Economics and Justice
The Power of Living in Truth
Jeffrey D. Sachs
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NEW YORK – The world’s greatest shortage is not of oil, clean water, or food, but of moral leadership. With a commitment to truth – scientific, ethical, and personal – a society can overcome the many crises of poverty, disease, hunger, and instability that confront us. Yet power abhors truth, and battles it relentlessly. So let us pause to express gratitude to Václav Havel, who died this month, for enabling a generation to gain the chance to live in truth.
Havel was a pivotal leader of the revolutionary movements that culminated in freedom in Eastern Europe and the end, 20 years ago this month, of the Soviet Union. Havel’s plays, essays, and letters described the moral struggle of living honestly under Eastern Europe’s Communist dictatorships. He risked everything to live in truth, as he called it – honest to himself and heroically honest to the authoritarian power that repressed his society and crushed the freedoms of hundreds of millions.
He paid dearly for this choice, spending several years in prison and many more under surveillance, harassment, and censorship of his writings. Yet the glow of truth spread. Havel gave hope, courage, and even fearlessness to a generation of his compatriots. When the web of lies collapsed in November 1989, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks poured into the streets to proclaim their freedom – and to sweep the banished and jailed playwright into Prague Castle as Czechoslovakia’s newly elected president.
I personally witnessed the power of living in truth in that year, when the leadership of Poland’s Solidarity movement asked me to help Poland with its transition to democracy and a market economy – part of what the Poles called their “return to Europe.” I met and was profoundly inspired by many in the region who, like Havel, lived in truth: Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron, Bronislaw Geremek, Gregorsz Lindenberg, Jan Smolar, Irena Grosfeld, and, of course, Lech Walesa. These brave men and women, and those like Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Leszek Balcerowicz, who led Poland during its first steps in freedom, succeeded through their combination of courage, intellect, and integrity.
The power of truth-telling that year created a dazzling sense of possibility, for it proved the undoing of one of history’s most recalcitrant hegemonies: Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Michnik, like Havel, radiated the joy of fearless truth. I asked him in July 1989, as Poland’s communist regime was already unraveling, when freedom would reach Prague. He replied, “By the end of the year.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “I was just with Havel in the mountains last week,” he said. “Have no fear. Freedom is on the way.” His forecast was correct, of course, with a month to spare.
Just as lies and corruption are contagious, so, too, moral truth and bravery spreads from one champion to another. Havel and Michnik could succeed in part because of the miracle of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who emerged from a poisoned system, yet who valued truth above force. And Gorbachev could triumph in part because of the sheer power of honesty of his countryman, Andrei Sakharov, the great and fearless nuclear physicist who also risked all to speak truth in the very heart of the Soviet empire – and who paid for it with years of internal exile.
These pillars of moral leadership typically drew upon still other examples, including that of Mahatma Gandhi, who called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments With Truth. They all believed that truth, both scientific and moral, could ultimately prevail against any phalanx of lies and power. Many died in the service of that belief; all of us alive today reap the benefits of their faith in the power of truth in action.
Havel’s life is a reminder of the miracles that such a credo can bring about; yet it is also a reminder of the more somber fact that truth’s victories are never definitive. Each generation must adapt its moral foundations to the ever-changing conditions of politics, culture, society, and technology.
Havel’s death comes at a time of massive demonstrations in Russia to protest ballot fraud; violence in Egypt as democratic activists battle the deeply entrenched military; an uprising in rural China against corrupt local officials; and police in body armor violently dismantling the Occupy protest sites in American cities. Power and truth remain locked in combat around the world.
Much of today’s struggle – everywhere – pits truth against greed. Even if our challenges are different from those faced by Havel, the importance of living in truth has not changed.
Today’s reality is of a world in which wealth translates into power, and power is abused in order to augment personal wealth, at the expense of the poor and the natural environment. As those in power destroy the environment, launch wars on false pretexts, foment social unrest, and ignore the plight of the poor, they seem unaware that they and their children will also pay a heavy price.
Moral leaders nowadays should build on the foundations laid by Havel. Many people, of course, now despair about the possibilities for constructive change. Yet the battles that we face – against powerful corporate lobbies, relentless public-relations spin, and our governments’ incessant lies – are a shadow of what Havel, Michnik, Sakharov, and others faced when taking on brutal Soviet-backed regimes.
In contrast to these titans of dissent, we are empowered with the instruments of social media to spread the word, overcome isolation, and mobilize millions in support of reform and renewal. Many of us enjoy minimum protections of speech and assembly, though these are inevitably hard won, imperfect, and fragile. Yet, of the profoundest importance and benefit, we are also blessed with the enduring inspiration of Havel’s life in truth.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
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Levantine 08:44 20 Dec 11
I don't endorse the tone and subject of the previous comment.
....Havel’s death comes at a time of massive demonstrations in Russia to protest ballot fraud;....
You can read an honest and qualified commentary here; you can’t find this good analysis in Western media: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121165759137131.html
Otherwise, I like how you depicted Havel's role as profoundly linked in a chain of revolutionaries, and within specific historical circumstances.
Zsolt 09:44 20 Dec 11
I do not want to take anything away from those brave revolutionaries who fought against oppressive regimes through human history, but discerning the "truth" is always easier when the contrast, the uncovered "evil" is so obvious that nobody can miss it.
It is much more difficult to find the "truth/evil" comparison in relatively peaceful times, when the world is dominated by "free and democratic" countries, seemingly all following the truth.
We could ask that if most of the free world today is on the path of truth (freedom and democracy as defined by the articles theme as the opposite of oppression and undemocratic regimes) why are we sliding into a global crisis which is not only an economical crisis, but one that affects all layers of human relationships and institutions from politics to education, from the family model to sciences and culture?
The first answer could be that our perception of reality is totally subjective thus my truth is not necessariliy the same as other people's truth, "one man's freedom fighter is the other man's terrorist", and we can find other similar examples on how our truth differ from each other.
If we want to base humanity on a safe moral foundation, so each of us can measure ourselves against the same "truth/evil" compass we have to look inside ourselves and understand that basic human nature is biased towards itself. As our perception of reality is subjective, our whole nature is subjective, our main drives is an overall desire to receive pleasure and to avoid pain. At every second we make slef calculations based on the "maximum pleasure/minimal pain" basis, and then this calculation determines how we relate to others as well.
Of course we cannot call this basic nature evil, since we have no free choice here, this is how we are born. But we have to recognize it because from this basic nature we can explain the whole of human history up till today, and could also understand how we could turn things around in the time of crisis.
Each one of us has a different magnitude of this self important desire, there are "hungrier" people who go further to achieve the pleasure they want even to the point of harming others even themselves. Usually these people become the leaders of society, industry, any human gathering and this difference in us renders humanity into a pyramid system.
And this system is still alive today, the "99%vs1%" slogan of the Occupy movements reflects it very precisely.
The difference today is that as the world and humanity in it became global, and as we exist in a closed, interdependent system (as we can easily see from the unfolding events of the global crisis) this initial human nature that drove human history for continous expansions and development so far has become destructive, because as we became a single, interconnected network, the uncontrolled expansion, ruthless competition, unchecked growth makes us similar to cancer cells in a living body.
Returning to the main article: truth today is not defined in fighting an oppressive regime or dictator, or any evil personalities. Today the fight for truth turns into a fight against our own inherent nature that threatens to destroy our whole human society, even to the point of extinction.
Europe and the desperate deadlock over saving the Euro and the whole European Union is a prime example where even when we understand logically that we need to connect in an integrated level, our basic nature still stops us from actually achieving the necessary mutual connections and unity which is the model of human relationships in the global world.
Alternative 05:23 22 Dec 11
Let's get back with our feet on the ground. Havel was important. But ... many Czechs are very dissappointed in him because he didn't do much about the corruption. He wanted to live in the truth yes, but didn't take action once he had power. Corruption is still a big problem in Czechia. No one can close his eyes for that any more.
HeroicImagination 05:15 23 Dec 11
Václav Havel was a philosopher and statesman, but in the first place a heroic leader in a world where most people either did nothing to protest injustices and inhumanity, or were profiting from the evil regimes. Long live his inspiration and example to countless new heroes who will rise up to fill his shoes, acting with moral courage, and transforming compassion into courageous action, whenever confronted with challenges against overwhelming odds.
I invite you to see my tribute to Václav Havel here: http://heroicimagination.com/2011/12/in-memory-of-vaclav-havel
Phil Zimbardo
Founder and President
The Heroic Imagination Project
janelasdedeus 04:21 28 Dec 11
It's very very difficult to find a middle path between the totalitarian repression of absolute statism (whether communist or religious) and the brutal insensitivity of totally free market capitalism. Human psychology may simply not have evolved to a level that will allow us to negotiate an adequate compromise. If not, our fate will be the same as the original human inhabitants of Easter Island, who exhausted all their resources and descended into barbarism.
Levantine 04:19 04 Jan 12
This is an excellent article on Havel, by Alexander Zaitchik:
http://exiledonline.com/velvet-disappointment-vaclav-havels-complicating-final-chapter/
riazt 06:58 20 Dec 11
No an iota of remorse from Sachs who recommended to East Europe Washington Consensus Economic policies served in Shock Doctrine style all over East Europe and had to distance Harvard from the mess he and his colleagues made there (Mankiw should not be the only target)... of course now that the crisis is hitting America, he takes a different line instead of the one size fits all policy... this is a guy who is Malthusian still advocating what could be seen as modern eugenics in third world countries by stating that there are too many people in the third world by raising concerns about rising population there... (see his Unctad Prebisch lecture for instance)... Shameless is as shameless does!