Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel [REDUX] w/Harvey Seifter & Jesan Sorrells
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Exploring Václav Havel’s influential essay, The Power of the Powerless, Jesan Sorrells and Harvey Seifter unpack what it means for leaders to “live in truth” in the face of societal conformity. They examine the dangers of moral and cultural hollowness, the practical implications of dissidence, and how authentic leadership begins with individual conscience rather than systemic change. The episode also connects Havel’s ideas to modern challenges in leadership, ethics, and the search for a transcendent anchor in turbulent times.
  • Book: The Power of the Powerless
  • Author: Václav Havel
  • Guest: Harvey Seifter Host: Jesan Sorrells
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Time-Stamped Outline:
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00:00 Discussing "The Power of the Powerless"
11:43 Forming and Scaling Arts-Based Organizations
17:12 Raising kids as future leaders
23:11 Discussing LLMs and historical figures
24:37 Discovering Vaclav Havel's Plays
30:48 Generational challenges in Hollywood writing
37:13 The need for societal self-reflection
42:12 Rereading a book in Prague
46:35 Reflecting on 9/11 and authenticity
52:32 Weekly Bible discussion lunch
57:36 Relatable job struggles and realities
01:05:45 Feeling disconnected from larger systems
01:08:49 Havel's philosophy on private pursuits
01:16:14 Turning to Biblical truth
01:23:22 Exploring the concept of truth
01:28:10 Value of truth in oppressive regimes
01:34:33 Differentiating ethics from morals
01:40:03 Connection between arts and ethical leadership
01:42:09 Empowering leaders for innovation
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Connect with Harvey Seifter by clicking on the links below:
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Guest
Harvey Seifter
Leadership Performance in Complexity
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Beautiful. All right. Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books Podcast, bonus episode with Harvey

Seifter. We're going to be talking about Václav

Havel's essay, The Power of the

Powerless Redux, in

3, 2, 1.

Hello, my name is Haysan Sorels, and

this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast. No episode number on this

one. This is a bonus episode

today. I want to open up

before we really get started and jump in with

an excerpt from the essay we're actually going to

be Recovering from a previous episode today.

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

vegetable shop places in his window among the onions and

carrots the slogan Workers of the World Unite.

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

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

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

irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals?

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

occur and what it would mean? I

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

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

express their real opinions. That poster was

delivered to our green grocer from the enterprise headquarters, along

with the onions and the carrots. He put them

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

everyone does it, and because that is the way it

has to be. If he were to

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

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

disloyalty. He does it because these things must

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

thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil

life. quote unquote, in harmony with society,

as they say. Obviously, the greengrocer

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

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

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

action has no motive or significance at all, or that

the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is

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

very definite message. Verbally,

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

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

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

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

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

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

protects the greengrocer from potential informers.

The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted

firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It

reflects his vital interests.

But what are those

interests?

Entrance. And that is a reading

from the post, the essay that we are

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

episode number 102 with our guest

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

episode. This essay tied in with

thoughts we had around War and Peace,

City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo,

and of course, our thoughts we had about the author

and the UAW and the nature of what really

Labor Day means when we really celebrate that

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

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

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

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

to talk about this again? Thus, this is a

Redux episode. Think like Francis Ford Coppola when he,

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

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

think about The Godfather, one of my favorite movies

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

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

That was even re-released probably about 20 years ago

with some extra bonus footage. Well, this is

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

different way with a new guest co-host.

Now, this essay is really

important And I want to emphasize this up front in

addressing the idea of holding individual conscience

pure and resisting

societal overreach, whether in a society that claims to

be quote unquote free and democratic, but is not

in practical terms, or in a society that refuses to

recognize its own growing tyrannical

Tendencies, even those at the cultural

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

start before they are hardened into public policy

and then into law that needs to be enforced

by someone. We're going to

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

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

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

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

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

be covering The Power of

the Powerless by Václav Havel.

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

the winds and the tides Have shifted a little bit.

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

being a dissident or cosplaying being a dissident

doesn't have as much social utility

as it previously did.

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

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

episode, by reading this essay today.

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

walk along our journey, is our returning—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

leaders, because leadership really has to think

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

covering of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the

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

about category errors. And I think one of the

challenges of our time is that leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

together is to start with the beginning, which is

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

first language. Uh, classically trained violinist, uh,

conductor, uh, played in orchestras, conducted

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

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

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

considerable career in theater, directing, producing,

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

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

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

hundreds of new plays,

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

I found myself as the director of a really remarkable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

things in the way that the orchestra worked that had really

powerful implications for organizations, for businesses, and

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

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

University, taught a bunch of courses in organizational

psychology and leadership with the orchestra. Eventually, we began

to form a management consulting practice. We, we,

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

in great concert halls by night, we essentially rehearsed those

pieces by day in front of Fortune 500 audiences as

process demonstrations. After some years of doing that, I

kind of came to the conclusion that there was something really

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

orchestra. More broadly, what you could learn from art

and from artistic skills and processes, practices that could have

a really powerful set of impacts and implications for a pretty

broad range of human endeavor. Began— I wrote a

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

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

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

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

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

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

arts-based learning on leaders, on innovation, on

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

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

also scale that into organizations, developed a

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

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

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

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

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

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

we also do incubators for innovation. We

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

trained in our techniques and also some of

the assessment tools that we've gathered.

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

also with an increasing focus on ethics and the

relationship between ethics, art, innovation,

and the future. So let me pause here

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

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

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

and theater background. And you've got The Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and drawing, also in

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

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

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

know. And the thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't do on the regular basis anymore.

I still have retained over the course of 20 years,

the ability that the

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

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

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

observe carefully, observe closely to be able to see the

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

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

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

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

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

difference between that and, you know,

a Rubens or something like that, right? But

also in being able to see how people

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

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

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

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

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

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

of the senses. And the, you know,

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

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

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

down? And how does it look? What do you

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

So we work with many, many different dimensions of

seeing and hearing and touching and feeling and

all of the senses. And then we also work a

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

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

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

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

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

things. And it's an incredibly

powerful, rich, multidimensional doorway into

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

an arts household, you know, reading

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

literature, having deep conversations around a wide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

children, she is really focused

on becoming the best,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all that to say that I think the way you

framed how we move from seeing to connection to

possibility to creativity, I wish

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

the Powerless here in just a moment. But I wish more of the conversation around

innovation and around the desire for innovation would

move from a mechanized engineering

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

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

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

describing such a rich generative kind of environment

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

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

was Steve Jobs who once said that he didn't really

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

trying to answer the same fundamental questions using different

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

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

organization, and there's a quote by Leonardo da

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

science and the science of art, learn that everything

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

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

brings us that ability to see and to

connect and to engage and to create. And science brings

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

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

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

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

Havel. Havel, in the literary

tradition that he grew out of, and the

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

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

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

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

he called writers the engineers of souls.

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

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

wrote this wonderful novel, The Engineer of Human Souls.

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

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

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

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

there is this idea, okay, so systems,

systems are everything. Systems are so powerful. And

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

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

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

Power of the Powerless, systems actually are

irrelevant. Systems are not the issue.

You cannot improve the world by making better systems.

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

you will create better systems. Mm-hmm.

There's a desire in our culture

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

on steroids when the commercial internet

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

We didn't realize just how

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

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

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

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

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

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

we are just as much a product of our

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

mash around with this idea. And,

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

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

you know, on top of the internet. And

when you talk about Havel and you talk about

the background that he came out of, and by the

way, I got to be honest, and I mentioned this in the previous episode too,

episode number 102, when we talked with Libby Unger, I always

confuse Havel with, or at least I always used to confuse him with Lech

Walesa. I always used to confuse the 2 guys in my head, you know, and

it's because when he was, when the fall of the Soviet Union happened, happened in

'89. You know, I was like 10 years old when this happened, you know. So

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

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

right, that it would ever— that the Berlin Wall would ever— that was—

people today, 40 years later,

don't understand how revolutionary that actually was when it happened.

No. So that, I mean, that's That

moment, I'm sorry, I didn't— Yeah, no, no, no, you're right. That, that moment

was the moment. Incredible. For me, that

moment was the moment and that broader moment of just when that was emerging.

That's when I actually read Power of the Powerless for the first

time. I got to know Havel as a playwright

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

began to read them and, and I began to really find

myself drawn to these strange worlds that they were talking about that I

sort of got. and sort of didn't. And

this incredible hollowness in his characters,

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

disconnect between those lives and what these characters were

trying to actually do and feel and emerge and experience. That

I scratched my head at that and wondered, what is all of that? And then

a couple of years later, in around 1984, '83,

'84, I, I got a fellowship, uh, from the Goethe Institute,

and I went and spent time in, in Europe for the first significant time,

for the first time. And I, and I went to, to Germany. I was doing

work in theater, and part of that took me to East Germany

back in the bad old days. So I was spending time in East Berlin,

and I saw this up front and

very close. And I mean, incredible things to see and to

experience, but but raising even more questions. I remember

that when I was in East Berlin at that time, so because I was

a Western minor dignitary of sorts and on an

official visit and so on and so forth, so they set me up

to have lunch with the Deputy Minister of Culture

for East Berlin. And so

in old East Berlin, where life was

kind of grim and kind of that way. But it wasn't— I

mean, it wasn't suffering in the sense that there was a level

of prosperity and reasonable comfort. I mean, people weren't going hungry. They were, you

know, they could take, you know, vacations in the East Bloc and so

on and so forth. But it was a very constrained and kind of

hollow existence in that sense. Mm-hmm. But right in the middle of that, there was

this one square where all the arts organizations

And everything in East Berlin was gray and drab,

and this one square, everything was gold and red and burgundy and

beautifully, warmly, richly lit. And if you put your

connections together for a year, you might be able to

score a couple of tickets to go with your wife to the opera and maybe

have a dinner in, in, in, in, in the restaurant there and have a

different kind of life. So that's where he took me, and There was

a lot of drinking at that time among

the people who were in official positions.

And also what was happening at that time is that Dallas

was really popular in American TV. Yes. And

so it was illegal but universally done among

the power of East Germany that they would be watching Western TV, especially

Dallas. So I was having this lunch with this guy, And

all of a sudden, apropos of absolutely nothing, but after 5 or 6 beers,

he looked at me very pugnaciously and he said,

you know, I get a feeling of pride as a German when I watch Dallas

on Western television. And there was no context then at all. So I

just sort of said, yeah, exactly that kind of— what is this? What?

But I figured, okay, I'll bite. And he said, I

get a feeling of pride as a German because I see that an

American millionaire is driving a Mercedes-Benz.

So 2 things happened to me at that moment. I registered all of those

contradictions. The first, this was 5 years before the Berlin

Wall fell down. But at that moment, I knew it was

coming. I could just feel it. I mean, the hollowness. But the other thing

was, I suddenly understood the hollowness of Havel's

characters. They were all putting up these

official signs that they And they were living their lives around it. And

none of them believed any of it. And yeah,

inauthenticity was just killing the society.

This opens up the door to something that I want to talk

about, that inauthenticity, that, that hollowness, that

disconnection that you're talking about. So

I would assert that In the

year of our Lord 2026, and I'm just using that as an appellation because that's

the appellation you use, we

are experiencing the same sort of

hollowness that you saw in East Germany,

except the hollowness is the disconnect between

the face people put online, the avatars we

all walk around with. in our very online

interactions that we have and the real

lives we actually live with real people in real life, IRL,

right? In real life. Perfectly said. I, I, that, yes.

Yes. And I think the challenge for

young leaders, the challenge for young people overall, but young leaders in

particular. And when I say young, I do mean chronologically young. I mean

the 18 to 34-year-old folks, the massive challenge that they are having right now

is They don't have a dissident writer

that can express in a Václav Havel

theater writer kind of way

that hollowness. They don't really have that.

And this is why I'll trace this to pop culture because one of the other

things is I'm a huge film guy, right? We talk a lot about film on

this show. And my regular

co-host, Tom Libby, He and I are both film fans and film,

we just, oh my God, I'm ridiculous with film, right? And

where that hollowness would be exposed is in film,

but the writers in the room

were raised in that hollowness. And so they don't see it

as being hollow. It's just the way that it is. So you have a

generation of people that are in the writer's room, and that's the millennial generation who

are currently in the writer's rooms. of Hollywood television shows and

movies right now being led by Gen

Xers whose only response to

the hollowness was to build the internet because they thought that that was the place

where they were going to go. And so they built the internet with all these

assumptions, but the internet turned out to not have weight to

it at all. It turned out to be hollow for as much as an impact

as it has had, it turned out to be hollow. So they didn't have the

gift to give the millennials other than hollowness. The millennial writers

are now operating underneath that hollowness, and the Gen

Z audiences that are looking for meaning

don't have a writer who has the chops

or even the guts and the courage to

engage with that hollowness in the way that Havel did for his

generation in not only

East Germany, but across Eastern Europe as well. Am I onto something

here, or is this a terrible analogy? I don't think it's a terrible

analogy at all, but, but I, I guess I would look at it maybe as

a reverse way of thinking about, about this.

So, Havel would say

each person is the master of their own fate. That actually is a

line from Temptation. a really

extraordinary play of his, which I directed in, in, in, in, in, in,

in 1990, actually, right as all this was going on.

And it's his own version of the Faust story. And it's both

wildly satirical and it's, it's, it hits

home very powerfully. So Havel would say

authenticity lies not in what teachers

teach us, It doesn't lie in the systems that we

build or the structures that we create. It lies in

how we construct our lives. And construct means

live. The choices that we make and how those

align with who we actually are as

people, as humans, as moral agents

responsible for those choices and those outcomes.

So Havel looked at the world around him and he said, there's 2 things going

on here. One is that, that we live in a, in a, in a what

he called a post-totalitarian society. What all he meant with

that is that it's a more subtle form

of unfreedom where in the totalitarian

society you had Big Brother who was controlling everything. And in the

post-totalitarian society, through skillful manipulation of

rewards and punishments and social currents and all the rest, it's simply

Big Brother is simply implanted inside ourselves. So we will

actually censor and regulate ourselves. Okay, so that's,

that's, that's the first part of this. But the second part is Hodel,

and, and, and he was very clear in, in his way of

viewing it, his orientation, and it was very clear in the world that, that, that

we all lived in at that time. The locus of the worst

of that was to be found in, in, in Soviet Union,

East Bloc, and communist countries. That it was not exclusively there,

but that, but that was sort of centered. But then he also said there's

another side to it. And here the worst part isn't necessarily found in the

communist countries. It's often found in the capitalist countries, or it's often found in, in,

in what we think of as democratic societies. And that is the

hollowness of not having a purpose, the hollowness of not

having something that is more important to you than the

fulfillment of basic material goods, needs, and pleasures.

Okay. And that is really kind of

critical because if you look at now, fast forward to Havel

a half generation later, now as the president of

this country and what he was dealing with and, and, and the

society that he was trying to help shape, guide, lead,

help emerge. It's not just about how

do you actually free yourself from the post-totalitarian constraints that we've

implanted inside of ourselves and which we're encouraged to and

coerced to, to a high degree. But it's also a question of

what matters to us and to what extent are we actually

ready to stand in that place, because that's what Havel called living in

truth. And if you do that,

you have unbelievable, immense,

enormous power. That is the power of the powerless.

Let me pick up with that idea of living in truth with

this from Power, The Power of the Powerless. I want

to go to page 49 in the essay there. We're gonna pick

up there, kind of where we, where we talked about a little bit before,

um, in the previous episode, episode number 102. Um, I'm

gonna pick this up here. This is from part 14 of his

essay. And I quote directly from Václav Havel, backing up

Harvey here. The post-totalitarian

system is mounting a total assault on humans,

and humans stand against it alone, abandoned and

isolated. It is therefore entirely natural that all the dissident

movements are explicitly defensive movements. They exist to defend human

beings and the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system.

Today, the Polish group KOR is called the Committee for Social

Self-Defence. The word defence appears in the names of other similar groups in Poland,

but even the Soviet Helsinki Monitoring Group and our own Charter 77 are

clearly defensive in nature. In terms of traditional

politics, this programme of defence is understandable, even though it may appear

minimal, provisional, and ultimately negative. It offers no new

conception, model, or ideology, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of

the word, since politics always assumes a positive programme and can scarcely

limit itself to defending someone against something.

Such a view, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionally political way of looking

at things. The post-totalitarian system, after all, is not the

manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is

something radically different. It is a complex, profound, and

long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation

of society. To oppose it merely by

establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not

only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come

near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has

no longer resided in a political line or program. It is a

problem of life itself.

Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity, is not only a more realistic

approach, Since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it

concerns people's everyday lives. At the same time, and perhaps

precisely because of this, it is also an

incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the

very essence of things. There

are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth,

just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars

in broad daylight. It seems to me that today this

provisional, minimal, and negative program, the simple defense of

people, is in a particular sense, and not merely in the circumstances in which we

live, an optimal and most positive program because it forces politics to return

to its only proper starting point. Proper, that is, if all the old

mistakes are to be avoided, individual people.

To Harvey's point here, in the democratic societies where the

violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution

in politics has yet to happen. And some things

will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is

reflected in politics. In our world, precisely

because of the misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politics has

already undergone that transformation. The central concerns of political thought is

no longer abstract visions of a self-redeeming positive model.

And of course, the opportunistic political practices that are in the— that are the

reverse of the same coin. But rather the people who have so far merely

been enslaved by those models and their

practices.

Again, he's writing this in the

'80s. We live in 2026 in the West,

ostensibly, and we are

there. We are there. This is why

On the dissident alt-right, you know, online,

Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless has become an essay

that's been passed around like Samizdat, around and

around and around. Because the recognition

is, as the very online rightist people would say, we

can't vote our way harder out of this problem.

The problem is the system itself. It's the problem is not progressive and

conservative. The problem is not even a uniparty. The problem is the

system itself. It's the nature of the thing we have. But, but Havel

would say the problem is not the

system. Right, right, right. He would say it's in the individuals. It's in the people.

It's in the people. Right. Exactly. This is, this is, this is the, this is

where we have met the enemy and he is us. And he's ourselves.

That's right. He is us. And this is where I think,

now again, I want to be as broad as possible in this. This is the,

the, the both the triumph and the tragedy of Donald Trump's election.

So the triumph is the idea that

just like in the Roman Republic, one man can save a system.

That's a very Roman idea. But then the tragedy is

just like in Coriolanus that we read here when we, when we covered Shakespeare,

right? You know, that one man

can't actually save the system.

And by the way, it's not up to one man. It's up to the

plebeians to save themselves and to recognize, to your point,

where the problems exist in their own,

in their own souls. Thus, I get to where I'm going with this, which

is in our society,

we have lawn signs and bumper stickers where people

proclaim, just like the greengrocer, they

proclaim— We have a lot of greengrocers. Yeah, we have a lot of greengrocers. Oh

my God. And, and on

social media, we have a lot of meme posters who

are also greengrocers. Right, right. Yep.

And the lack of critical thought, which is part of the reason why

I do this podcast. I do this podcast because I have critical thoughts.

Right? Not critic thoughts, critical thoughts,

right? The lack of critical thought behind social

signaling is a

psychocultural phenomenon that we're just beginning to wrestle with at this moment

in the West. This is the thing that Havel predicted.

Yeah. He predicted it because he was living in

the middle of a vast environment and

network built on that. It comes in

cycles.

You know, this, this actually kind of makes

me think, and just to kind of pause

for a moment on that, although I want to get back to that point.

But so everything that we've been talking about

so far has been, for me, what I

experienced or what I thought about or what I lived through the

first time I read this book. So I read this book a second time.

I came back to it. I came back to it actually

first— I made my first visit to Prague around

2000, and none of this was

especially particularly on my mind. I was there with

Orpheus and I was planning concerts and getting ready to do something.

So I have an unusual last name. And it's sufficiently

unusual that if you share the same last name, it's

not— we don't have to go too far back. We can figure out the relationship.

Okay, so my practice has been

for many, many years. I travel to different parts of the world back

before the internet was pervasive, and it wasn't really that pervasive yet in

2000 in Eastern Europe or Central Europe.

So I would go to the phone book. So I was in Prague. I had

a few minutes between things, and I popped into a phone

booth, and sure enough, there's a phone book there. So I looked for

Seifter, particularly since I knew my

grandfather actually was from there and so forth. So,

so sure enough, there's a Seifter there. His name is Pavel Seifter.

So I figured, okay, I reached in,

dropped a couple of coins in the phone. Called up, and

against all odds, somebody picked up the phone. So,

and so, so there was this guy. So I, I would,

I sort of started in German. I speak Czech and lots of people speak German.

So I thought I would start in German. So, so I explained, and I got

as far as, ich heiße Seifter, my name is Seifter.

And he said, where and when should we meet?

So 20 minutes later, downstairs

in Old Town Square and looking around,

and I met who I learned after several hours of reconstruction

was my cousin Paul, who was

considerably older and who had actually,

through a circuitous story, his life as

an infant had been saved by my grandfather, who

raised money to get him out just ahead of the Germans as

they moved in in '38. Yeah. So Pavel, who was only

by chance that he was there, it was actually his daughter's apartment. He lived

in London. And as the story

became clear, so Pavel was a close

friend and

colleague of Havel. He was a

signer of Charter 77. He had

been in prison. He had been through all kinds of things. He

spent many, many years after getting his

PhD as a young man in history from Charles University, Washington windows there,

for his dissidence. And then in the end, when

Havel triumphed and the Velvet Revolution happened,

he invited my cousin Pavel to join him in

the palace. He became his national security advisor.

orchestrated the entry into NATO. And as his final

job before retiring, he asked, where would you like to

go? And Pavel said, I'd like to go to London. So

Pavel made a visit passing. So he

had such an extraordinary vantage point on all this, and that

immediately triggered my thinking about The Power of

the Powerless. And I went back and I read it a second time. And I

really immersed myself in it deeply. And this also was, uh,

when 9/11 happened. Mm-hmm. And I was sort of

rereading that in that context and thinking about that. And what does it mean to

live in truth? Uh, I was actually, uh, on

my way to Hong Kong when 9/11 happened. And, uh, I was in a,

a quick, immediate, uh, uh, bubble of people that

were, uh, experiencing this together from all over the

world. And so many of them were actually not

taking a perspective that, uh, that I found that I could

live with because, well, maybe America had it

coming to it. And all the support for Israel, all, all the other things that,

that, that started emerging immediately,

that also made me think a lot about what it meant to live in truth

and what it meant authenticity So the book

became a kind of a touchstone for me. And

the culmination of this second reading in this story came a few

years later. So in

2009, I was invited by the International

Leadership Association to give a keynote concert

at— in Prague on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet

Revolution. They did their little conference there that year

for that reason. And so, and I

reached out to the Prague Chamber Orchestra and we developed a program

together and did it at the Liechtenstein Palace.

And as I dove deeply into the history, as it happened, I wasn't

expecting this, but this building, this building, this

magnificent building had so many strange things in its history.

Decapitated rebels and

histories around that. It turned out that this building was

actually then the headquarters of the German

railroad that was routing the trains to Auschwitz.

This building was used by Stalin to, to, to, to

be the center for political reeducation after the war,

and they built in his honor the largest statue of Stalin in the

world. And Havel

came in, and he had many

problems to deal with. This building, this palace, was not the top one on the

list. But on the other hand,

Sohabel believes that small spaces matter incredibly, that public

choices matter incredibly, and that authenticity matters.

And of course, he's an artist. And so he

reflected a lot about this building and its history.

And he came to the conclusion that this building represented

a really profound opportunity. He did something

amazing. This whole long history of this building, it had never been

used for anything that anybody could call a good purpose.

He took this building and he turned it into a center for art

and culture and for young musicians to learn.

And by that simple act of taking

Stalin's statue and the German railroads and the bloody

patriots of the 17th century who were decapitated there and battle plans and

the rest of it in that building and turning it into a center for art

and creation, of culture, of observing the world, connecting

with the world, creating in the world, building things in the world.

That took something and it also showed something. What

it took was a profound act of moral

imagination. And to me, that's at the heart of

my second reading of this, of this. This is, this is an essay

about the moral imagination. The ability to imagine a world

that's different. And he did that, but he

also realized something else. This is something

that I think is so powerful and so important and so

urgently needed in the world. He recognized people

are always talking about how do we transform? How do we bridge

to the future? How do we become one with this? And what Havel is

saying With that act, just as he said it in, in

different words, but he said it in, in The Power of the Powerless. If you

want to transform, you must first transcend.

You must take that step into truth. You

must transcend the environment that you're in. You have

to become that other person. Once you do that,

transformation is a piece of cake. That's then just

how you live. But until you do that,

you're nope. So

that's powerful. That's, that's, that's, that's powerful.

And I would assert that

while a person with an engineering background might have the moral imagination to

get there, maybe a person with a financial background might have the moral

imagination to get there. I would assert that only a person with a deeply

artistic background has the moral imagination to get there.

That's the first thing that occurs to me. The second thing that occurs to me

as you were speaking, among the many notes that I took here,

this is a powerful observation.

The kind of moral imagination.

That is necessary to understand that place.

I'll make this even more abstract, that the physical

world buttresses on and

impacts the spiritual world. And I'm not talking about this in a religious

context. I'm talking about this in a broad, broad context. We

can get to the narrow religion if we want later on, but

in a broad context, the material world and the spiritual world.

interact. So I'm part of a, I'm part of a men's group.

We meet on, we meet on Wednesdays. We're all Christians. We

all go to different churches and we get together and we have lunch and we

talk about biblical things, right? I do this once a week, every week with these

guys. I've been doing it for about a year, year and a half now.

And it doesn't matter which part of the Bible we were reading, but the question

that was in front of us was,

Why, or not why, does, which is a better

question, does a

material sacrifice, no, does a spiritual sacrifice

require a material element in order to be effective?

Now that's a hugely powerful question. It's almost a rabbinical question, actually.

It's a hugely powerful question, right? And we only have 45

minutes for lunch. we're not going to get to the end of this question. Like,

it's just not, it's just not going to happen.

Plus, we're like 4 dudes who all have different jobs

in different places. Like, we got, you know, we got, you know, we're just regular

schmucks, right? Just hanging out trying to figure this out, right?

And it's interesting that I had this conversation yesterday with these guys and you're bringing

this up today because I think what you're talking about with

Havel is part of the answer to this question and what he understood

was the sacrifice of this building

with all of its bloody history.

That history had to be— I'm going to use a spiritual term

here— it had to be atoned for, but

not in the destruction of the building. Right. It had to be

atoned for in the changing of the material nature

of what goes on in the building. And then let people with their— you talk

about individuals rather than systems and institutions. Let individuals have the

freedom to come in, and freedom is the key word there. Freedom to come in,

bring their spirit with them, and

then the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual atonement can continue

on another level that quite frankly, even Havel, myself, the

guys in my group, even Harvey here doesn't really understand. Right.

We just know it works. We're just in tune with it. We know it works.

We don't know why. We don't know how. As I, as I sometimes put it,

or as I put it in the group conversation I was having yesterday with my,

with the folks in my men's group, that's happening 1,200 levels above

me. I have no idea. I don't know. I just

know that like, even in the Old Testament, even in the Torah,

when Abraham brought Isaac to the mountain,

And there was still, and even when Isaac was spared, and if you want to

go back and read that in the book of Genesis, go back and read that.

But Isaac was spared. Don't touch the boy. Not a hand goes on

him. Not one. But here's a ram in the thicket. There has

to be some material element that somehow ties into a spiritual

sacrifice and even into a spiritual atonement. And I think that that's

what Havel was getting at with the rededication of this building to something

else. And I think it's only artists that get that at a deep level and

understand that deep But they operate to it out of instinct. And of

course, you recognized it because you're coming out of the theater, you're coming out of

music. And I don't even know if you would have articulated it that way back

in the day. But I think that's what you sensed.

Yeah. Yeah,

it's a rich journey. It's an incredible

journey that that building was on, that he

was on, that each of us are on.

Right. And the moral imagination, to know that and to recognize that

you're on that journey is something that I think we're, we're

lacking in the West. We're lacking at an individual level. We

lack it. Moral imagination. I think of

moral imagination as a skill, actually. Okay.

I think we don't practice it enough. And the thing is that with,

with, as with all skills, you get good at it by practicing it.

Yeah. Or it'll atrophy if you never use it. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. And so this gets into the question

here that you posed, which you're posing it and Havel has

posed it. So I'm going to challenge you with this question

because our listeners are going to be listening to this. They're going to be going,

okay, Hasan, you're going all esoteric here on me. Okay,

fine. We'll tolerate some of this, but at

a certain point, you got to get practical with me, right? And, you know, that's

good because I am at the bottom a pragmatic guy. I could do the abstract

stuff, but at the bottom, like what works and what doesn't and do the things

that work. Right. Right. Um, so

what does it mean to live in truth at a

practical level? Like if I'm listening to this, if I've

made it this far in the episode where, you know, we're, we're, we're about an

hour, we're about an hour or so in now. I made it an hour in.

I've wandered down this journey.

Okay, what does it mean practically to live in truth? Because

if, you know, my listeners, maybe it's a guy who's a carpenter,

you know, and he's hammering nails, right? And I'm not diminishing carpenters. Well, like, that's,

that's the job that he's done, right? We need carpenters. Heck, I need carpenters. I'm

an amateur carpenter. I know how hard that job is. Or maybe he's a

truck driver, you know, listening to this, driving across country, delivering loads.

Or maybe he works in the oil and gas field. Or maybe

he's on his way on the bus or her on her way on the bus

to go do a job that maybe they

weren't exactly excited about doing, but it feeds their family. Or maybe they're

in a white-collar work situation where they don't have a chance to be

artistic because now they're

fighting a war of justifying their

job, you know, to someone. Who

sold their boss on an AI solution for what they're doing.

And they've been thinking they've been bringing practical value. And now they're being told

that they're not. What do we say to those people? Because when we say you

have to, you must live in truth, that sounds very pie in

the sky. Break that down practically. What does it mean

if I'm a regular person to live in truth? What does that actually mean?

What does that actually look like? How do I actually do that in a meaningful

way? Yeah. So it's a great question. I'm going to

suggest there are actually 2 questions embedded in this. So one is the

how, and the other is

how much of this do I have to do? And

that's kind of an important question too, because there's always a cost.

And so, so what do we mean? But let's, let's, let's start with the how.

So for Havel, the

definition is really

simple.

Do you know who you are?

Do you recognize what matters to you?

Really? And of course,

that question has been in Western philosophy since the Greeks from the beginning. It's been—

Yeah, Plato, Plato was writing down

Socrates and stuff, struggling with that going all the way back. Yeah, please.

Exactly. But what he's really asking,

go back to our greengrocer here, is, so

do you actually care about

workers of the world uniting? Okay.

If you do, then, you know, that's a reasonable starting point for

why you should put this out of there quickly. And if you don't, Then there

are all kinds of issues and problems and questions. But Havel is

basically saying, okay, now look at the, look at the negative

space agreement. Look at, flip that assumption on its head.

He's saying, okay, you don't care about that, but you're going

to put a sign up. What, what's the price

to you? What's the cost?

And that comes back to who are you? If you

don't believe it, but you're putting it up,

there is a cost to it. Now you have to weigh that against the

practical costs of not doing it and not compliance and all

of that. So it doesn't lead to a simple, so you must do it because

that's the law. But what it does lead you to is recognizing,

okay, I'm, I'm not living,

I'm not living aligned with with who I am, with what I

believe, with what I think, with what I want to do.

So it kind of starts there for him.

I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. That's my observation here.

I think COVID brought that home to a lot of people. Yes, I think you're

right. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah.

Okay. And I think that's also part of what we're still wrestling with because just

like we haven't, you mentioned 9/11. We haven't fully wrapped our arms

around 9/11 in any kind of meaningful way. And I will be saying this for

the rest of my life. We really haven't wrapped our arms around 9/11.

And this year, I mean, this is 2026. This is the 25th anniversary of

9/11. Yep. You know, we really fully haven't,

we haven't wrapped our arms around that. And then COVID to

happen inside of this, what has been a very

wild fourth turning, a wild fourth turning

moment in our history. Um, no major civil war,

weirdly enough, but there's been a lot of,

there've been a lot of Donnybrooks, been a lot of things around it that could

substitute for that if they were looked at in a different context.

Um, but COVID, we still haven't really, we haven't wrapped our arms around that

with COVID either, because there were costs to

not masking, just like there were

costs to putting on the mask. There were

costs to not taking, as I put it on

my show, and this is my language, not others, not Harvey's, this is mine,

not taking the jab and consequences to taking the

jab. Right. There were consequences to that.

And there were costs, as I tell my children all the time. And as I

tell other folks when they're, if they will listen, I just had

4 conversations about this in different contexts yesterday. Everything

costs something. Everything costs something.

And those costs are difficult. So when Havel became—

actually went to power, and almost immediately he was

confronted with something which he hated. He

didn't like being confronted with this at all, which is now,

okay, he's the universally acclaimed hero of the

revolution and And power

to the powerless, to now power to society and to

good and all of these things. And immediately his new

country that he's installed in, president of, so

it's called Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs don't want to be with the

Slovaks and the Slovaks don't want to be with the Czechs. Little problem.

Mm-hmm. And Havel

looked at the whole situation, and he was absolutely horrified because he

basically said, as a student of history, as

a citizen, as somebody who's thought deeply about,

about all of these things, this was insanity. This was a

country that was barely now getting to its feet, and,

and one half was considerably richer than the other. They're going to split

apart and go separate ways at this moment. It's, it's crazy. It's

insane. Bad things will come of it. Our whole trajectory is going

to be knocked in its path, and many bad things will

come of it. And

it's not my

place to say that it shouldn't happen. So

this is what they want to do.

So this is what was meant

by them as they had been fighting for this freedom. It was

also the freedom to separate and the freedom to go their separate

ways. And he spent months

wrestling with this. And then in the end, he

just— okay, so let's,

let's, let's, let's show the world that we can do this peacefully, democratically.

Let's have a vote. Let's, let's, let's, let's make sure that, that no

blood is spilled in the process of doing it. And if that's the vote,

Then I hate it and I'll sign it.

Yeah, I mean, you didn't need— in the mid-1990s, you didn't need a,

you didn't need a 2-parter in Eastern Europe.

The, you know, the Serbians and the Croats are already putting on a show.

You didn't need a second show. Exactly.

It could have so easily gone that way. Right. So

You know, these choices about what is, what does it mean to live in truth?

It, it, it meant in, in his case, the actual

truth behind all the slogans is that he had no alternative

to do but to do what he did, much as he

hated it. So this gets to your second

question that you said was embedded in my, my larger question, which is,

how much of this do I have to do? And so if I'm the

carpenter or the truck driver or the mom or the dad

or the pastor or the rabbi, or even

in our culture today, the imam or the mayor or the

whatever, and I

see myself as being not even a cog in the system,

the system doesn't even know who I am.

How much of this do I have to do? Even though I look

around and I see all— because I'm not ignorant and I'm not blind.

I see what's happening. I may not be able to categorize it correctly.

I may understand that there are moral implications to it and they may morally unsettle

me, but I may not have the words or the language to describe what that

moral unsettling is. I may make category errors

repeatedly in my own mind and not even be able to explain

myself Clearly, or if I can explain myself clearly, it's only

about things that I'm passionate about, or I've had direct experience, which to me

may not translate up, may not scale up the hierarchy.

If I am this person, if I'm the avatar that I'm building

as the straw man for this argument, or for this question, not argument

for this question. Harvey, how much

of this do I actually have to do? My kids got to

eat. I've got to eat. I've got a mortgage to pay, Harvey. Yep.

Yep. And this, this is, this

was such a powerful theme for Havel himself. One of the

last plays that he wrote before the revolution and before he pretty

much left behind for the most part his playwriting career for something

very different was a play called Largo Desolado. And

in that play, The hero of that play, or the antihero of that play, was

a great dissident hero who was,

had been let out of prison, but was now being constantly

shadowed and warned, step out of line and you're going back. And he'd had

10 years in there already. So he knew what was waiting. If he did, he

got himself a tenner, as, uh, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have

said. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there he is.

And, um, And now all of, all of the other dissidents are

gathering around his apartment saying, stand up to it. And he's like, I

don't want to go back. I've done this. You

know, I support you. I love you. But I

just want to live the rest of my life. And

Havel writes with such understanding

of both sides of that. These are complicated.

These aren't black and white things. Nothing that Havel ever

wrote or said or believed or did was to

paint, to point a finger. We do so much of that today.

And the internet culture just sort of fuels that in so many different ways.

But he would never say, oh, here's the purity test, and you've got

to do that. Yeah. Then you have to do that. Yeah, it was the

opposite of that. What Hubble would actually say is,

find what you can do. Find

what you can do that actually aligns you with yourself

and do that and do it privately, but not

solitarily if you could avoid it. He made that big distinction

between private and solitary. So sometimes you have to do things

solitary and some things are by their nature solitary pursuits.

But he was so interested in these private

spaces that we share with as these small spaces,

these natural communities that grow together

as people find what they can do, what they want to do, what aligns

themselves, what allows them, to the extent that they can, to live in

truth. What Havel would say is that the moment that you start

doing that, you set things in force in yourself, in your

little community, and the broader society. And if that's what you can do,

that's wonderful. You have actually done something very powerful. And it's, and we

know that it's powerful because if, if, if, if anybody

from the government in that case, or the system finds out that you're doing

it, they'll let you know that it's powerful by the way they react against you.

All right, let me, I got to go to the restroom. Let me pause here.

Okay, good. We'll come back. Very good.

Beautiful. All right, we're back. So,

you know, the, the question of what does it mean to live in truth? How

do we do that? And how much of this do we actually have to do

in a real way? You know, there's something that occurred to me just now as

you said that. Yeah. And that, how much do we need

to do? So one of the things that I think

is, I don't know if Havel ever said this

explicitly, but it comes through so much in everything that he

He wrote in, in his entire life. And I think

it's, it's, it's, it's a subtext theme of The Power

of the Powerless, the why we do it. We don't live in

truth, Ahlen would say. I think we're not

living in truth because it's good for society.

We're not living in truth because it's

good for you. We're doing it because it's good for us.

It's actually the only way to live that's good for us.

And I think that that's kind of the

heart of the question. How much?

When we think about dissident movements, people tend to think

about it in terms of, um,

To his point earlier, politics, right? We tend to think about it in terms of

political framing, right? And he

even says in his, in his essay, you know, every society, of course,

requires some degree of organization. Yet if that organization is to serve

people and not the other way around, then the people will have to be liberated

and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.

And I look at The

consternation that has occurred over the last couple of years,

um, around

the dynamics of what in America we are now

calling socialism at a political level,

which tie directly back into the dynamics of

protesting the government.

Which tie directly back into the dynamics of

political polarization that started online and then has

now spilled out into real life. But let's, let's,

let's, let's draw a sharp distinction

between, between

socialism and protestism. Okay, so

go ahead. Let's draw a sharp distinction. Yeah, let's do that. Go ahead. Yeah, no,

I think it's important because I think it's ignored a lot.

Okay. So, so

Havel talks a lot in The Power of the Powerless. What does it actually mean

to be a dissident? And, and he makes it very clear

that the stance of a dissident is not, not something that

he's actually particularly advocating for or against.

It's not— he doesn't find

the kind of the moral

force or the moral authority or the imagination. Dissidence. He

finds it in the truth. He finds it in living the truth. If that

leads him to dissent and dissident

behavior, that's where it leads. Okay, then

I'm going to ask you a very New Testament question.

That is at the root of some of our challenges in that,

and I'm glad you drew the sharp distinction there, but in the muddying of the

categories and the lack of distinction that has occurred and has been

allowed to occur in our culture over the last 20 years that has led us

to the point where we are now. I'm going to ask you this question. Pontius

Pilate asked this of Jesus before he was crucified. It's one of the

greatest questions in the New Testament. What is truth?

This, the, this is the thing that is

at the root of the problems in our time.

Because it is. We've wound up at the Nietzschean

cul-de-sac after the death of God. And the

Nietzschean cul-de-sac is, okay, you killed

God. You've said that texts don't

matter, right? That's Derrida. You've said that

the Foucaultians have won the day. Everything's power.

Everything is power, right? There is no truth. There's just who's

on top, who's on bottom. And if you're on the bottom and you're oppressed,

you have a moral, I would assert, that's the strength of it

now, a moral duty to upend the oppressor, to attain power

so that you could oppress them. We've wound

up in that Nietzschean cul-de-sac.

And what drove Nietzsche crazy, and we've covered Thus Spake Zarathustra, we've talked about

Nietzsche on this podcast extensively. You can't get away from him.

What drove Nietzsche crazy was he couldn't figure out how we could make our

own truth without a transcendent,

without an appeal to a transcendent. Right. Okay.

That's what's tying us into knots. We want to

appeal to politics or to power or to policy or

to oppressor-oppressed binaries.

But that's not where truth lies. So the question, I guess,

for us here is if we're reading Power, The Power of

the Powerless, right? And

Havel is confronting us with what this means, right, to live in truth.

But I don't even know where truth is because I don't know what it is.

I'm haunted by the Pontius Pilate question. And by the way,

my friends aren't giving me any answers. My social media feed isn't giving me

any answers. Right. My, my education isn't giving me any

answers. My mass media popular culture isn't giving me any answers.

As a matter of fact, the answers that I'm getting from the vast majority of

those inputs are either the Foucauldian answer, the Derridean

answer, or some variation of postmodernism. That's

a weird combination of both of those. And so what do I have

if I sense that truth is missing? What else do I have?

Now, I will say, for me, I'm asking you this question. I will say, for

me, the answer is, as a person who is a,

who is a Bible-believing Christian and tries to walk that out in all kinds of

practical ways, I say truth lies in the

biblical corpus. It's the one book that even Nietzsche couldn't overcome.

He couldn't step over it. He tried to, and every other

thinker in the West in the last 200 years has tried to,

and it beats everybody. I said this on the podcast about the tragedy of,

of, or not the tragedy, but the life of Henry V. It's the book that's

at the bottom. And we keep butting our heads against that book at the bottom

of the Western culture, and we cannot dig past it because

that's where the transcendence lies. Even if you don't believe in it,

it's still where it lies. It's still where it lies. So your belief

is irrelevant. Doesn't matter. All that matters is that's where the

answer to what is truth is. It's in that. It's in that. It's in that

document that we can't get past. Now, other folks

will come from a different perspective. I'm sure you will come from a different perspective

on this. But at the end of the day,

we have to have a lodestone. We have to have an anchor because

without that, we are running, we have, we've run an 80-year

experiment of what it looks like to be disconnected from the

anchor of truth. And the end

result of that in 2026 is we just float away. We're just floating

around, just doing stuff, right?

You can't build a dissident movement with no anchor.

You have to be anchored to something. And I'm not even talking about building a

dissident movement. I'm just saying that at the base level, if you really wanted to

do that, that, right? If

you want to live in truth, you have to know what truth is. You have

to anchor yourself to something. And I think this is what people struggle with in

our time. I think one of the problems that

immediately comes up for people, and we see it all

over society, you know, there's this phrase that's the— that

I wonder, it would be interesting to look at the Google history of this

phrase a little bit, how it, how it's emerged, how it's been used. But this

phrase, my truth.

So, so I have an enormous problem with it.

It's a phrase that I think kind of lies,

lies at the heart of a lot of these things. And yet, one of the

reasons why— I mean, it's, it's seductive and appealing, because if we can

all have our own truths, and that's kind of nice, right?

Mm-hmm. on a certain level.

But there, what there is, once we start down

that road, there's kind of no way past it.

Right. So

people live the bulk of their lives

in a realm of needs,

power, Opportunities,

what they have to do, what they feel that they have to do,

what they want to do in order to gain more of the things that they

want to have, which is how Hubble would put it.

All of the material dimensions of it.

So if there's no

anchor, to use your word.

If there is no anchor, then,

then the whole phrase of living in truth doesn't actually

have much meaning. Right. Existence becomes

extremely hollow. Right back to where we were at

the start of the conversation. So

meaning comes from some

transcendent belief of some kind in

something. Uh,

some of those transcendent beliefs can take people to some pretty

strange places. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. But

some, some could take them to some pretty horrible places. Um,

and yet we kind of can't avoid the, the

essential need for that because If we don't have

that, all we have are the engineers of

souls and optimizing our material return

and so on and so forth. So, okay,

if Havel

believed in the— not just the importance, the

central role that spirituality has—

he believed very much in the importance

of and the interconnection between religion, culture,

belief, spirit. But he also believed very much in

science, believed very much in rationality,

believed in causal relationships, and all, all,

all, all of those kinds of things. What he

didn't believe in was dogma. Right.

Um, I think, and sometimes he

uses the word dogma, especially in his, in his theater. Uh,

in his political writing, he talks more about systems, but he

means them roughly interchangeably, um, because systems

exist to, to, to, to, to, to, to

propagate dogma. Right. So

If we come back to the question of living in truth,

what that actually means, it means that

if you have that anchor, some

transcendent belief, you need to

try to find some way to embody that in your life.

If you have that anchor. Yeah. If you don't have that anchor— If you don't,

if you have much— if your anchor is my truth,

Yeah. No, then you have no anchor. You're in a lot of trouble. Yeah.

And by extension, we were all in a lot of trouble.

We're all in a lot of trouble, right? This is that idea

of, of 1 million ants, right, on the march,

right?

Like, if, if, if as an individual, right,

Stalin infamously said, you know, you kill one man, you're a murderer.

Kill a million, you run a country. That's the Hasan paraphrase.

And, and I don't, I don't think Stalin would object to that, actually. Yeah, I

don't think so. I think he'd be perfectly fine with that. And that's what made

him a monster. I

think that if I'm one person,

And I am surrounded culturally because I can only swim in the

water I'm in, right? I could hear

this and I can think, okay, what

is truth? What actually is that thing right

now? That's going to send you, if you ask that question and you search for

the meaning honestly, that's going to send you on a journey.

And I think a lot of people, by the way, Let me be very clear.

I think a lot of people have gone on this journey and are continuing to

go on this journey. I think more people than we're even aware of, right?

However, the people who scream the loudest and get the most internet ink

spilled on them are the people who,

to your point earlier, are trapped in the cul-de-sac of the my

truth, right? You know, sort of idea.

And The, the challenge of our time

is that multiple people

decentralized and disconnected, but all

understanding the same thing can make a difference.

Um, they're generals without an army or an army

without any generals, you know? Absolutely. And

they're actually the only thing. can make a difference. Right. And so

I, I take heart because I think that the most—

if we're going to go back to this word dissident for just a minute, I

think the most dissident act you can do is raise

your children to believe in an anchor of truth. Yeah. I,

yes, absolutely. By the way, I am not— I, yes, I

admitted already, I'm a partisan for Christianity. That's my

partisanism. If you're Jewish or

you're Muslim or some— okay,

we can have those kinds of discussions. Those are discussions that are interesting to have.

But I personally, I go, you got to go, you got to stick with one

of the big 3. Anything outside of the big 3, the big

religious traditions, you're going to struggle with a little bit. So, so I, I guess

I see it a little differently in that. Yeah, that's okay. So I, I

don't necessarily

I'm much more concerned with the degree of

alignment, first of all, between what a person

actually lives and what they say they do. And what they say they do.

Yeah. And what that does. But also,

these, these great faiths have

significant points of alignment. And not only the

Western Um, they're not all the same.

The differences are really important. We could have really great discussions

about all of the differences. Uh, and even, even

within the faiths, they have discussions about differences.

Absolutely. Within any given gathering

of 3 people, any of the faiths, there will be significant differences.

But, but still, we can, we we can align around some

basic things. Yeah. To a pretty high degree.

And those things are fundamental to your earlier

point. What is truth? What do we mean? So

we've kind of described what it's not, right? Not my truth. It's not

your truth. That's the

cul-de-sac, as you call it. It's the big trap, I think.

But what What is it? So there's the internal truth.

And there's maybe the eternal truth, right?

So the, the internal truth is,

most of us know, when we are

not aligned with who we are,

we may not recognize it, because

we do a lot to dull ourselves from that realization.

costs we spend most of the time not necessarily actually

aligned with who we are. So we don't want to think about that. And also

because society puts lots of

distractions in the way, it's not terribly useful to most

forms of social organization that we live for us to be thinking

about that. So there are lots of reasons why we don't think about that.

But, but that, but that internal compass

is incredibly important. It is at the core of what Hamlet is actually talking about.

Yeah, find someplace where, where, where, where

you know that you're not living aligned with who you are.

Identify that place. And this gets back to the idea that Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn was talking about, you know,

in, you know, in the face of living in a society

that's full of liars, basically, The person who says the truth

is the most dangerous person, right?

To a certain degree, you know, writers who

wrote about and wrote about in the

aftermath of the Holocaust noted this as well

on multiple sides, noted this as well.

We have talked on this show about

some of the failures of not appealing to truth.

In particular, I think one of the greater failures of the 20th century was,

was by the folks who prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials,

not appealing to a transcendent truth.

International law isn't transcendent enough. It's just not. It's just

not a big enough judge. And I don't need to go deeply

into that. We've covered that a lot on this show. You can go back and

listen to other episodes where I've talked about that. But this is one of the—

it's one of my bugaboo things about the 20th century. I think we had a

moment. We still have an unfinished conversation. We do about the

banality of evil. Evil banality. Yes, we do. We do. We

do. Yes, we do. Yes, we

do. Harvey and I got a little, got a little bit into it. I never

actually told the story of how I met Harvey. One of the, one of the

first conversations we had, we kind of got a little, got a little sparky about

that because Harvey and I, while we may unite around,

while we may unite around a shared faith tradition in some ways,

we're going to have some differences in that, in that space. And that's okay, by

the way. That's, and you know what, and actually, Harvey, hearing your story today

of meeting Paulo and sort of all of that, that gives me more

context to what you were saying in that, in that

conversation around Eichmann. And I still think there's—

Hannah Arendt landed on something. that I think is incredibly uncomfortable that

we actually have to deal with. But we could talk— we talk about that another

time. What I think is

wonderful in all of this, though, is so

there is that internal question, but then there's also

what you brought up earlier, which is the eternal question, the transcendent

question. And, you know,

if we think about ethics, Mm-hmm. We

think about it as a way of not

just thinking and the codification of it in laws

and norms and all the rest of it, a way of feeling, way of being,

way of sensing the world, which is

aligned with and oriented towards

maximizing human good

and maximizing flourishing, minimizing harm. Are.

Basic things like that that bring together

lots of different faith traditions.

Um, when I think about that as a point of departure,

and, and again coming back to Havel and The Power of the Powerless and

his, his career, that's essentially

what, what he did. He didn't

try to come up with universal truths.

Mm-hmm. He tried to encourage

individuals to come together in little ways in,

in society and embody

living in truth and embody those moral values and

find a way to, to, to, to put that at the center. His point is

that as you start to live that way, the larger systems

You build them, they grow. It becomes who you are.

It connects other people. Movements form out of that. All of these things

happen. But, you know, Powell was very much,

and this goes very much to one of the

reasons why he was not a socialist. He was never a socialist.

He was so progressive in so many ways in the real sense of that word.

But there was nothing socialist about him. He

actually believed that this starts with the

individual. It starts with the individual person and

their dignity and their choices and their free will and how

they exercise that and how they align with who they really are, and then how

they gather others in personal ways, in

private connections, and then the things that build with that.

And I think this is at the core of what we need to take

from Václav Havel's essay, The Power of the Powerless. By the way,

available for free on the internet. Right. Go out, download it,

read it, absorb it. It's only 80 pages. You can

do it in a sitting, maybe a couple of sittings. If your attention

span is not that sharp, you can work your way into it. What I always

tell folks is just watch one less Netflix episode of something. You

know, just, just those guys at Netflix, they've got theirs. You need to get

yours. That's what my grandmother would say. She was right.

But, but go out, download it, read it. If you want to buy a

copy, absolutely go buy a copy. Go help, go help us,

go help support somebody with your money on this.

I love it how you brought up ethics, Harvey. And in our close

here, as we wrap up, because we got to turn the corner, we got to

wrap up here. I love how you brought up ethics, and I wanted to, I

wanted to visit this because this is something you brought up initially. And, you know,

we're involved in an organization called the World Ethics Organization,

doing various things with them. And Richard Messing's been on our show before.

He's going to be on our show again. He's coming up, coming up in a,

coming up in a couple of weeks. He's going to be on talking about the

builder's stone, which is going to be an interesting conversation

for us to, for us to have.

Ethics. One of the things that has struck me about

people in our time is we,

we make a fundamental, very often, category

error between what is ethical and what is moral. Now,

I'm not saying those things don't overlap. Very often they do.

But I'm saying understanding the distinction with the difference between what

is ethical and what is moral is,

and the benefit to other parties that comes from that

confusion is something that

is a real trap, I think, for leaders. And I'm thinking specifically of a

conversation I had with somebody, a person that you and I both

know. Actually, I won't say who it was, but a person that you and I

both know. About a very sensitive topic and a category

error literally in this, and this is a highly educated person.

He literally made the category error in the conversation

and I caught it and I called him out on it. I said, this is

not, I didn't use the term category error, but I said like, I think you're

mis— you're mixing 2 things together here. While I understand your

outrage about this thing in this way,

you have it in the wrong box. And because you have it in the wrong

box, you are walking down the road to other wrong conclusions that are

actually going to be deleterious to other kinds of things that you want to do

with other people. And of course, he did not accept that. He thought

that that was, that I was incorrect, that my categories were incorrect,

and that, and that somehow I was trying to draw him into, like Br'er

Rabbit, I was trying to draw him into a tar baby of nettles,

right? And, uh, And yes, I know I mixed my metaphors there,

folks. I realize what I just did. But, but

my point is— It was quite vivid. It was quite vivid. It was, it was,

I'm building, I'm building a word image here. You know, remember I said visual

arts, right? I'm building, I'm building things here with the words. But my

point is that in ethics,

how do we as leaders, and let's close with this, how do we as leaders

avoid category errors? About

what is ethical. Not even, no, not even what is ethical, about

how to apply, there we go, ethical thinking.

Because to your point, Havel is really interested in

that, and he's really interested in that idea of what is ethical. And

I loved how you talked about embodiment, right? Embodiment is huge,

right? The body matters. The material world matters. Whether

it's a physical building where horrific atrocities have happened, And now it gets

transformed into something else by, by an act of moral

imagination, or whether it's a

mom and a dad, you know, sitting

down with a child and reading to them every night.

There's ethical pieces to all of this. And so I

want you to speak to some of that. How do leaders suss that

out and then apply that? in their, in their lived lives

and their organizations, the teams, the cultures that they are in. Let's, let's close

with that. Yeah. So it's, it's a great place to close here.

So knowing who we are,

spending the necessary time to kind of revisit that,

to reflect on it, to explore it, to explore it in different ways. We

do so much of our exploration in a cognitive kind of way.

And that's necessary but not sufficient. I

mean, it, it kind of strips away the—

all of the sensory dimensions to it, all of the body

dimensions, all of the social dimensions. It— so

knowing who we are is a starting point.

Um, leaders who

actually

look at not just the broad

canvas of their, the impact of their actions. So

yes, the con— in Powell's case, the countries, maybe our

companies and the different, the social forces,

systems, all of that kind of thing. But the personal individual aspects of

how we live them in, in, in, in, in, in the moments of our lives,

how we actually inhabit the

I think so much of what it

takes to lead lies in

really simple ethical dimensions. So

we do, so you know that I've done a lot of research on

sort of the impact of the arts. Yeah. What that does for

leaders. And different ways in which

engaging in the arts develops our

sense of engagement, connection,

authenticity, resilience,

empathy. And I want to say a word or two about empathy because it's

easy because of some of the ways that empathy is used or misused

to skip by actually just how vital it is. Because

essentially, without empathy, we have no capacity

to actually understand other people. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty fundamental. Yes.

So, and without empathy, and

we always talk about behavioral empathy, so it's not just a matter of how

I feel, but what do I do with those feelings? How does

that translate into our choices or actions? behaviors. Awesome. Okay.

So there are all these things we know in the arts. So a

few years ago, we had a series of discussions with, with ethicists

around the world. You were part of one of those conversations. Mm-hmm. And

when we put all of those together and just look at

what the ethicists told us, they came up with a series of attributes.

Question was, what makes an ethical leader? They were virtually

identical. with what the research shows the arts

produce in people. So in other words,

when we work with the arts, we actually do that first because we

love art and we want to create things. Second, we do it in our work

because we believe that it leads to innovation, creativity, and all

kinds of fantastic outcomes and

growth in skills and qualities and purposes in people.

But in the process of doing that, we're actually also

developing the capacity, or at least the behaviors and the attributes

that lead to the capacity of ethical leadership. So

it's a little bit of a roundabout way of coming back now to the point

here. But the point, the point is clear, that

as leaders, these are the things that are

actually going to matter much more than the things that we

often think This policy and that policy,

this structural change, this oppressor and this oppressed,

whatever, however we frame these things, Habermas would look at

all of those and say, that's, that's all very interesting. And maybe

it's also all very beside the point. The point is

much more me. Who am I?

Who do I want to be? How do I want to be? How am I

going to do that? How am I going to connect with others? How do I

see it? How do I shape it? All of those things. These are

not the things that we necessarily think of all the time when we talk about,

about leadership. And yet those are the fundamental questions about

leadership. What does it take to be somebody who was washing windows

and become instead the president of a

country that was in itself an exemplar that was

reshaping the way that the world understands these things.

Mm-hmm. The power of the powerless is, is, is, is,

is incredibly resonant in all

of us. It's only resonant— it's only resonant

in us if, if, if we activate it. We start with awareness,

we move through embodiment, because that's actually how we feel these

things as well as, as think about them. And when we

use that to, to see the world, to connect with the world, to create

the world, to impact and shape the world. So when I

think of all of those things,

we work with leaders a lot. We work with them around the world.

We do that so that we can help them become

more innovative. Why does it matter? Because the world

is changing so radically, so profoundly, so constantly. That

if you can't innovate, you can't possibly lead because you can't

anticipate the future. And we can only lead people into the future. We

can't lead people into the past, and they're not going to stay where they are.

So this is pretty critical. And we

talk a lot about future readiness. That's why we talk about it.

So I, I think that it's

easy to think about future readiness as, okay, so future,

the new technology, AI, what are we going to do with that? And, you know,

all of these relate, all of them connect

directly and intimately, but they kind of come back to the core of

the individual. And that's where, where I see it.

And that's why we work so, so much with individuals and then individuals

as they come together in teams, which are of course the kinds of small

communities that

Great and powerful closing ideas

from Harvey Seifter. Please connect with

Harvey through The Art of Science Learning

and Creating Futures That Work. We're going to have

links to all the places where you can connect with Harvey and

check out his work in the show notes below the player,

uh, that you may be listening to this podcast or watching

this podcast on. I want to thank Harvey

for coming on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today.

And with that, well, we're out.

Thanks, Hades. See you next time.