necessarily found in the

539
00:34:16,042 –> 00:34:19,815
communist countries. It’s often found in the capitalist countries, or it’s often found in, in,

540
00:34:20,201 –> 00:34:23,765
in what we think of as democratic societies. And that is the

541
00:34:23,765 –> 00:34:27,314
hollowness of not having a purpose, the hollowness of not

542
00:34:27,667 –> 00:34:31,360
having something that is more important to you than the

543
00:34:31,360 –> 00:34:35,117
fulfillment of basic material goods, needs, and pleasures.

544
00:34:36,048 –> 00:34:39,611
Okay. And that is really kind of

545
00:34:39,804 –> 00:34:43,366
critical because if you look at now, fast forward to Havel

546
00:34:43,976 –> 00:34:47,555
a half generation later, now as the president of

547
00:34:47,587 –> 00:34:51,422
this country and what he was dealing with and, and, and the

548
00:34:51,422 –> 00:34:54,744
society that he was trying to help shape, guide, lead,

549
00:34:55,129 –> 00:34:58,916
help emerge. It’s not just about how

550
00:34:58,916 –> 00:35:02,335
do you actually free yourself from the post-totalitarian constraints that we’ve

551
00:35:02,833 –> 00:35:06,198
implanted inside of ourselves and which we’re encouraged to and

552
00:35:06,842 –> 00:35:10,690
coerced to, to a high degree. But it’s also a question of

553
00:35:11,511 –> 00:35:14,816
what matters to us and to what extent are we actually

554
00:35:15,319 –> 00:35:19,116
ready to stand in that place, because that’s what Havel called living in

555
00:35:19,213 –> 00:35:22,799
truth. And if you do that,

556
00:35:24,644 –> 00:35:27,737
you have unbelievable, immense,

557
00:35:27,915 –> 00:35:31,108
enormous power. That is the power of the powerless.

558
00:35:33,778 –> 00:35:37,550
Let me pick up with that idea of living in truth with

559
00:35:37,582 –> 00:35:41,353
this from Power, The Power of the Powerless. I want

560
00:35:41,661 –> 00:35:45,344
to go to page 49 in the essay there. We’re gonna pick

561
00:35:45,344 –> 00:35:48,882
up there, kind of where we, where we talked about a little bit before,

562
00:35:49,645 –> 00:35:53,404
um, in the previous episode, episode number 102. Um, I’m

563
00:35:53,469 –> 00:35:57,175
gonna pick this up here. This is from part 14 of his

564
00:35:57,368 –> 00:36:01,146
essay. And I quote directly from Václav Havel, backing up

565
00:36:01,146 –> 00:36:04,734
Harvey here. The post-totalitarian

566
00:36:04,734 –> 00:36:07,651
system is mounting a total assault on humans,

567
00:36:08,607 –> 00:36:11,915
and humans stand against it alone, abandoned and

568
00:36:12,011 –> 00:36:15,618
isolated. It is therefore entirely natural that all the dissident

569
00:36:15,651 –> 00:36:19,354
movements are explicitly defensive movements. They exist to defend human

570
00:36:19,354 –> 00:36:23,145
beings and the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system.

571
00:36:24,604 –> 00:36:27,361
Today, the Polish group KOR is called the Committee for Social

572
00:36:28,692 –> 00:36:32,314
Self-Defence. The word defence appears in the names of other similar groups in Poland,

573
00:36:33,020 –> 00:36:36,851
but even the Soviet Helsinki Monitoring Group and our own Charter 77 are

574
00:36:36,851 –> 00:36:40,522
clearly defensive in nature. In terms of traditional

575
00:36:40,554 –> 00:36:44,080
politics, this programme of defence is understandable, even though it may appear

576
00:36:44,080 –> 00:36:47,928
minimal, provisional, and ultimately negative. It offers no new

577
00:36:47,928 –> 00:36:51,679
conception, model, or ideology, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of

578
00:36:51,679 –> 00:36:55,269
the word, since politics always assumes a positive programme and can scarcely

579
00:36:55,383 –> 00:36:58,908
limit itself to defending someone against something.

580
00:37:01,310 –> 00:37:04,350
Such a view, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionally political way of looking

581
00:37:04,350 –> 00:37:07,989
at things. The post-totalitarian system, after all, is not the

582
00:37:07,989 –> 00:37:11,814
manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is

583
00:37:11,846 –> 00:37:15,606
something radically different. It is a complex, profound, and

584
00:37:15,606 –> 00:37:19,446
long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation

585
00:37:19,543 –> 00:37:22,900
of society. To oppose it merely by

586
00:37:22,900 –> 00:37:26,561
establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not

587
00:37:26,561 –> 00:37:30,077
only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come

588
00:37:30,450 –> 00:37:34,147
near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has

589
00:37:34,195 –> 00:37:38,026
no longer resided in a political line or program. It is a

590
00:37:38,075 –> 00:37:40,268
problem of life itself.

591
00:37:42,192 –> 00:37:45,861
Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity, is not only a more realistic

592
00:37:45,861 –> 00:37:49,395
approach, Since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it

593
00:37:49,395 –> 00:37:53,239
concerns people’s everyday lives. At the same time, and perhaps

594
00:37:53,303 –> 00:37:56,440
precisely because of this, it is also an

595
00:37:56,440 –> 00:37:59,931
incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the

596
00:38:00,059 –> 00:38:03,842
very essence of things. There

597
00:38:03,842 –> 00:38:07,599
are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth,

598
00:38:08,343 –> 00:38:10,999
just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars

599
00:38:11,112 –> 00:38:14,692
in broad daylight. It seems to me that today this

600
00:38:15,031 –> 00:38:18,685
provisional, minimal, and negative program, the simple defense of

601
00:38:18,685 –> 00:38:22,467
people, is in a particular sense, and not merely in the circumstances in which we

602
00:38:22,467 –> 00:38:26,274
live, an optimal and most positive program because it forces politics to return

603
00:38:26,274 –> 00:38:29,743
to its only proper starting point. Proper, that is, if all the old

604
00:38:29,743 –> 00:38:32,067
mistakes are to be avoided, individual people.

605
00:38:33,923 –> 00:38:37,473
To Harvey’s point here, in the democratic societies where the

606
00:38:37,489 –> 00:38:41,300
violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution

607
00:38:41,300 –> 00:38:45,097
in politics has yet to happen. And some things

608
00:38:45,113 –> 00:38:48,228
will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is

609
00:38:48,260 –> 00:38:52,081
reflected in politics. In our world, precisely

610
00:38:52,113 –> 00:38:55,646
because of the misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politics has

611
00:38:55,726 –> 00:38:59,548
already undergone that transformation. The central concerns of political thought is

612
00:38:59,564 –> 00:39:02,952
no longer abstract visions of a self-redeeming positive model.

613
00:39:03,514 –> 00:39:07,030
And of course, the opportunistic political practices that are in the— that are the

614
00:39:07,030 –> 00:39:10,880
reverse of the same coin. But rather the people who have so far merely

615
00:39:10,912 –> 00:39:14,173
been enslaved by those models and their

616
00:39:14,948 –> 00:39:16,127
practices.

617
00:39:20,412 –> 00:39:24,082
Again, he’s writing this in the

618
00:39:24,391 –> 00:39:27,816
’80s. We live in 2026 in the West,

619
00:39:27,977 –> 00:39:31,709
ostensibly, and we are

620
00:39:31,854 –> 00:39:35,586
there. We are there. This is why

621
00:39:37,209 –> 00:39:40,483
On the dissident alt-right, you know, online,

622
00:39:41,237 –> 00:39:44,993
Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless has become an essay

623
00:39:44,993 –> 00:39:48,524
that’s been passed around like Samizdat, around and

624
00:39:48,524 –> 00:39:52,263
around and around. Because the recognition

625
00:39:52,312 –> 00:39:56,003
is, as the very online rightist people would say, we

626
00:39:56,003 –> 00:39:58,796
can’t vote our way harder out of this problem.

627
00:39:59,855 –> 00:40:03,590
The problem is the system itself. It’s the problem is not progressive and

628
00:40:03,590 –> 00:40:07,110
conservative. The problem is not even a uniparty. The problem is the

629
00:40:07,110 –> 00:40:10,770
system itself. It’s the nature of the thing we have. But, but Havel

630
00:40:10,770 –> 00:40:14,390
would say the problem is not the

631
00:40:14,390 –> 00:40:17,230
system. Right, right, right. He would say it’s in the individuals. It’s in the people.

632
00:40:17,590 –> 00:40:21,430
It’s in the people. Right. Exactly. This is, this is, this is the, this is

633
00:40:21,430 –> 00:40:25,150
where we have met the enemy and he is us. And he’s ourselves.

634
00:40:25,710 –> 00:40:28,759
That’s right. He is us. And this is where I think,

635
00:40:31,025 –> 00:40:34,159
now again, I want to be as broad as possible in this. This is the,

636
00:40:34,384 –> 00:40:37,427
the, the both the triumph and the tragedy of Donald Trump’s election.

637
00:40:38,417 –> 00:40:41,452
So the triumph is the idea that

638
00:40:42,734 –> 00:40:45,734
just like in the Roman Republic, one man can save a system.

639
00:40:46,766 –> 00:40:49,974
That’s a very Roman idea. But then the tragedy is

640
00:40:50,570 –> 00:40:54,133
just like in Coriolanus that we read here when we, when we covered Shakespeare,

641
00:40:54,262 –> 00:40:57,642
right? You know, that one man

642
00:40:58,475 –> 00:41:00,338
can’t actually save the system.

643
00:41:02,318 –> 00:41:05,866
And by the way, it’s not up to one man. It’s up to the

644
00:41:05,866 –> 00:41:09,607
plebeians to save themselves and to recognize, to your point,

645
00:41:10,332 –> 00:41:14,169
where the problems exist in their own,

646
00:41:14,443 –> 00:41:18,200
in their own souls. Thus, I get to where I’m going with this, which

647
00:41:18,232 –> 00:41:21,894
is in our society,

648
00:41:22,040 –> 00:41:25,778
we have lawn signs and bumper stickers where people

649
00:41:25,778 –> 00:41:29,533
proclaim, just like the greengrocer, they

650
00:41:29,533 –> 00:41:32,907
proclaim— We have a lot of greengrocers. Yeah, we have a lot of greengrocers. Oh

651
00:41:32,988 –> 00:41:36,670
my God. And, and on

652
00:41:36,670 –> 00:41:40,414
social media, we have a lot of meme posters who

653
00:41:40,854 –> 00:41:44,543
are also greengrocers. Right, right. Yep.

654
00:41:45,497 –> 00:41:49,312
And the lack of critical thought, which is part of the reason why

655
00:41:49,312 –> 00:41:52,205
I do this podcast. I do this podcast because I have critical thoughts.

656
00:41:53,815 –> 00:41:57,544
Right? Not critic thoughts, critical thoughts,

657
00:41:57,625 –> 00:42:01,431
right? The lack of critical thought behind social

658
00:42:01,431 –> 00:42:04,725
signaling is a

659
00:42:04,773 –> 00:42:08,558
psychocultural phenomenon that we’re just beginning to wrestle with at this moment

660
00:42:08,574 –> 00:42:10,515
in the West. This is the thing that Havel predicted.

661
00:42:12,560 –> 00:42:15,709
Yeah. He predicted it because he was living in

662
00:42:16,629 –> 00:42:20,134
the middle of a vast environment and

663
00:42:20,134 –> 00:42:23,475
network built on that. It comes in

664
00:42:23,524 –> 00:42:24,054
cycles.

665
00:42:27,360 –> 00:42:31,167
You know, this, this actually kind of makes

666
00:42:31,167 –> 00:42:34,831
me think, and just to kind of pause

667
00:42:34,943 –> 00:42:37,688
for a moment on that, although I want to get back to that point.

668
00:42:39,000 –> 00:42:42,768
But so everything that we’ve been talking about

669
00:42:42,768 –> 00:42:46,310
so far has been, for me, what I

670
00:42:46,310 –> 00:42:50,145
experienced or what I thought about or what I lived through the

671
00:42:50,161 –> 00:42:53,428
first time I read this book. So I read this book a second time.

672
00:42:55,138 –> 00:42:58,664
I came back to it. I came back to it actually

673
00:43:00,379 –> 00:43:04,034
first— I made my first visit to Prague around

674
00:43:04,034 –> 00:43:07,479
2000, and none of this was

675
00:43:07,527 –> 00:43:11,166
especially particularly on my mind. I was there with

676
00:43:11,230 –> 00:43:15,078
Orpheus and I was planning concerts and getting ready to do something.

677
00:43:15,433 –> 00:43:19,117
So I have an unusual last name. And it’s sufficiently

678
00:43:19,117 –> 00:43:22,856
unusual that if you share the same last name, it’s

679
00:43:22,968 –> 00:43:26,483
not— we don’t have to go too far back. We can figure out the relationship.

680
00:43:27,301 –> 00:43:31,104
Okay, so my practice has been

681
00:43:31,618 –> 00:43:34,923
for many, many years. I travel to different parts of the world back

682
00:43:35,164 –> 00:43:38,823
before the internet was pervasive, and it wasn’t really that pervasive yet in

683
00:43:38,855 –> 00:43:41,679
2000 in Eastern Europe or Central Europe.

684
00:43:42,883 –> 00:43:46,174
So I would go to the phone book. So I was in Prague. I had

685
00:43:46,174 –> 00:43:49,256
a few minutes between things, and I popped into a phone

686
00:43:49,594 –> 00:43:52,404
booth, and sure enough, there’s a phone book there. So I looked for

687
00:43:52,404 –> 00:43:55,711
Seifter, particularly since I knew my

688
00:43:55,856 –> 00:43:58,746
grandfather actually was from there and so forth. So,

689
00:43:59,886 –> 00:44:03,547
so sure enough, there’s a Seifter there. His name is Pavel Seifter.

690
00:44:04,398 –> 00:44:07,481
So I figured, okay, I reached in,

691
00:44:08,251 –> 00:44:11,752
dropped a couple of coins in the phone. Called up, and

692
00:44:11,752 –> 00:44:14,786
against all odds, somebody picked up the phone. So,

693
00:44:15,204 –> 00:44:18,961
and so, so there was this guy. So I, I would,

694
00:44:19,459 –> 00:44:23,136
I sort of started in German. I speak Czech and lots of people speak German.

695
00:44:23,184 –> 00:44:26,973
So I thought I would start in German. So, so I explained, and I got

696
00:44:27,022 –> 00:44:29,928
as far as, ich heiße Seifter, my name is Seifter.

697
00:44:31,020 –> 00:44:34,729
And he said, where and when should we meet?

698
00:44:35,788 –> 00:44:39,516
So 20 minutes later, downstairs

699
00:44:39,628 –> 00:44:43,003
in Old Town Square and looking around,

700
00:44:43,485 –> 00:44:47,324
and I met who I learned after several hours of reconstruction

701
00:44:47,421 –> 00:44:51,110
was my cousin Paul, who was

702
00:44:53,081 –> 00:44:56,845
considerably older and who had actually,

703
00:44:57,104 –> 00:45:00,880
through a circuitous story, his life as

704
00:45:01,138 –> 00:45:04,876
an infant had been saved by my grandfather, who

705
00:45:04,892 –> 00:45:08,651
raised money to get him out just ahead of the Germans as

706
00:45:08,748 –> 00:45:12,588
they moved in in ’38. Yeah. So Pavel, who was only

707
00:45:13,166 –> 00:45:16,942
by chance that he was there, it was actually his daughter’s apartment. He lived

708
00:45:16,942 –> 00:45:19,898
in London. And as the story

709
00:45:21,055 –> 00:45:24,638
became clear, so Pavel was a close

710
00:45:24,815 –> 00:45:27,530
friend and

711
00:45:27,562 –> 00:45:31,174
colleague of Havel. He was a

712
00:45:31,174 –> 00:45:34,588
signer of Charter 77. He had

713
00:45:35,021 –> 00:45:38,548
been in prison. He had been through all kinds of things. He

714
00:45:39,045 –> 00:45:42,700
spent many, many years after getting his

715
00:45:42,700 –> 00:45:46,419
PhD as a young man in history from Charles University, Washington windows there,

716
00:45:47,284 –> 00:45:50,763
for his dissidence. And then in the end, when

717
00:45:51,516 –> 00:45:55,027
Havel triumphed and the Velvet Revolution happened,

718
00:45:55,540 –> 00:45:59,243
he invited my cousin Pavel to join him in

719
00:45:59,371 –> 00:46:01,631
the palace. He became his national security advisor.

720
00:46:02,753 –> 00:46:06,326
orchestrated the entry into NATO. And as his final

721
00:46:07,560 –> 00:46:11,181
job before retiring, he asked, where would you like to

722
00:46:11,181 –> 00:46:14,867
go? And Pavel said, I’d like to go to London. So

723
00:46:14,931 –> 00:46:18,520
Pavel made a visit passing. So he

724
00:46:18,520 –> 00:46:21,500
had such an extraordinary vantage point on all this, and that

725
00:46:22,238 –> 00:46:26,035
immediately triggered my thinking about The Power of

726
00:46:26,147 –> 00:46:29,433
the Powerless. And I went back and I read it a second time. And I

727
00:46:29,433 –> 00:46:32,998
really immersed myself in it deeply. And this also was, uh,

728
00:46:33,287 –> 00:46:37,108
when 9/11 happened. Mm-hmm. And I was sort of

729
00:46:37,365 –> 00:46:40,978
rereading that in that context and thinking about that. And what does it mean to

730
00:46:40,978 –> 00:46:44,799
live in truth? Uh, I was actually, uh, on

731
00:46:44,847 –> 00:46:48,621
my way to Hong Kong when 9/11 happened. And, uh, I was in a,

732
00:46:48,862 –> 00:46:52,587
a quick, immediate, uh, uh, bubble of people that

733
00:46:52,715 –> 00:46:56,549
were, uh, experiencing this together from all over the

734
00:46:56,549 –> 00:47:00,074
world. And so many of them were actually not

735
00:47:00,074 –> 00:47:03,776
taking a perspective that, uh, that I found that I could

736
00:47:03,776 –> 00:47:07,461
live with because, well, maybe America had it

737
00:47:07,461 –> 00:47:11,307
coming to it. And all the support for Israel, all, all the other things that,

738
00:47:11,451 –> 00:47:14,961
that, that started emerging immediately,

739
00:47:15,297 –> 00:47:18,326
that also made me think a lot about what it meant to live in truth

740
00:47:18,839 –> 00:47:22,367
and what it meant authenticity So the book

741
00:47:22,367 –> 00:47:26,028
became a kind of a touchstone for me. And

742
00:47:26,221 –> 00:47:29,914
the culmination of this second reading in this story came a few

743
00:47:29,978 –> 00:47:33,414
years later. So in

744
00:47:33,527 –> 00:47:36,947
2009, I was invited by the International

745
00:47:36,979 –> 00:47:39,724
Leadership Association to give a keynote concert

746
00:47:40,897 –> 00:47:44,686
at— in Prague on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet

747
00:47:44,686 –> 00:47:48,524
Revolution. They did their little conference there that year

748
00:47:48,524 –> 00:47:51,778
for that reason. And so, and I

749
00:47:52,291 –> 00:47:55,929
reached out to the Prague Chamber Orchestra and we developed a program

750
00:47:55,929 –> 00:47:59,326
together and did it at the Liechtenstein Palace.

751
00:47:59,743 –> 00:48:03,124
And as I dove deeply into the history, as it happened, I wasn’t

752
00:48:03,124 –> 00:48:06,682
expecting this, but this building, this building, this

753
00:48:06,730 –> 00:48:10,432
magnificent building had so many strange things in its history.

754
00:48:10,656 –> 00:48:14,230
Decapitated rebels and

755
00:48:14,358 –> 00:48:18,076
histories around that. It turned out that this building was

756
00:48:18,252 –> 00:48:22,029
actually then the headquarters of the German

757
00:48:22,029 –> 00:48:25,818
railroad that was routing the trains to Auschwitz.

758
00:48:28,020 –> 00:48:31,749
This building was used by Stalin to, to, to, to

759
00:48:31,749 –> 00:48:35,237
be the center for political reeducation after the war,

760
00:48:35,606 –> 00:48:38,933
and they built in his honor the largest statue of Stalin in the

761
00:48:39,062 –> 00:48:42,484
world. And Havel

762
00:48:42,597 –> 00:48:46,020
came in, and he had many

763
00:48:46,052 –> 00:48:49,729
problems to deal with. This building, this palace, was not the top one on the

764
00:48:49,729 –> 00:48:52,314
list. But on the other hand,

765
00:48:53,357 –> 00:48:57,194
Sohabel believes that small spaces matter incredibly, that public

766
00:48:57,194 –> 00:49:00,935
choices matter incredibly, and that authenticity matters.

767
00:49:02,091 –> 00:49:05,703
And of course, he’s an artist. And so he

768
00:49:06,265 –> 00:49:09,251
reflected a lot about this building and its history.

769
00:49:10,343 –> 00:49:14,180
And he came to the conclusion that this building represented

770
00:49:15,049 –> 00:49:18,691
a really profound opportunity. He did something

771
00:49:18,691 –> 00:49:22,463
amazing. This whole long history of this building, it had never been

772
00:49:22,479 –> 00:49:25,289
used for anything that anybody could call a good purpose.

773
00:49:26,690 –> 00:49:30,492
He took this building and he turned it into a center for art

774
00:49:30,492 –> 00:49:32,780
and culture and for young musicians to learn.

775
00:49:34,326 –> 00:49:37,353
And by that simple act of taking

776
00:49:38,061 –> 00:49:41,394
Stalin’s statue and the German railroads and the bloody

777
00:49:41,427 –> 00:49:44,241
patriots of the 17th century who were decapitated there and battle plans and

778
00:49:46,080 –> 00:49:48,775
the rest of it in that building and turning it into a center for art

779
00:49:48,775 –> 00:49:52,535
and creation, of culture, of observing the world, connecting

780
00:49:52,551 –> 00:49:55,841
with the world, creating in the world, building things in the world.

781
00:49:57,384 –> 00:50:01,177
That took something and it also showed something. What

782
00:50:01,177 –> 00:50:04,585
it took was a profound act of moral

783
00:50:04,634 –> 00:50:08,312
imagination. And to me, that’s at the heart of

784
00:50:08,973 –> 00:50:12,764
my second reading of this, of this. This is, this is an essay

785
00:50:12,764 –> 00:50:16,476
about the moral imagination. The ability to imagine a world

786
00:50:16,476 –> 00:50:20,147
that’s different. And he did that, but he

787
00:50:20,307 –> 00:50:24,059
also realized something else. This is something

788
00:50:24,155 –> 00:50:27,842
that I think is so powerful and so important and so

789
00:50:28,098 –> 00:50:31,946
urgently needed in the world. He recognized people

790
00:50:31,946 –> 00:50:35,761
are always talking about how do we transform? How do we bridge

791
00:50:35,793 –> 00:50:39,128
to the future? How do we become one with this? And what Havel is

792
00:50:39,417 –> 00:50:43,141
saying With that act, just as he said it in, in

793
00:50:43,237 –> 00:50:46,770
different words, but he said it in, in The Power of the Powerless. If you

794
00:50:47,010 –> 00:50:50,768
want to transform, you must first transcend.

795
00:50:51,587 –> 00:50:54,862
You must take that step into truth. You

796
00:50:54,975 –> 00:50:58,796
must transcend the environment that you’re in. You have

797
00:50:58,828 –> 00:51:02,601
to become that other person. Once you do that,

798
00:51:03,549 –> 00:51:06,696
transformation is a piece of cake. That’s then just

799
00:51:07,375 –> 00:51:10,059
how you live. But until you do that,

800
00:51:11,417 –> 00:51:13,869
you’re nope. So

801
00:51:15,143 –> 00:51:18,692
that’s powerful. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s powerful.

802
00:51:19,643 –> 00:51:21,998
And I would assert that

803
00:51:23,676 –> 00:51:27,403
while a person with an engineering background might have the moral imagination to

804
00:51:27,403 –> 00:51:31,187
get there, maybe a person with a financial background might have the moral

805
00:51:31,204 –> 00:51:34,805
imagination to get there. I would assert that only a person with a deeply

806
00:51:34,805 –> 00:51:37,278
artistic background has the moral imagination to get there.

807
00:51:40,944 –> 00:51:43,779
That’s the first thing that occurs to me. The second thing that occurs to me

808
00:51:43,779 –> 00:51:47,295
as you were speaking, among the many notes that I took here,

809
00:51:48,235 –> 00:51:49,417
this is a powerful observation.

810
00:51:54,770 –> 00:51:57,877
The kind of moral imagination.

811
00:51:59,197 –> 00:52:02,793
That is necessary to understand that place.

812
00:52:03,344 –> 00:52:07,036
I’ll make this even more abstract, that the physical

813
00:52:07,036 –> 00:52:10,340
world buttresses on and

814
00:52:10,340 –> 00:52:13,821
impacts the spiritual world. And I’m not talking about this in a religious

815
00:52:13,821 –> 00:52:17,547
context. I’m talking about this in a broad, broad context. We

816
00:52:17,547 –> 00:52:20,806
can get to the narrow religion if we want later on, but

817
00:52:21,468 –> 00:52:24,679
in a broad context, the material world and the spiritual world.

818
00:52:25,418 –> 00:52:29,050
interact. So I’m part of a, I’m part of a men’s group.

819
00:52:29,130 –> 00:52:32,970
We meet on, we meet on Wednesdays. We’re all Christians. We

820
00:52:32,970 –> 00:52:36,184
all go to different churches and we get together and we have lunch and we

821
00:52:36,184 –> 00:52:40,024
talk about biblical things, right? I do this once a week, every week with these

822
00:52:40,057 –> 00:52:43,142
guys. I’ve been doing it for about a year, year and a half now.

823
00:52:44,138 –> 00:52:47,673
And it doesn’t matter which part of the Bible we were reading, but the question

824
00:52:47,673 –> 00:52:48,943
that was in front of us was,

825
00:52:53,820 –> 00:52:57,246
Why, or not why, does, which is a better

826
00:52:57,246 –> 00:52:59,864
question, does a

827
00:52:59,912 –> 00:53:03,533
material sacrifice, no, does a spiritual sacrifice

828
00:53:03,533 –> 00:53:06,508
require a material element in order to be effective?

829
00:53:08,157 –> 00:53:11,472
Now that’s a hugely powerful question. It’s almost a rabbinical question, actually.

830
00:53:11,958 –> 00:53:15,709
It’s a hugely powerful question, right? And we only have 45

831
00:53:15,709 –> 00:53:18,410
minutes for lunch. we’re not going to get to the end of this question. Like,

832
00:53:18,410 –> 00:53:21,030
it’s just not, it’s just not going to happen.

833
00:53:23,530 –> 00:53:27,250
Plus, we’re like 4 dudes who all have different jobs

834
00:53:27,250 –> 00:53:30,090
in different places. Like, we got, you know, we got, you know, we’re just regular

835
00:53:30,090 –> 00:53:33,470
schmucks, right? Just hanging out trying to figure this out, right?

836
00:53:33,560 –> 00:53:37,030
And it’s interesting that I had this conversation yesterday with these guys and you’re bringing

837
00:53:37,030 –> 00:53:40,450
this up today because I think what you’re talking about with

838
00:53:40,450 –> 00:53:44,218
Havel is part of the answer to this question and what he understood

839
00:53:44,331 –> 00:53:47,630
was the sacrifice of this building

840
00:53:48,552 –> 00:53:50,056
with all of its bloody history.

841
00:53:52,935 –> 00:53:56,756
That history had to be— I’m going to use a spiritual term

842
00:53:56,805 –> 00:54:00,271
here— it had to be atoned for, but

843
00:54:00,287 –> 00:54:03,815
not in the destruction of the building. Right. It had to be

844
00:54:03,815 –> 00:54:07,578
atoned for in the changing of the material nature

845
00:54:08,049 –> 00:54:11,736
of what goes on in the building. And then let people with their— you talk

846
00:54:11,736 –> 00:54:15,317
about individuals rather than systems and institutions. Let individuals have the

847
00:54:15,317 –> 00:54:18,849
freedom to come in, and freedom is the key word there. Freedom to come in,

848
00:54:19,909 –> 00:54:23,281
bring their spirit with them, and

849
00:54:23,425 –> 00:54:27,263
then the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual atonement can continue

850
00:54:27,375 –> 00:54:31,148
on another level that quite frankly, even Havel, myself, the

851
00:54:31,148 –> 00:54:34,681
guys in my group, even Harvey here doesn’t really understand. Right.

852
00:54:35,403 –> 00:54:38,342
We just know it works. We’re just in tune with it. We know it works.

853
00:54:38,695 –> 00:54:42,532
We don’t know why. We don’t know how. As I, as I sometimes put it,

854
00:54:42,549 –> 00:54:45,535
or as I put it in the group conversation I was having yesterday with my,

855
00:54:45,985 –> 00:54:49,822
with the folks in my men’s group, that’s happening 1,200 levels above

856
00:54:49,854 –> 00:54:53,547
me. I have no idea. I don’t know. I just

857
00:54:53,547 –> 00:54:56,903
know that like, even in the Old Testament, even in the Torah,

858
00:54:57,465 –> 00:54:59,296
when Abraham brought Isaac to the mountain,

859
00:55:02,696 –> 00:55:05,902
And there was still, and even when Isaac was spared, and if you want to

860
00:55:05,902 –> 00:55:08,082
go back and read that in the book of Genesis, go back and read that.

861
00:55:08,451 –> 00:55:12,154
But Isaac was spared. Don’t touch the boy. Not a hand goes on

862
00:55:12,154 –> 00:55:15,857
him. Not one. But here’s a ram in the thicket. There has

863
00:55:16,001 –> 00:55:19,752
to be some material element that somehow ties into a spiritual

864
00:55:19,752 –> 00:55:23,599
sacrifice and even into a spiritual atonement. And I think that that’s

865
00:55:23,599 –> 00:55:27,398
what Havel was getting at with the rededication of this building to something

866
00:55:27,398 –> 00:55:31,229
else. And I think it’s only artists that get that at a deep level and

867
00:55:31,229 –> 00:55:34,913
understand that deep But they operate to it out of instinct. And of

868
00:55:34,913 –> 00:55:37,505
course, you recognized it because you’re coming out of the theater, you’re coming out of

869
00:55:37,505 –> 00:55:40,584
music. And I don’t even know if you would have articulated it that way back

870
00:55:40,584 –> 00:55:42,796
in the day. But I think that’s what you sensed.

871
00:55:45,520 –> 00:55:47,638
Yeah. Yeah,

872
00:55:48,156 –> 00:55:51,019
it’s a rich journey. It’s an incredible

873
00:55:51,051 –> 00:55:54,836
journey that that building was on, that he

874
00:55:54,836 –> 00:55:57,850
was on, that each of us are on.

875
00:55:58,755 –> 00:56:02,595
Right. And the moral imagination, to know that and to recognize that

876
00:56:02,595 –> 00:56:06,065
you’re on that journey is something that I think we’re, we’re

877
00:56:06,130 –> 00:56:09,584
lacking in the West. We’re lacking at an individual level. We

878
00:56:09,664 –> 00:56:13,472
lack it. Moral imagination. I think of

879
00:56:13,521 –> 00:56:17,280
moral imagination as a skill, actually. Okay.

880
00:56:17,473 –> 00:56:21,088
I think we don’t practice it enough. And the thing is that with,

881
00:56:21,169 –> 00:56:24,061
with, as with all skills, you get good at it by practicing it.

882
00:56:25,270 –> 00:56:28,790
Yeah. Or it’ll atrophy if you never use it. Right? Yeah.

883
00:56:28,790 –> 00:56:32,370
Yeah. And so this gets into the question

884
00:56:32,370 –> 00:56:35,910
here that you posed, which you’re posing it and Havel has

885
00:56:35,910 –> 00:56:39,030
posed it. So I’m going to challenge you with this question

886
00:56:39,880 –> 00:56:42,150
because our listeners are going to be listening to this. They’re going to be going,

887
00:56:42,250 –> 00:56:44,630
okay, Hasan, you’re going all esoteric here on me. Okay,

888
00:56:44,630 –> 00:56:48,390
fine. We’ll tolerate some of this, but at

889
00:56:48,390 –> 00:56:51,663
a certain point, you got to get practical with me, right? And, you know, that’s

890
00:56:51,663 –> 00:56:54,868
good because I am at the bottom a pragmatic guy. I could do the abstract

891
00:56:54,868 –> 00:56:58,201
stuff, but at the bottom, like what works and what doesn’t and do the things

892
00:56:58,217 –> 00:57:00,797
that work. Right. Right. Um, so

893
00:57:02,063 –> 00:57:05,267
what does it mean to live in truth at a

894
00:57:05,267 –> 00:57:08,905
practical level? Like if I’m listening to this, if I’ve

895
00:57:08,905 –> 00:57:12,718
made it this far in the episode where, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re about an

896
00:57:12,718 –> 00:57:15,971
hour, we’re about an hour or so in now. I made it an hour in.

897
00:57:16,019 –> 00:57:17,349
I’ve wandered down this journey.

898
00:57:19,669 –> 00:57:22,689
Okay, what does it mean practically to live in truth? Because

899
00:57:23,448 –> 00:57:27,017
if, you know, my listeners, maybe it’s a guy who’s a carpenter,

900
00:57:27,507 –> 00:57:31,078
you know, and he’s hammering nails, right? And I’m not diminishing carpenters. Well, like, that’s,

901
00:57:31,094 –> 00:57:33,999
that’s the job that he’s done, right? We need carpenters. Heck, I need carpenters. I’m

902
00:57:33,999 –> 00:57:37,847
an amateur carpenter. I know how hard that job is. Or maybe he’s a

903
00:57:37,847 –> 00:57:41,355
truck driver, you know, listening to this, driving across country, delivering loads.

904
00:57:41,549 –> 00:57:45,131
Or maybe he works in the oil and gas field. Or maybe

905
00:57:45,244 –> 00:57:48,542
he’s on his way on the bus or her on her way on the bus

906
00:57:50,553 –> 00:57:54,192
to go do a job that maybe they

907
00:57:54,208 –> 00:57:57,978
weren’t exactly excited about doing, but it feeds their family. Or maybe they’re

908
00:57:57,978 –> 00:58:01,491
in a white-collar work situation where they don’t have a chance to be

909
00:58:01,540 –> 00:58:04,534
artistic because now they’re

910
00:58:05,003 –> 00:58:08,286
fighting a war of justifying their

911
00:58:08,351 –> 00:58:11,395
job, you know, to someone. Who

912
00:58:11,781 –> 00:58:15,410
sold their boss on an AI solution for what they’re doing.

913
00:58:16,245 –> 00:58:19,955
And they’ve been thinking they’ve been bringing practical value. And now they’re being told

914
00:58:19,955 –> 00:58:23,698
that they’re not. What do we say to those people? Because when we say you

915
00:58:23,714 –> 00:58:27,552
have to, you must live in truth, that sounds very pie in

916
00:58:27,584 –> 00:58:31,326
the sky. Break that down practically. What does it mean

917
00:58:32,547 –> 00:58:36,369
if I’m a regular person to live in truth? What does that actually mean?

918
00:58:36,417 –> 00:58:39,796
What does that actually look like? How do I actually do that in a meaningful

919
00:58:39,796 –> 00:58:43,434
way? Yeah. So it’s a great question. I’m going to

920
00:58:43,483 –> 00:58:47,282
suggest there are actually 2 questions embedded in this. So one is the

921
00:58:47,282 –> 00:58:49,912
how, and the other is

922
00:58:52,670 –> 00:58:55,771
how much of this do I have to do? And

923
00:58:56,526 –> 00:58:59,822
that’s kind of an important question too, because there’s always a cost.

924
00:59:00,931 –> 00:59:03,969
And so, so what do we mean? But let’s, let’s, let’s start with the how.

925
00:59:04,572 –> 00:59:07,950
So for Havel, the

926
00:59:07,950 –> 00:59:11,037
definition is really

927
00:59:11,037 –> 00:59:12,880
simple.

928
00:59:16,296 –> 00:59:19,241
Do you know who you are?

929
00:59:20,335 –> 00:59:22,394
Do you recognize what matters to you?

930
00:59:26,043 –> 00:59:28,107
Really? And of course,

931
00:59:29,981 –> 00:59:33,549
that question has been in Western philosophy since the Greeks from the beginning. It’s been—

932
00:59:33,549 –> 00:59:36,962
Yeah, Plato, Plato was writing down

933
00:59:36,962 –> 00:59:40,003
Socrates and stuff, struggling with that going all the way back. Yeah, please.

934
00:59:40,586 –> 00:59:44,209
Exactly. But what he’s really asking,

935
00:59:44,727 –> 00:59:47,523
go back to our greengrocer here, is, so

936
00:59:49,171 –> 00:59:51,385
do you actually care about

937
00:59:52,629 –> 00:59:55,787
workers of the world uniting? Okay.

938
00:59:56,350 –> 01:00:00,117
If you do, then, you know, that’s a reasonable starting point for

939
01:00:00,133 –> 01:00:03,939
why you should put this out of there quickly. And if you don’t, Then there

940
01:00:03,939 –> 01:00:07,472
are all kinds of issues and problems and questions. But Havel is

941
01:00:07,504 –> 01:00:11,200
basically saying, okay, now look at the, look at the negative

942
01:00:11,200 –> 01:00:14,447
space agreement. Look at, flip that assumption on its head.

943
01:00:15,234 –> 01:00:19,044
He’s saying, okay, you don’t care about that, but you’re going

944
01:00:19,044 –> 01:00:22,887
to put a sign up. What, what’s the price

945
01:00:22,887 –> 01:00:26,424
to you? What’s the cost?

946
01:00:28,906 –> 01:00:32,613
And that comes back to who are you? If you

947
01:00:32,613 –> 01:00:35,371
don’t believe it, but you’re putting it up,

948
01:00:37,367 –> 01:00:40,916
there is a cost to it. Now you have to weigh that against the

949
01:00:40,916 –> 01:00:44,740
practical costs of not doing it and not compliance and all

950
01:00:45,257 –> 01:00:47,818
of that. So it doesn’t lead to a simple, so you must do it because

951
01:00:47,835 –> 01:00:51,440
that’s the law. But what it does lead you to is recognizing,

952
01:00:51,568 –> 01:00:54,659
okay, I’m, I’m not living,

953
01:00:55,730 –> 01:00:59,366
I’m not living aligned with with who I am, with what I

954
01:00:59,366 –> 01:01:02,237
believe, with what I think, with what I want to do.

955
01:01:04,000 –> 01:01:07,313
So it kind of starts there for him.

956
01:01:09,043 –> 01:01:12,534
I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. That’s my observation here.

957
01:01:12,599 –> 01:01:15,344
I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. Yes, I think you’re

958
01:01:15,409 –> 01:01:18,959
right. I think that’s absolutely true. Yeah.

959
01:01:19,363 –> 01:01:22,558
Okay. And I think that’s also part of what we’re still wrestling with because just

960
01:01:22,590 –> 01:01:26,413
like we haven’t, you mentioned 9/11. We haven’t fully wrapped our arms

961
01:01:26,413 –> 01:01:29,508
around 9/11 in any kind of meaningful way. And I will be saying this for

962
01:01:29,638 –> 01:01:33,461
the rest of my life. We really haven’t wrapped our arms around 9/11.

963
01:01:33,526 –> 01:01:36,988
And this year, I mean, this is 2026. This is the 25th anniversary of

964
01:01:37,005 –> 01:01:40,468
9/11. Yep. You know, we really fully haven’t,

965
01:01:41,050 –> 01:01:44,580
we haven’t wrapped our arms around that. And then COVID to

966
01:01:44,596 –> 01:01:48,063
happen inside of this, what has been a very

967
01:01:48,176 –> 01:01:51,944
wild fourth turning, a wild fourth turning

968
01:01:51,977 –> 01:01:55,441
moment in our history. Um, no major civil war,

969
01:01:55,634 –> 01:01:58,748
weirdly enough, but there’s been a lot of,

970
01:01:59,406 –> 01:02:02,697
there’ve been a lot of Donnybrooks, been a lot of things around it that could

971
01:02:02,697 –> 01:02:05,908
substitute for that if they were looked at in a different context.

972
01:02:06,550 –> 01:02:10,291
Um, but COVID, we still haven’t really, we haven’t wrapped our arms around that

973
01:02:10,323 –> 01:02:14,032
with COVID either, because there were costs to

974
01:02:14,032 –> 01:02:17,114
not masking, just like there were

975
01:02:17,146 –> 01:02:20,758
costs to putting on the mask. There were

976
01:02:20,758 –> 01:02:24,560
costs to not taking, as I put it on

977
01:02:24,560 –> 01:02:28,378
my show, and this is my language, not others, not Harvey’s, this is mine,

978
01:02:28,715 –> 01:02:32,324
not taking the jab and consequences to taking the

979
01:02:32,324 –> 01:02:36,014
jab. Right. There were consequences to that.

980
01:02:36,800 –> 01:02:40,057
And there were costs, as I tell my children all the time. And as I

981
01:02:40,265 –> 01:02:43,971
tell other folks when they’re, if they will listen, I just had

982
01:02:44,019 –> 01:02:47,611
4 conversations about this in different contexts yesterday. Everything

983
01:02:48,028 –> 01:02:51,361
costs something. Everything costs something.

984
01:02:51,793 –> 01:02:55,511
And those costs are difficult. So when Havel became—

985
01:02:56,360 –> 01:03:00,110
actually went to power, and almost immediately he was

986
01:03:00,222 –> 01:03:03,748
confronted with something which he hated. He

987
01:03:03,828 –> 01:03:07,545
didn’t like being confronted with this at all, which is now,

988
01:03:07,834 –> 01:03:11,599
okay, he’s the universally acclaimed hero of the

989
01:03:11,599 –> 01:03:15,306
revolution and And power

990
01:03:15,932 –> 01:03:19,673
to the powerless, to now power to society and to

991
01:03:19,785 –> 01:03:23,398
good and all of these things. And immediately his new

992
01:03:23,398 –> 01:03:27,091
country that he’s installed in, president of, so

993
01:03:27,428 –> 01:03:30,929
it’s called Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs don’t want to be with the

994
01:03:30,929 –> 01:03:34,702
Slovaks and the Slovaks don’t want to be with the Czechs. Little problem.

995
01:03:35,360 –> 01:03:38,122
Mm-hmm. And Havel

996
01:03:39,678 –> 01:03:43,448
looked at the whole situation, and he was absolutely horrified because he

997
01:03:43,448 –> 01:03:47,282
basically said, as a student of history, as

998
01:03:47,330 –> 01:03:50,490
a citizen, as somebody who’s thought deeply about,

999
01:03:51,020 –> 01:03:54,533
about all of these things, this was insanity. This was a

1000
01:03:54,533 –> 01:03:57,949
country that was barely now getting to its feet, and,

1001
01:03:58,286 –> 01:04:01,847
and one half was considerably richer than the other. They’re going to split

1002
01:04:01,847 –> 01:04:05,601
apart and go separate ways at this moment. It’s, it’s crazy. It’s

1003
01:04:05,601 –> 01:04:09,419
insane. Bad things will come of it. Our whole trajectory is going

1004
01:04:09,435 –> 01:04:13,269
to be knocked in its path, and many bad things will

1005
01:04:13,269 –> 01:04:14,918
come of it. And

1006
01:04:15,080 –> 01:04:18,767
it’s not my

1007
01:04:18,767 –> 01:04:22,344
place to say that it shouldn’t happen. So

1008
01:04:23,914 –> 01:04:26,455
this is what they want to do.

1009
01:04:27,976 –> 01:04:31,309
So this is what was meant

1010
01:04:31,923 –> 01:04:35,767
by them as they had been fighting for this freedom. It was

1011
01:04:35,863 –> 01:04:39,523
also the freedom to separate and the freedom to go their separate

1012
01:04:39,619 –> 01:04:43,150
ways. And he spent months

1013
01:04:43,150 –> 01:04:46,360
wrestling with this. And then in the end, he

1014
01:04:46,360 –> 01:04:49,778
just— okay, so let’s,

1015
01:04:49,987 –> 01:04:53,678
let’s, let’s, let’s show the world that we can do this peacefully, democratically.

1016
01:04:53,759 –> 01:04:57,594
Let’s have a vote. Let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s make sure that, that no

1017
01:04:57,610 –> 01:05:01,141
blood is spilled in the process of doing it. And if that’s the vote,

1018
01:05:02,045 –> 01:05:04,680
Then I hate it and I’ll sign it.

1019
01:05:06,850 –> 01:05:10,294
Yeah, I mean, you didn’t need— in the mid-1990s, you didn’t need a,

1020
01:05:11,856 –> 01:05:14,689
you didn’t need a 2-parter in Eastern Europe.

1021
01:05:15,530 –> 01:05:18,782
The, you know, the Serbians and the Croats are already putting on a show.

1022
01:05:19,346 –> 01:05:22,824
You didn’t need a second show. Exactly.

1023
01:05:23,033 –> 01:05:26,869
It could have so easily gone that way. Right. So

1024
01:05:28,248 –> 01:05:31,757
You know, these choices about what is, what does it mean to live in truth?

1025
01:05:32,414 –> 01:05:36,084
It, it, it meant in, in his case, the actual

1026
01:05:36,116 –> 01:05:39,946
truth behind all the slogans is that he had no alternative

1027
01:05:40,042 –> 01:05:43,711
to do but to do what he did, much as he

1028
01:05:43,711 –> 01:05:47,541
hated it. So this gets to your second

1029
01:05:47,573 –> 01:05:50,826
question that you said was embedded in my, my larger question, which is,

1030
01:05:51,403 –> 01:05:54,661
how much of this do I have to do? And so if I’m the

1031
01:05:54,661 –> 01:05:58,418
carpenter or the truck driver or the mom or the dad

1032
01:05:58,611 –> 01:06:01,803
or the pastor or the rabbi, or even

1033
01:06:02,384 –> 01:06:06,144
in our culture today, the imam or the mayor or the

1034
01:06:06,160 –> 01:06:09,838
whatever, and I

1035
01:06:10,160 –> 01:06:13,782
see myself as being not even a cog in the system,

1036
01:06:14,506 –> 01:06:16,952
the system doesn’t even know who I am.

1037
01:06:21,099 –> 01:06:24,736
How much of this do I have to do? Even though I look

1038
01:06:24,736 –> 01:06:27,957
around and I see all— because I’m not ignorant and I’m not blind.

1039
01:06:28,870 –> 01:06:32,299
I see what’s happening. I may not be able to categorize it correctly.

1040
01:06:32,732 –> 01:06:36,353
I may understand that there are moral implications to it and they may morally unsettle

1041
01:06:36,353 –> 01:06:39,910
me, but I may not have the words or the language to describe what that

1042
01:06:40,006 –> 01:06:43,836
moral unsettling is. I may make category errors

1043
01:06:43,932 –> 01:06:46,319
repeatedly in my own mind and not even be able to explain

1044
01:06:46,351 –> 01:06:50,054
myself Clearly, or if I can explain myself clearly, it’s only

1045
01:06:50,087 –> 01:06:53,692
about things that I’m passionate about, or I’ve had direct experience, which to me

1046
01:06:54,081 –> 01:06:56,799
may not translate up, may not scale up the hierarchy.

1047
01:06:58,500 –> 01:07:01,580
If I am this person, if I’m the avatar that I’m building

1048
01:07:02,423 –> 01:07:06,217
as the straw man for this argument, or for this question, not argument

1049
01:07:06,217 –> 01:07:09,886
for this question. Harvey, how much

1050
01:07:10,000 –> 01:07:13,683
of this do I actually have to do? My kids got to

1051
01:07:13,715 –> 01:07:17,113
eat. I’ve got to eat. I’ve got a mortgage to pay, Harvey. Yep.

1052
01:07:18,650 –> 01:07:22,338
Yep. And this, this is, this

1053
01:07:22,435 –> 01:07:26,073
was such a powerful theme for Havel himself. One of the

1054
01:07:26,073 –> 01:07:29,776
last plays that he wrote before the revolution and before he pretty

1055
01:07:29,808 –> 01:07:33,570
much left behind for the most part his playwriting career for something

1056
01:07:33,603 –> 01:07:37,346
very different was a play called Largo Desolado. And

1057
01:07:37,410 –> 01:07:41,128
in that play, The hero of that play, or the antihero of that play, was

1058
01:07:41,128 –> 01:07:44,853
a great dissident hero who was,

1059
01:07:45,270 –> 01:07:48,465
had been let out of prison, but was now being constantly

1060
01:07:48,963 –> 01:07:52,592
shadowed and warned, step out of line and you’re going back. And he’d had

1061
01:07:52,592 –> 01:07:55,322
10 years in there already. So he knew what was waiting. If he did, he

1062
01:07:55,386 –> 01:07:59,047
got himself a tenner, as, uh, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have

1063
01:07:59,047 –> 01:08:02,114
said. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there he is.

1064
01:08:02,708 –> 01:08:06,557
And, um, And now all of, all of the other dissidents are

1065
01:08:06,557 –> 01:08:10,356
gathering around his apartment saying, stand up to it. And he’s like, I

1066
01:08:10,356 –> 01:08:14,107
don’t want to go back. I’ve done this. You

1067
01:08:14,107 –> 01:08:17,586
know, I support you. I love you. But I

1068
01:08:18,099 –> 01:08:20,632
just want to live the rest of my life. And

1069
01:08:20,824 –> 01:08:24,672
Havel writes with such understanding

1070
01:08:24,688 –> 01:08:27,926
of both sides of that. These are complicated.

1071
01:08:28,503 –> 01:08:32,271
These aren’t black and white things. Nothing that Havel ever

1072
01:08:32,351 –> 01:08:35,637
wrote or said or believed or did was to

1073
01:08:36,038 –> 01:08:39,537
paint, to point a finger. We do so much of that today.

1074
01:08:40,067 –> 01:08:43,566
And the internet culture just sort of fuels that in so many different ways.

1075
01:08:44,802 –> 01:08:48,638
But he would never say, oh, here’s the purity test, and you’ve got

1076
01:08:48,638 –> 01:08:52,377
to do that. Yeah. Then you have to do that. Yeah, it was the

1077
01:08:52,650 –> 01:08:55,122
opposite of that. What Hubble would actually say is,

1078
01:08:56,342 –> 01:08:59,937
find what you can do. Find

1079
01:09:00,370 –> 01:09:04,156
what you can do that actually aligns you with yourself

1080
01:09:06,842 –> 01:09:10,354
and do that and do it privately, but not

1081
01:09:10,403 –> 01:09:13,967
solitarily if you could avoid it. He made that big distinction

1082
01:09:13,967 –> 01:09:17,796
between private and solitary. So sometimes you have to do things

1083
01:09:17,796 –> 01:09:20,983
solitary and some things are by their nature solitary pursuits.

1084
01:09:21,563 –> 01:09:24,944
But he was so interested in these private

1085
01:09:24,944 –> 01:09:28,384
spaces that we share with as these small spaces,

1086
01:09:28,657 –> 01:09:32,137
these natural communities that grow together

1087
01:09:32,490 –> 01:09:36,338
as people find what they can do, what they want to do, what aligns

1088
01:09:36,338 –> 01:09:40,171
themselves, what allows them, to the extent that they can, to live in

1089
01:09:40,187 –> 01:09:43,812
truth. What Havel would say is that the moment that you start

1090
01:09:43,812 –> 01:09:47,500
doing that, you set things in force in yourself, in your

1091
01:09:47,500 –> 01:09:51,285
little community, and the broader society. And if that’s what you can do,

1092
01:09:51,894 –> 01:09:55,700
that’s wonderful. You have actually done something very powerful. And it’s, and we

1093
01:09:55,700 –> 01:09:58,993
know that it’s powerful because if, if, if, if anybody

1094
01:09:59,720 –> 01:10:03,428
from the government in that case, or the system finds out that you’re doing

1095
01:10:03,476 –> 01:10:06,723
it, they’ll let you know that it’s powerful by the way they react against you.

1096
01:10:08,397 –> 01:10:11,347
All right, let me, I got to go to the restroom. Let me pause here.

1097
01:10:11,476 –> 01:10:13,137
Okay, good. We’ll come back. Very good.

1098
01:10:16,233 –> 01:10:19,975
Beautiful. All right, we’re back. So,

1099
01:10:21,010 –> 01:10:24,745
you know, the, the question of what does it mean to live in truth? How

1100
01:10:24,745 –> 01:10:27,752
do we do that? And how much of this do we actually have to do

1101
01:10:28,059 –> 01:10:31,849
in a real way? You know, there’s something that occurred to me just now as

1102
01:10:31,849 –> 01:10:35,658
you said that. Yeah. And that, how much do we need

1103
01:10:35,658 –> 01:10:39,421
to do? So one of the things that I think

1104
01:10:39,421 –> 01:10:42,612
is, I don’t know if Havel ever said this

1105
01:10:42,612 –> 01:10:46,256
explicitly, but it comes through so much in everything that he

1106
01:10:46,547 –> 01:10:50,202
He wrote in, in his entire life. And I think

1107
01:10:50,250 –> 01:10:54,050
it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a subtext theme of The Power

1108
01:10:54,050 –> 01:10:57,726
of the Powerless, the why we do it. We don’t live in

1109
01:10:57,758 –> 01:11:01,473
truth, Ahlen would say. I think we’re not

1110
01:11:01,473 –> 01:11:04,428
living in truth because it’s good for society.

1111
01:11:05,968 –> 01:11:09,724
We’re not living in truth because it’s

1112
01:11:09,724 –> 01:11:13,501
good for you. We’re doing it because it’s good for us.

1113
01:11:15,102 –> 01:11:18,207
It’s actually the only way to live that’s good for us.

1114
01:11:19,598 –> 01:11:23,163
And I think that that’s kind of the

1115
01:11:23,163 –> 01:11:24,821
heart of the question. How much?

1116
01:11:27,010 –> 01:11:30,713
When we think about dissident movements, people tend to think

1117
01:11:30,713 –> 01:11:32,050
about it in terms of, um,

1118
01:11:37,959 –> 01:11:41,360
To his point earlier, politics, right? We tend to think about it in terms of

1119
01:11:41,586 –> 01:11:45,390
political framing, right? And he

1120
01:11:45,390 –> 01:11:49,057
even says in his, in his essay, you know, every society, of course,

1121
01:11:49,170 –> 01:11:52,954
requires some degree of organization. Yet if that organization is to serve

1122
01:11:53,051 –> 01:11:56,377
people and not the other way around, then the people will have to be liberated

1123
01:11:56,377 –> 01:12:00,147
and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.

1124
01:12:02,661 –> 01:12:06,502
And I look at The

1125
01:12:06,502 –> 01:12:09,313
consternation that has occurred over the last couple of years,

1126
01:12:11,106 –> 01:12:13,190
um, around

1127
01:12:15,166 –> 01:12:18,762
the dynamics of what in America we are now

1128
01:12:18,892 –> 01:12:21,643
calling socialism at a political level,

1129
01:12:22,913 –> 01:12:26,112
which tie directly back into the dynamics of

1130
01:12:27,189 –> 01:12:29,585
protesting the government.

1131
01:12:30,926 –> 01:12:34,275
Which tie directly back into the dynamics of

1132
01:12:35,016 –> 01:12:38,863
political polarization that started online and then has

1133
01:12:38,896 –> 01:12:41,964
now spilled out into real life. But let’s, let’s,

1134
01:12:42,045 –> 01:12:45,490
let’s, let’s draw a sharp distinction

1135
01:12:45,602 –> 01:12:47,373
between, between

1136
01:12:49,788 –> 01:12:53,088
socialism and protestism. Okay, so

1137
01:12:53,636 –> 01:12:56,208
go ahead. Let’s draw a sharp distinction. Yeah, let’s do that. Go ahead. Yeah, no,

1138
01:12:56,757 –> 01:12:59,764
I think it’s important because I think it’s ignored a lot.

1139
01:13:00,476 –> 01:13:04,016
Okay. So, so

1140
01:13:04,032 –> 01:13:07,153
Havel talks a lot in The Power of the Powerless. What does it actually mean

1141
01:13:07,202 –> 01:13:10,937
to be a dissident? And, and he makes it very clear

1142
01:13:11,002 –> 01:13:14,770
that the stance of a dissident is not, not something that

1143
01:13:14,770 –> 01:13:18,048
he’s actually particularly advocating for or against.

1144
01:13:18,597 –> 01:13:21,149
It’s not— he doesn’t find

1145
01:13:22,446 –> 01:13:24,806
the kind of the moral

1146
01:13:25,962 –> 01:13:29,671
force or the moral authority or the imagination. Dissidence. He

1147
01:13:29,751 –> 01:13:33,316
finds it in the truth. He finds it in living the truth. If that

1148
01:13:33,589 –> 01:13:37,169
leads him to dissent and dissident

1149
01:13:37,218 –> 01:13:40,943
behavior, that’s where it leads. Okay, then

1150
01:13:40,975 –> 01:13:44,154
I’m going to ask you a very New Testament question.

1151
01:13:47,654 –> 01:13:51,026
That is at the root of some of our challenges in that,

1152
01:13:51,893 –> 01:13:55,345
and I’m glad you drew the sharp distinction there, but in the muddying of the

1153
01:13:55,345 –> 01:13:59,038
categories and the lack of distinction that has occurred and has been

1154
01:13:59,038 –> 01:14:02,024
allowed to occur in our culture over the last 20 years that has led us

1155
01:14:02,024 –> 01:14:05,717
to the point where we are now. I’m going to ask you this question. Pontius

1156
01:14:05,717 –> 01:14:09,313
Pilate asked this of Jesus before he was crucified. It’s one of the

1157
01:14:09,313 –> 01:14:12,765
greatest questions in the New Testament. What is truth?

1158
01:14:18,146 –> 01:14:21,744
This, the, this is the thing that is

1159
01:14:22,338 –> 01:14:26,016
at the root of the problems in our time.

1160
01:14:27,237 –> 01:14:30,739
Because it is. We’ve wound up at the Nietzschean

1161
01:14:30,915 –> 01:14:34,465
cul-de-sac after the death of God. And the

1162
01:14:34,465 –> 01:14:38,240
Nietzschean cul-de-sac is, okay, you killed

1163
01:14:38,240 –> 01:14:41,752
God. You’ve said that texts don’t

1164
01:14:41,752 –> 01:14:45,472
matter, right? That’s Derrida. You’ve said that

1165
01:14:46,177 –> 01:14:49,705
the Foucaultians have won the day. Everything’s power.

1166
01:14:50,330 –> 01:14:54,098
Everything is power, right? There is no truth. There’s just who’s

1167
01:14:54,098 –> 01:14:57,481
on top, who’s on bottom. And if you’re on the bottom and you’re oppressed,

1168
01:14:58,523 –> 01:15:02,291
you have a moral, I would assert, that’s the strength of it

1169
01:15:02,291 –> 01:15:06,011
now, a moral duty to upend the oppressor, to attain power

1170
01:15:06,075 –> 01:15:09,839
so that you could oppress them. We’ve wound

1171
01:15:09,839 –> 01:15:11,738
up in that Nietzschean cul-de-sac.

1172
01:15:13,662 –> 01:15:17,307
And what drove Nietzsche crazy, and we’ve covered Thus Spake Zarathustra, we’ve talked about

1173
01:15:17,307 –> 01:15:20,709
Nietzsche on this podcast extensively. You can’t get away from him.

1174
01:15:22,150 –> 01:15:25,893
What drove Nietzsche crazy was he couldn’t figure out how we could make our

1175
01:15:25,909 –> 01:15:29,556
own truth without a transcendent,

1176
01:15:29,702 –> 01:15:32,600
without an appeal to a transcendent. Right. Okay.

1177
01:15:34,306 –> 01:15:37,933
That’s what’s tying us into knots. We want to

1178
01:15:37,949 –> 01:15:41,657
appeal to politics or to power or to policy or

1179
01:15:41,657 –> 01:15:44,465
to oppressor-oppressed binaries.

1180
01:15:45,932 –> 01:15:49,430
But that’s not where truth lies. So the question, I guess,

1181
01:15:49,495 –> 01:15:53,310
for us here is if we’re reading Power, The Power of

1182
01:15:53,310 –> 01:15:56,579
the Powerless, right? And

1183
01:15:57,080 –> 01:16:00,881
Havel is confronting us with what this means, right, to live in truth.

1184
01:16:01,973 –> 01:16:05,211
But I don’t even know where truth is because I don’t know what it is.

1185
01:16:05,323 –> 01:16:09,170
I’m haunted by the Pontius Pilate question. And by the way,

1186
01:16:09,587 –> 01:16:13,305
my friends aren’t giving me any answers. My social media feed isn’t giving me

1187
01:16:13,353 –> 01:16:16,880
any answers. Right. My, my education isn’t giving me any

1188
01:16:16,880 –> 01:16:20,662
answers. My mass media popular culture isn’t giving me any answers.

1189
01:16:20,726 –> 01:16:23,307
As a matter of fact, the answers that I’m getting from the vast majority of

1190
01:16:23,307 –> 01:16:26,993
those inputs are either the Foucauldian answer, the Derridean

1191
01:16:26,993 –> 01:16:30,841
answer, or some variation of postmodernism. That’s

1192
01:16:30,841 –> 01:16:34,640
a weird combination of both of those. And so what do I have

1193
01:16:34,896 –> 01:16:38,712
if I sense that truth is missing? What else do I have?

1194
01:16:38,984 –> 01:16:42,367
Now, I will say, for me, I’m asking you this question. I will say, for

1195
01:16:42,367 –> 01:16:46,054
me, the answer is, as a person who is a,

1196
01:16:46,455 –> 01:16:49,501
who is a Bible-believing Christian and tries to walk that out in all kinds of

1197
01:16:49,501 –> 01:16:53,108
practical ways, I say truth lies in the

1198
01:16:53,108 –> 01:16:56,926
biblical corpus. It’s the one book that even Nietzsche couldn’t overcome.

1199
01:16:57,023 –> 01:17:00,797
He couldn’t step over it. He tried to, and every other

1200
01:17:00,797 –> 01:17:04,299
thinker in the West in the last 200 years has tried to,

1201
01:17:05,214 –> 01:17:08,699
and it beats everybody. I said this on the podcast about the tragedy of,

1202
01:17:09,149 –> 01:17:12,377
of, or not the tragedy, but the life of Henry V. It’s the book that’s

1203
01:17:12,377 –> 01:17:16,088
at the bottom. And we keep butting our heads against that book at the bottom

1204
01:17:16,088 –> 01:17:19,894
of the Western culture, and we cannot dig past it because

1205
01:17:19,926 –> 01:17:23,246
that’s where the transcendence lies. Even if you don’t believe in it,

1206
01:17:24,480 –> 01:17:28,198
it’s still where it lies. It’s still where it lies. So your belief

1207
01:17:28,262 –> 01:17:32,091
is irrelevant. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that’s where the

1208
01:17:32,091 –> 01:17:35,713
answer to what is truth is. It’s in that. It’s in that. It’s in that

1209
01:17:35,713 –> 01:17:39,558
document that we can’t get past. Now, other folks

1210
01:17:39,558 –> 01:17:42,603
will come from a different perspective. I’m sure you will come from a different perspective

1211
01:17:42,603 –> 01:17:45,647
on this. But at the end of the day,

1212
01:17:46,753 –> 01:17:50,433
we have to have a lodestone. We have to have an anchor because

1213
01:17:50,465 –> 01:17:53,639
without that, we are running, we have, we’ve run an 80-year

1214
01:17:53,687 –> 01:17:57,167
experiment of what it looks like to be disconnected from the

1215
01:17:57,216 –> 01:18:00,858
anchor of truth. And the end

1216
01:18:00,858 –> 01:18:04,532
result of that in 2026 is we just float away. We’re just floating

1217
01:18:04,564 –> 01:18:06,934
around, just doing stuff, right?

1218
01:18:08,779 –> 01:18:11,489
You can’t build a dissident movement with no anchor.

1219
01:18:14,511 –> 01:18:16,610
You have to be anchored to something. And I’m not even talking about building a

1220
01:18:16,610 –> 01:18:18,299
dissident movement. I’m just saying that at the base level, if you really wanted to

1221
01:18:18,299 –> 01:18:22,099
do that, that, right? If

1222
01:18:22,099 –> 01:18:25,226
you want to live in truth, you have to know what truth is. You have

1223
01:18:25,226 –> 01:18:28,867
to anchor yourself to something. And I think this is what people struggle with in

1224
01:18:28,867 –> 01:18:32,074
our time. I think one of the problems that

1225
01:18:32,074 –> 01:18:35,618
immediately comes up for people, and we see it all

1226
01:18:35,826 –> 01:18:39,371
over society, you know, there’s this phrase that’s the— that

1227
01:18:39,996 –> 01:18:43,652
I wonder, it would be interesting to look at the Google history of this

1228
01:18:43,748 –> 01:18:47,530
phrase a little bit, how it, how it’s emerged, how it’s been used. But this

1229
01:18:47,530 –> 01:18:48,823
phrase, my truth.

1230
01:18:53,241 –> 01:18:55,294
So, so I have an enormous problem with it.

1231
01:18:57,088 –> 01:19:00,628
It’s a phrase that I think kind of lies,

1232
01:19:01,816 –> 01:19:05,190
lies at the heart of a lot of these things. And yet, one of the

1233
01:19:05,190 –> 01:19:08,901
reasons why— I mean, it’s, it’s seductive and appealing, because if we can

1234
01:19:08,965 –> 01:19:12,254
all have our own truths, and that’s kind of nice, right?

1235
01:19:12,531 –> 01:19:15,024
Mm-hmm. on a certain level.

1236
01:19:17,720 –> 01:19:21,564
But there, what there is, once we start down

1237
01:19:21,564 –> 01:19:25,310
that road, there’s kind of no way past it.

1238
01:19:26,086 –> 01:19:29,385
Right. So

1239
01:19:31,261 –> 01:19:35,092
people live the bulk of their lives

1240
01:19:35,866 –> 01:19:39,315
in a realm of needs,

1241
01:19:39,347 –> 01:19:41,364
power, Opportunities,

1242
01:19:44,287 –> 01:19:46,871
what they have to do, what they feel that they have to do,

1243
01:19:48,070 –> 01:19:50,904
what they want to do in order to gain more of the things that they

1244
01:19:50,920 –> 01:19:54,335
want to have, which is how Hubble would put it.

1245
01:19:55,978 –> 01:19:58,898
All of the material dimensions of it.

1246
01:19:59,884 –> 01:20:03,228
So if there’s no

1247
01:20:03,486 –> 01:20:05,376
anchor, to use your word.

1248
01:20:07,487 –> 01:20:09,043
If there is no anchor, then,

1249
01:20:11,424 –> 01:20:15,215
then the whole phrase of living in truth doesn’t actually

1250
01:20:15,313 –> 01:20:18,804
have much meaning. Right. Existence becomes

1251
01:20:18,804 –> 01:20:22,440
extremely hollow. Right back to where we were at

1252
01:20:22,763 –> 01:20:26,254
the start of the conversation. So

1253
01:20:26,417 –> 01:20:28,069
meaning comes from some

1254
01:20:32,367 –> 01:20:35,659
transcendent belief of some kind in

1255
01:20:35,659 –> 01:20:38,262
something. Uh,

1256
01:20:39,370 –> 01:20:42,293
some of those transcendent beliefs can take people to some pretty

1257
01:20:43,032 –> 01:20:46,711
strange places. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. But

1258
01:20:46,887 –> 01:20:50,534
some, some could take them to some pretty horrible places. Um,

1259
01:20:50,823 –> 01:20:54,373
and yet we kind of can’t avoid the, the

1260
01:20:54,373 –> 01:20:58,083
essential need for that because If we don’t have

1261
01:20:58,083 –> 01:21:01,457
that, all we have are the engineers of

1262
01:21:01,457 –> 01:21:05,024
souls and optimizing our material return

1263
01:21:05,763 –> 01:21:07,954
and so on and so forth. So, okay,

1264
01:21:10,276 –> 01:21:12,420
if Havel

1265
01:21:13,661 –> 01:21:17,056
believed in the— not just the importance, the

1266
01:21:17,056 –> 01:21:19,597
central role that spirituality has—

1267
01:21:21,237 –> 01:21:25,008
he believed very much in the importance

1268
01:21:25,525 –> 01:21:29,157
of and the interconnection between religion, culture,

1269
01:21:29,173 –> 01:21:32,983
belief, spirit. But he also believed very much in

1270
01:21:32,983 –> 01:21:36,698
science, believed very much in rationality,

1271
01:21:37,394 –> 01:21:40,898
believed in causal relationships, and all, all,

1272
01:21:41,290 –> 01:21:44,710
all, all of those kinds of things. What he

1273
01:21:45,609 –> 01:21:48,356
didn’t believe in was dogma. Right.

1274
01:21:49,672 –> 01:21:53,446
Um, I think, and sometimes he

1275
01:21:53,462 –> 01:21:57,010
uses the word dogma, especially in his, in his theater. Uh,

1276
01:21:57,315 –> 01:22:00,928
in his political writing, he talks more about systems, but he

1277
01:22:00,928 –> 01:22:04,605
means them roughly interchangeably, um, because systems

1278
01:22:04,605 –> 01:22:08,266
exist to, to, to, to, to, to, to

1279
01:22:08,314 –> 01:22:11,413
propagate dogma. Right. So

1280
01:22:14,198 –> 01:22:17,236
If we come back to the question of living in truth,

1281
01:22:18,152 –> 01:22:21,946
what that actually means, it means that

1282
01:22:21,994 –> 01:22:25,217
if you have that anchor, some

1283
01:22:25,217 –> 01:22:28,828
transcendent belief, you need to

1284
01:22:28,844 –> 01:22:31,439
try to find some way to embody that in your life.

1285
01:22:35,009 –> 01:22:38,718
If you have that anchor. Yeah. If you don’t have that anchor— If you don’t,

1286
01:22:38,896 –> 01:22:40,911
if you have much— if your anchor is my truth,

1287
01:22:42,797 –> 01:22:45,828
Yeah. No, then you have no anchor. You’re in a lot of trouble. Yeah.

1288
01:22:46,281 –> 01:22:49,518
And by extension, we were all in a lot of trouble.

1289
01:22:49,599 –> 01:22:53,067
We’re all in a lot of trouble, right? This is that idea

1290
01:22:53,083 –> 01:22:56,218
of, of 1 million ants, right, on the march,

1291
01:22:56,735 –> 01:22:57,947
right?

1292
01:23:04,043 –> 01:23:06,679
Like, if, if, if as an individual, right,

1293
01:23:08,322 –> 01:23:10,934
Stalin infamously said, you know, you kill one man, you’re a murderer.

1294
01:23:12,120 –> 01:23:15,697
Kill a million, you run a country. That’s the Hasan paraphrase.

1295
01:23:18,014 –> 01:23:21,489
And, and I don’t, I don’t think Stalin would object to that, actually. Yeah, I

1296
01:23:21,489 –> 01:23:25,271
don’t think so. I think he’d be perfectly fine with that. And that’s what made

1297
01:23:25,271 –> 01:23:28,797
him a monster. I

1298
01:23:28,813 –> 01:23:32,170
think that if I’m one person,

1299
01:23:34,008 –> 01:23:37,656
And I am surrounded culturally because I can only swim in the

1300
01:23:37,656 –> 01:23:41,077
water I’m in, right? I could hear

1301
01:23:41,271 –> 01:23:45,015
this and I can think, okay, what

1302
01:23:45,015 –> 01:23:48,693
is truth? What actually is that thing right

1303
01:23:48,951 –> 01:23:52,630
now? That’s going to send you, if you ask that question and you search for

1304
01:23:52,630 –> 01:23:56,273
the meaning honestly, that’s going to send you on a journey.

1305
01:23:56,467 –> 01:23:58,771
And I think a lot of people, by the way, Let me be very clear.

1306
01:23:59,077 –> 01:24:02,178
I think a lot of people have gone on this journey and are continuing to

1307
01:24:02,194 –> 01:24:05,343
go on this journey. I think more people than we’re even aware of, right?

1308
01:24:06,693 –> 01:24:09,952
However, the people who scream the loudest and get the most internet ink

1309
01:24:10,081 –> 01:24:13,263
spilled on them are the people who,

1310
01:24:13,877 –> 01:24:17,699
to your point earlier, are trapped in the cul-de-sac of the my

1311
01:24:17,699 –> 01:24:20,918
truth, right? You know, sort of idea.

1312
01:24:22,845 –> 01:24:26,591
And The, the challenge of our time

1313
01:24:28,460 –> 01:24:32,293
is that multiple people

1314
01:24:32,310 –> 01:24:35,271
decentralized and disconnected, but all

1315
01:24:35,561 –> 01:24:38,425
understanding the same thing can make a difference.

1316
01:24:40,390 –> 01:24:44,033
Um, they’re generals without an army or an army

1317
01:24:44,049 –> 01:24:47,741
without any generals, you know? Absolutely. And

1318
01:24:47,773 –> 01:24:51,259
they’re actually the only thing. can make a difference. Right. And so

1319
01:24:52,286 –> 01:24:55,961
I, I take heart because I think that the most—

1320
01:24:56,812 –> 01:24:59,043
if we’re going to go back to this word dissident for just a minute, I

1321
01:24:59,043 –> 01:25:02,702
think the most dissident act you can do is raise

1322
01:25:02,815 –> 01:25:06,234
your children to believe in an anchor of truth. Yeah. I,

1323
01:25:06,506 –> 01:25:10,005
yes, absolutely. By the way, I am not— I, yes, I

1324
01:25:10,118 –> 01:25:13,472
admitted already, I’m a partisan for Christianity. That’s my

1325
01:25:13,472 –> 01:25:17,100
partisanism. If you’re Jewish or

1326
01:25:17,100 –> 01:25:20,745
you’re Muslim or some— okay,

1327
01:25:21,275 –> 01:25:23,892
we can have those kinds of discussions. Those are discussions that are interesting to have.

1328
01:25:24,486 –> 01:25:27,634
But I personally, I go, you got to go, you got to stick with one

1329
01:25:27,634 –> 01:25:31,214
of the big 3. Anything outside of the big 3, the big

1330
01:25:31,214 –> 01:25:34,538
religious traditions, you’re going to struggle with a little bit. So, so I, I guess

1331
01:25:34,666 –> 01:25:38,456
I see it a little differently in that. Yeah, that’s okay. So I, I

1332
01:25:38,456 –> 01:25:39,467
don’t necessarily

1333
01:25:43,632 –> 01:25:47,039
I’m much more concerned with the degree of

1334
01:25:47,039 –> 01:25:49,943
alignment, first of all, between what a person

1335
01:25:51,742 –> 01:25:55,178
actually lives and what they say they do. And what they say they do.

1336
01:25:55,307 –> 01:25:57,890
Yeah. And what that does. But also,

1337
01:25:59,353 –> 01:26:02,294
these, these great faiths have

1338
01:26:02,583 –> 01:26:05,765
significant points of alignment. And not only the

1339
01:26:05,765 –> 01:26:09,037
Western Um, they’re not all the same.

1340
01:26:09,665 –> 01:26:13,145
The differences are really important. We could have really great discussions

1341
01:26:13,145 –> 01:26:16,946
about all of the differences. Uh, and even, even

1342
01:26:16,946 –> 01:26:20,794
within the faiths, they have discussions about differences.

1343
01:26:21,295 –> 01:26:25,111
Absolutely. Within any given gathering

1344
01:26:25,111 –> 01:26:28,809
of 3 people, any of the faiths, there will be significant differences.

1345
01:26:30,544 –> 01:26:33,987
But, but still, we can, we we can align around some

1346
01:26:34,084 –> 01:26:37,826
basic things. Yeah. To a pretty high degree.

1347
01:26:39,442 –> 01:26:43,172
And those things are fundamental to your earlier

1348
01:26:43,236 –> 01:26:47,079
point. What is truth? What do we mean? So

1349
01:26:47,176 –> 01:26:50,846
we’ve kind of described what it’s not, right? Not my truth. It’s not

1350
01:26:50,974 –> 01:26:54,366
your truth. That’s the

1351
01:26:54,366 –> 01:26:57,653
cul-de-sac, as you call it. It’s the big trap, I think.

1352
01:26:58,315 –> 01:27:02,035
But what What is it? So there’s the internal truth.

1353
01:27:02,535 –> 01:27:06,146
And there’s maybe the eternal truth, right?

1354
01:27:06,501 –> 01:27:09,772
So the, the internal truth is,

1355
01:27:11,255 –> 01:27:15,074
most of us know, when we are

1356
01:27:17,216 –> 01:27:18,698
not aligned with who we are,

1357
01:27:21,468 –> 01:27:25,247
we may not recognize it, because

1358
01:27:25,344 –> 01:27:28,008
we do a lot to dull ourselves from that realization.

1359
01:27:29,123 –> 01:27:32,825
costs we spend most of the time not necessarily actually

1360
01:27:32,825 –> 01:27:36,094
aligned with who we are. So we don’t want to think about that. And also

1361
01:27:36,094 –> 01:27:39,507
because society puts lots of

1362
01:27:39,635 –> 01:27:43,113
distractions in the way, it’s not terribly useful to most

1363
01:27:43,145 –> 01:27:46,991
forms of social organization that we live for us to be thinking

1364
01:27:47,055 –> 01:27:50,773
about that. So there are lots of reasons why we don’t think about that.

1365
01:27:51,302 –> 01:27:54,740
But, but that, but that internal compass

1366
01:27:55,111 –> 01:27:58,790
is incredibly important. It is at the core of what Hamlet is actually talking about.

1367
01:27:59,290 –> 01:28:03,129
Yeah, find someplace where, where, where, where

1368
01:28:03,242 –> 01:28:06,656
you know that you’re not living aligned with who you are.

1369
01:28:08,210 –> 01:28:11,865
Identify that place. And this gets back to the idea that Aleksandr

1370
01:28:11,865 –> 01:28:15,327
Solzhenitsyn was talking about, you know,

1371
01:28:15,955 –> 01:28:19,642
in, you know, in the face of living in a society

1372
01:28:19,642 –> 01:28:23,492
that’s full of liars, basically, The person who says the truth

1373
01:28:23,540 –> 01:28:27,081
is the most dangerous person, right?

1374
01:28:28,674 –> 01:28:32,489
To a certain degree, you know, writers who

1375
01:28:33,021 –> 01:28:36,395
wrote about and wrote about in the

1376
01:28:36,395 –> 01:28:40,011
aftermath of the Holocaust noted this as well

1377
01:28:41,082 –> 01:28:43,486
on multiple sides, noted this as well.

1378
01:28:46,116 –> 01:28:48,457
We have talked on this show about

1379
01:28:50,353 –> 01:28:54,129
some of the failures of not appealing to truth.

1380
01:28:54,193 –> 01:28:57,697
In particular, I think one of the greater failures of the 20th century was,

1381
01:28:58,372 –> 01:29:01,635
was by the folks who prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials,

1382
01:29:02,214 –> 01:29:04,287
not appealing to a transcendent truth.

1383
01:29:05,464 –> 01:29:09,243
International law isn’t transcendent enough. It’s just not. It’s just

1384
01:29:09,243 –> 01:29:13,039
not a big enough judge. And I don’t need to go deeply

1385
01:29:13,055 –> 01:29:15,850
into that. We’ve covered that a lot on this show. You can go back and

1386
01:29:15,850 –> 01:29:18,010
listen to other episodes where I’ve talked about that. But this is one of the—

1387
01:29:18,010 –> 01:29:21,490
it’s one of my bugaboo things about the 20th century. I think we had a

1388
01:29:21,490 –> 01:29:25,250
moment. We still have an unfinished conversation. We do about the

1389
01:29:25,250 –> 01:29:28,910
banality of evil. Evil banality. Yes, we do. We do. We

1390
01:29:28,910 –> 01:29:32,230
do. Yes, we do. Yes, we

1391
01:29:32,230 –> 01:29:34,830
do. Harvey and I got a little, got a little bit into it. I never

1392
01:29:34,830 –> 01:29:36,910
actually told the story of how I met Harvey. One of the, one of the

1393
01:29:36,910 –> 01:29:39,810
first conversations we had, we kind of got a little, got a little sparky about

1394
01:29:39,810 –> 01:29:43,294
that because Harvey and I, while we may unite around,

1395
01:29:43,967 –> 01:29:46,819
while we may unite around a shared faith tradition in some ways,

1396
01:29:47,973 –> 01:29:50,777
we’re going to have some differences in that, in that space. And that’s okay, by

1397
01:29:50,777 –> 01:29:54,383
the way. That’s, and you know what, and actually, Harvey, hearing your story today

1398
01:29:54,479 –> 01:29:57,940
of meeting Paulo and sort of all of that, that gives me more

1399
01:29:57,988 –> 01:30:01,353
context to what you were saying in that, in that

1400
01:30:01,353 –> 01:30:04,206
conversation around Eichmann. And I still think there’s—

1401
01:30:05,103 –> 01:30:08,870
Hannah Arendt landed on something. that I think is incredibly uncomfortable that

1402
01:30:08,903 –> 01:30:11,685
we actually have to deal with. But we could talk— we talk about that another

1403
01:30:11,685 –> 01:30:15,339
time. What I think is

1404
01:30:15,372 –> 01:30:18,559
wonderful in all of this, though, is so

1405
01:30:18,913 –> 01:30:22,037
there is that internal question, but then there’s also

1406
01:30:22,681 –> 01:30:26,472
what you brought up earlier, which is the eternal question, the transcendent

1407
01:30:26,472 –> 01:30:29,458
question. And, you know,

1408
01:30:31,152 –> 01:30:34,694
if we think about ethics, Mm-hmm. We

1409
01:30:34,694 –> 01:30:38,461
think about it as a way of not

1410
01:30:38,461 –> 01:30:42,213
just thinking and the codification of it in laws

1411
01:30:42,261 –> 01:30:45,517
and norms and all the rest of it, a way of feeling, way of being,

1412
01:30:45,710 –> 01:30:48,904
way of sensing the world, which is

1413
01:30:49,178 –> 01:30:51,371
aligned with and oriented towards

1414
01:30:51,388 –> 01:30:54,789
maximizing human good

1415
01:30:55,692 –> 01:30:59,233
and maximizing flourishing, minimizing harm. Are.

1416
01:30:59,558 –> 01:31:03,378
Basic things like that that bring together

1417
01:31:03,687 –> 01:31:05,133
lots of different faith traditions.

1418
01:31:08,059 –> 01:31:11,814
Um, when I think about that as a point of departure,

1419
01:31:11,975 –> 01:31:15,587
and, and again coming back to Havel and The Power of the Powerless and

1420
01:31:15,603 –> 01:31:18,491
his, his career, that’s essentially

1421
01:31:19,410 –> 01:31:22,911
what, what he did. He didn’t

1422
01:31:23,040 –> 01:31:26,404
try to come up with universal truths.

1423
01:31:26,532 –> 01:31:30,012
Mm-hmm. He tried to encourage

1424
01:31:30,750 –> 01:31:34,582
individuals to come together in little ways in,

1425
01:31:35,416 –> 01:31:37,790
in society and embody

1426
01:31:39,265 –> 01:31:42,376
living in truth and embody those moral values and

1427
01:31:43,018 –> 01:31:46,770
find a way to, to, to, to put that at the center. His point is

1428
01:31:46,866 –> 01:31:50,699
that as you start to live that way, the larger systems

1429
01:31:51,855 –> 01:31:55,020
You build them, they grow. It becomes who you are.

1430
01:31:56,337 –> 01:32:00,128
It connects other people. Movements form out of that. All of these things

1431
01:32:00,193 –> 01:32:03,630
happen. But, you know, Powell was very much,

1432
01:32:03,888 –> 01:32:07,598
and this goes very much to one of the

1433
01:32:07,663 –> 01:32:11,390
reasons why he was not a socialist. He was never a socialist.

1434
01:32:12,000 –> 01:32:15,518
He was so progressive in so many ways in the real sense of that word.

1435
01:32:16,434 –> 01:32:19,919
But there was nothing socialist about him. He

1436
01:32:20,112 –> 01:32:23,564
actually believed that this starts with the

1437
01:32:23,564 –> 01:32:27,401
individual. It starts with the individual person and

1438
01:32:27,434 –> 01:32:31,062
their dignity and their choices and their free will and how

1439
01:32:31,191 –> 01:32:34,916
they exercise that and how they align with who they really are, and then how

1440
01:32:35,060 –> 01:32:38,818
they gather others in personal ways, in

1441
01:32:38,818 –> 01:32:41,692
private connections, and then the things that build with that.

1442
01:32:45,398 –> 01:32:48,795
And I think this is at the core of what we need to take

1443
01:32:49,163 –> 01:32:52,528
from Václav Havel’s essay, The Power of the Powerless. By the way,

1444
01:32:52,944 –> 01:32:56,598
available for free on the internet. Right. Go out, download it,

1445
01:32:57,030 –> 01:33:00,267
read it, absorb it. It’s only 80 pages. You can

1446
01:33:00,796 –> 01:33:04,529
do it in a sitting, maybe a couple of sittings. If your attention

1447
01:33:04,561 –> 01:33:08,375
span is not that sharp, you can work your way into it. What I always

1448
01:33:08,407 –> 01:33:12,190
tell folks is just watch one less Netflix episode of something. You

1449
01:33:12,190 –> 01:33:15,948
know, just, just those guys at Netflix, they’ve got theirs. You need to get

1450
01:33:15,948 –> 01:33:19,690
yours. That’s what my grandmother would say. She was right.

1451
01:33:21,160 –> 01:33:24,737
But, but go out, download it, read it. If you want to buy a

1452
01:33:24,737 –> 01:33:28,492
copy, absolutely go buy a copy. Go help, go help us,

1453
01:33:28,605 –> 01:33:30,700
go help support somebody with your money on this.

1454
01:33:33,340 –> 01:33:37,139
I love it how you brought up ethics, Harvey. And in our close

1455
01:33:37,139 –> 01:33:39,136
here, as we wrap up, because we got to turn the corner, we got to

1456
01:33:39,152 –> 01:33:42,412
wrap up here. I love how you brought up ethics, and I wanted to, I

1457
01:33:42,476 –> 01:33:45,937
wanted to visit this because this is something you brought up initially. And, you know,

1458
01:33:46,001 –> 01:33:49,190
we’re involved in an organization called the World Ethics Organization,

1459
01:33:50,408 –> 01:33:53,805
doing various things with them. And Richard Messing’s been on our show before.

1460
01:33:54,398 –> 01:33:56,609
He’s going to be on our show again. He’s coming up, coming up in a,

1461
01:33:56,962 –> 01:34:00,663
coming up in a couple of weeks. He’s going to be on talking about the

1462
01:34:00,663 –> 01:34:04,381
builder’s stone, which is going to be an interesting conversation

1463
01:34:04,429 –> 01:34:05,759
for us to, for us to have.

1464
01:34:13,420 –> 01:34:17,194
Ethics. One of the things that has struck me about

1465
01:34:17,292 –> 01:34:18,594
people in our time is we,

1466
01:34:21,800 –> 01:34:25,373
we make a fundamental, very often, category

1467
01:34:25,470 –> 01:34:29,221
error between what is ethical and what is moral. Now,

1468
01:34:29,254 –> 01:34:32,160
I’m not saying those things don’t overlap. Very often they do.

1469
01:34:33,134 –> 01:34:36,975
But I’m saying understanding the distinction with the difference between what

1470
01:34:36,975 –> 01:34:38,456
is ethical and what is moral is,

1471
01:34:40,796 –> 01:34:44,451
and the benefit to other parties that comes from that

1472
01:34:44,451 –> 01:34:47,752
confusion is something that

1473
01:34:49,105 –> 01:34:52,715
is a real trap, I think, for leaders. And I’m thinking specifically of a

1474
01:34:52,715 –> 01:34:56,456
conversation I had with somebody, a person that you and I both

1475
01:34:56,504 –> 01:34:58,923
know. Actually, I won’t say who it was, but a person that you and I

1476
01:34:58,923 –> 01:35:02,531
both know. About a very sensitive topic and a category

1477
01:35:02,563 –> 01:35:06,143
error literally in this, and this is a highly educated person.

1478
01:35:06,497 –> 01:35:09,917
He literally made the category error in the conversation

1479
01:35:10,414 –> 01:35:13,770
and I caught it and I called him out on it. I said, this is

1480
01:35:13,786 –> 01:35:15,649
not, I didn’t use the term category error, but I said like, I think you’re

1481
01:35:15,649 –> 01:35:19,470
mis— you’re mixing 2 things together here. While I understand your

1482
01:35:19,486 –> 01:35:22,264
outrage about this thing in this way,

1483
01:35:23,517 –> 01:35:26,789
you have it in the wrong box. And because you have it in the wrong

1484
01:35:26,902 –> 01:35:30,719
box, you are walking down the road to other wrong conclusions that are

1485
01:35:30,751 –> 01:35:33,875
actually going to be deleterious to other kinds of things that you want to do

1486
01:35:33,891 –> 01:35:37,728
with other people. And of course, he did not accept that. He thought

1487
01:35:37,728 –> 01:35:41,471
that that was, that I was incorrect, that my categories were incorrect,

1488
01:35:41,941 –> 01:35:45,550
and that, and that somehow I was trying to draw him into, like Br’er

1489
01:35:45,550 –> 01:35:48,499
Rabbit, I was trying to draw him into a tar baby of nettles,

1490
01:35:48,743 –> 01:35:52,466
right? And, uh, And yes, I know I mixed my metaphors there,

1491
01:35:52,482 –> 01:35:56,226
folks. I realize what I just did. But, but

1492
01:35:56,226 –> 01:35:59,536
my point is— It was quite vivid. It was quite vivid. It was, it was,

1493
01:35:59,729 –> 01:36:03,361
I’m building, I’m building a word image here. You know, remember I said visual

1494
01:36:03,409 –> 01:36:06,944
arts, right? I’m building, I’m building things here with the words. But my

1495
01:36:06,944 –> 01:36:09,772
point is that in ethics,

1496
01:36:10,881 –> 01:36:14,079
how do we as leaders, and let’s close with this, how do we as leaders

1497
01:36:14,175 –> 01:36:17,854
avoid category errors? About

1498
01:36:17,966 –> 01:36:21,433
what is ethical. Not even, no, not even what is ethical, about

1499
01:36:21,722 –> 01:36:24,676
how to apply, there we go, ethical thinking.

1500
01:36:25,575 –> 01:36:29,364
Because to your point, Havel is really interested in

1501
01:36:29,364 –> 01:36:33,120
that, and he’s really interested in that idea of what is ethical. And

1502
01:36:33,137 –> 01:36:36,941
I loved how you talked about embodiment, right? Embodiment is huge,

1503
01:36:36,989 –> 01:36:40,826
right? The body matters. The material world matters. Whether

1504
01:36:40,826 –> 01:36:44,600
it’s a physical building where horrific atrocities have happened, And now it gets

1505
01:36:44,600 –> 01:36:48,072
transformed into something else by, by an act of moral

1506
01:36:48,072 –> 01:36:51,463
imagination, or whether it’s a

1507
01:36:51,544 –> 01:36:55,312
mom and a dad, you know, sitting

1508
01:36:55,344 –> 01:36:57,136
down with a child and reading to them every night.

1509
01:37:00,511 –> 01:37:04,230
There’s ethical pieces to all of this. And so I

1510
01:37:04,279 –> 01:37:08,127
want you to speak to some of that. How do leaders suss that

1511
01:37:08,127 –> 01:37:11,890
out and then apply that? in their, in their lived lives

1512
01:37:11,922 –> 01:37:15,636
and their organizations, the teams, the cultures that they are in. Let’s, let’s close

1513
01:37:15,636 –> 01:37:19,366
with that. Yeah. So it’s, it’s a great place to close here.

1514
01:37:22,800 –> 01:37:26,270
So knowing who we are,

1515
01:37:27,868 –> 01:37:30,596
spending the necessary time to kind of revisit that,

1516
01:37:31,790 –> 01:37:35,546
to reflect on it, to explore it, to explore it in different ways. We

1517
01:37:35,546 –> 01:37:38,428
do so much of our exploration in a cognitive kind of way.

1518
01:37:39,428 –> 01:37:43,164
And that’s necessary but not sufficient. I

1519
01:37:43,228 –> 01:37:46,641
mean, it, it kind of strips away the—

1520
01:37:48,203 –> 01:37:51,585
all of the sensory dimensions to it, all of the body

1521
01:37:51,618 –> 01:37:55,343
dimensions, all of the social dimensions. It— so

1522
01:37:56,012 –> 01:37:58,494
knowing who we are is a starting point.

1523
01:38:02,365 –> 01:38:03,559
Um, leaders who

1524
01:38:05,413 –> 01:38:09,261
actually

1525
01:38:09,293 –> 01:38:13,109
look at not just the broad

1526
01:38:13,174 –> 01:38:16,812
canvas of their, the impact of their actions. So

1527
01:38:16,877 –> 01:38:20,530
yes, the con— in Powell’s case, the countries, maybe our

1528
01:38:20,530 –> 01:38:23,893
companies and the different, the social forces,

1529
01:38:24,103 –> 01:38:27,761
systems, all of that kind of thing. But the personal individual aspects of

1530
01:38:28,603 –> 01:38:31,906
how we live them in, in, in, in, in, in the moments of our lives,

1531
01:38:32,003 –> 01:38:33,169
how we actually inhabit the

1532
01:38:36,783 –> 01:38:40,430
I think so much of what it

1533
01:38:40,430 –> 01:38:43,142
takes to lead lies in

1534
01:38:45,666 –> 01:38:49,306
really simple ethical dimensions. So

1535
01:38:50,131 –> 01:38:53,868
we do, so you know that I’ve done a lot of research on

1536
01:38:55,211 –> 01:38:58,851
sort of the impact of the arts. Yeah. What that does for

1537
01:38:58,867 –> 01:39:01,458
leaders. And different ways in which

1538
01:39:02,393 –> 01:39:05,297
engaging in the arts develops our

1539
01:39:05,943 –> 01:39:08,976
sense of engagement, connection,

1540
01:39:09,073 –> 01:39:12,268
authenticity, resilience,

1541
01:39:13,092 –> 01:39:16,674
empathy. And I want to say a word or two about empathy because it’s

1542
01:39:16,804 –> 01:39:20,587
easy because of some of the ways that empathy is used or misused

1543
01:39:21,832 –> 01:39:25,583
to skip by actually just how vital it is. Because

1544
01:39:25,631 –> 01:39:29,198
essentially, without empathy, we have no capacity

1545
01:39:29,391 –> 01:39:32,846
to actually understand other people. Yep.

1546
01:39:33,553 –> 01:39:37,136
Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty fundamental. Yes.

1547
01:39:37,345 –> 01:39:40,848
So, and without empathy, and

1548
01:39:41,121 –> 01:39:44,898
we always talk about behavioral empathy, so it’s not just a matter of how

1549
01:39:44,898 –> 01:39:48,609
I feel, but what do I do with those feelings? How does

1550
01:39:48,674 –> 01:39:51,983
that translate into our choices or actions? behaviors. Awesome. Okay.

1551
01:39:52,368 –> 01:39:55,836
So there are all these things we know in the arts. So a

1552
01:39:56,543 –> 01:40:00,316
few years ago, we had a series of discussions with, with ethicists

1553
01:40:00,316 –> 01:40:03,897
around the world. You were part of one of those conversations. Mm-hmm. And

1554
01:40:04,395 –> 01:40:08,168
when we put all of those together and just look at

1555
01:40:08,168 –> 01:40:11,443
what the ethicists told us, they came up with a series of attributes.

1556
01:40:11,748 –> 01:40:15,297
Question was, what makes an ethical leader? They were virtually

1557
01:40:15,329 –> 01:40:19,086
identical. with what the research shows the arts

1558
01:40:19,086 –> 01:40:22,730
produce in people. So in other words,

1559
01:40:23,356 –> 01:40:27,129
when we work with the arts, we actually do that first because we

1560
01:40:27,129 –> 01:40:30,260
love art and we want to create things. Second, we do it in our work

1561
01:40:30,260 –> 01:40:34,097
because we believe that it leads to innovation, creativity, and all

1562
01:40:34,097 –> 01:40:37,773
kinds of fantastic outcomes and

1563
01:40:38,448 –> 01:40:41,883
growth in skills and qualities and purposes in people.

1564
01:40:42,381 –> 01:40:45,619
But in the process of doing that, we’re actually also

1565
01:40:46,166 –> 01:40:49,823
developing the capacity, or at least the behaviors and the attributes

1566
01:40:50,113 –> 01:40:53,652
that lead to the capacity of ethical leadership. So

1567
01:40:54,681 –> 01:40:57,591
it’s a little bit of a roundabout way of coming back now to the point

1568
01:40:57,591 –> 01:41:01,390
here. But the point, the point is clear, that

1569
01:41:02,245 –> 01:41:05,958
as leaders, these are the things that are

1570
01:41:05,958 –> 01:41:09,311
actually going to matter much more than the things that we

1571
01:41:09,875 –> 01:41:13,717
often think This policy and that policy,

1572
01:41:13,831 –> 01:41:16,601
this structural change, this oppressor and this oppressed,

1573
01:41:17,420 –> 01:41:21,179
whatever, however we frame these things, Habermas would look at

1574
01:41:21,179 –> 01:41:24,907
all of those and say, that’s, that’s all very interesting. And maybe

1575
01:41:24,907 –> 01:41:28,367
it’s also all very beside the point. The point is

1576
01:41:28,562 –> 01:41:31,910
much more me. Who am I?

1577
01:41:33,580 –> 01:41:35,900
Who do I want to be? How do I want to be? How am I

1578
01:41:35,949 –> 01:41:38,587
going to do that? How am I going to connect with others? How do I

1579
01:41:38,652 –> 01:41:42,500
see it? How do I shape it? All of those things. These are

1580
01:41:42,500 –> 01:41:46,189
not the things that we necessarily think of all the time when we talk about,

1581
01:41:47,352 –> 01:41:51,164
about leadership. And yet those are the fundamental questions about

1582
01:41:51,212 –> 01:41:54,892
leadership. What does it take to be somebody who was washing windows

1583
01:41:57,237 –> 01:42:00,949
and become instead the president of a

1584
01:42:00,949 –> 01:42:04,450
country that was in itself an exemplar that was

1585
01:42:04,503 –> 01:42:07,885
reshaping the way that the world understands these things.

1586
01:42:08,495 –> 01:42:12,088
Mm-hmm. The power of the powerless is, is, is, is,

1587
01:42:12,425 –> 01:42:16,163
is incredibly resonant in all

1588
01:42:16,211 –> 01:42:19,901
of us. It’s only resonant— it’s only resonant

1589
01:42:19,965 –> 01:42:23,222
in us if, if, if we activate it. We start with awareness,

1590
01:42:23,832 –> 01:42:27,409
we move through embodiment, because that’s actually how we feel these

1591
01:42:27,522 –> 01:42:31,067
things as well as, as think about them. And when we

1592
01:42:31,768 –> 01:42:35,512
use that to, to see the world, to connect with the world, to create

1593
01:42:35,512 –> 01:42:39,311
the world, to impact and shape the world. So when I

1594
01:42:39,311 –> 01:42:40,711
think of all of those things,

1595
01:42:43,189 –> 01:42:46,407
we work with leaders a lot. We work with them around the world.

1596
01:42:47,195 –> 01:42:51,036
We do that so that we can help them become

1597
01:42:52,353 –> 01:42:55,615
more innovative. Why does it matter? Because the world

1598
01:42:56,194 –> 01:43:00,015
is changing so radically, so profoundly, so constantly. That

1599
01:43:00,353 –> 01:43:03,171
if you can’t innovate, you can’t possibly lead because you can’t

1600
01:43:03,831 –> 01:43:07,615
anticipate the future. And we can only lead people into the future. We

1601
01:43:07,615 –> 01:43:10,358
can’t lead people into the past, and they’re not going to stay where they are.

1602
01:43:10,924 –> 01:43:14,561
So this is pretty critical. And we

1603
01:43:14,561 –> 01:43:18,411
talk a lot about future readiness. That’s why we talk about it.

1604
01:43:19,086 –> 01:43:22,736
So I, I think that it’s

1605
01:43:22,832 –> 01:43:26,633
easy to think about future readiness as, okay, so future,

1606
01:43:26,873 –> 01:43:29,838
the new technology, AI, what are we going to do with that? And, you know,

1607
01:43:30,463 –> 01:43:33,459
all of these relate, all of them connect

1608
01:43:34,309 –> 01:43:38,155
directly and intimately, but they kind of come back to the core of

1609
01:43:38,155 –> 01:43:41,776
the individual. And that’s where, where I see it.

1610
01:43:43,058 –> 01:43:46,872
And that’s why we work so, so much with individuals and then individuals

1611
01:43:46,984 –> 01:43:50,526
as they come together in teams, which are of course the kinds of small

1612
01:43:50,574 –> 01:43:51,680
communities that

1613
01:43:56,183 –> 01:43:59,772
Great and powerful closing ideas

1614
01:44:00,669 –> 01:44:04,307
from Harvey Seifter. Please connect with

1615
01:44:04,355 –> 01:44:07,464
Harvey through The Art of Science Learning

1616
01:44:08,201 –> 01:44:11,710
and Creating Futures That Work. We’re going to have

1617
01:44:11,823 –> 01:44:15,572
links to all the places where you can connect with Harvey and

1618
01:44:15,588 –> 01:44:18,720
check out his work in the show notes below the player,

1619
01:44:19,430 –> 01:44:22,962
uh, that you may be listening to this podcast or watching

1620
01:44:23,301 –> 01:44:27,034
this podcast on. I want to thank Harvey

1621
01:44:27,341 –> 01:44:30,327
for coming on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today.

1622
01:44:31,150 –> 01:44:33,735
And with that, well, we’re out.

1623
01:44:34,794 –> 01:44:35,968
Thanks, Hades. See you next time.