Abasing the Whole of Society – The How and Why for Dummies

Compelled Speech. Compelled Vaccines. Compelled Spying.

Lech Walesa had a big hand in organizing the Gdansk Shipyard strike in 1980.  I remember seeing grainy footage on the evening news of a shipyard worker strolling, hands in pockets, past a shuttered shipyard gate.  I remember wondering, how did anyone manage to get a hold of this film footage from behind the Iron Curtain?  And I remember thinking, this will not end well.  It may turn out like Prague 1968, or, worse, like Hungary 1956.

But, wrong.  That turned out to be the beginning of Solidarity, the shipyard workers union.  Solidarity subsequently grew into a nationwide movement.  It took nearly ten years, but nation-wide Solidarity took down the Polish government.  The Iron Curtain began to crumble.  The Czechs subsequently secured their Velvet Revolution.  The regimes in East Germany and Hungary gave way.  After a standoff with the tanks in the streets, the Romanians managed to depose the leadership of their regime.  They tried the Ceausescus, Nicolae and Elena, for a host of charges, and subsequently executed them.  More blood than velvet in that case, but the Central and Eastern Europeans secured liberation after the Soviets swept them into their sphere in 1945.

In Poland the monopoly of the Communist Party gave way to vigorous political competition.  No surprise, Solidarity emerged as a de facto political party.  Much of its leadership assumed elected office, and then politics degenerated into the usual factionalism that attends any effective transition to the real stuff of democratic competition: actual (and sometimes bitter) competition between factions.

I can’t pretend to be an expert on the Polish experience in the 1980’s, but to date I have yet to find reason to give up on the idea that the Solidarity experience illuminated some of the ideas that came out Vaclav Havel’s 1977 essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”  What I get out of that essay is the idea that, once everyone knows that the system is a joke, and everyone knows that everyone knows that the system is a joke, then the system becomes susceptible to collapse.  The prospect of collapse degenerates not into some heroic venture but rather into a mere matter of drawing a card from a deck, day after day.  One day the leadership of the regime finally draws a bad card.  The regime collapses.

It is a great shame that Vaclav Havel is no longer with us to take up the question of whether he would understand that interpretation as a reasonable interpretation of his essay.  But one could not help but perceive that Solidarity was motivated and sustained by optimism.  Everyone knew that the system was a joke.  And the leadership knew that everyone knew that the system was a joke.  Everyone knew that everyone knew.  It was just a matter when the leadership would officially recognize the joke that it was.

More certain, perhaps, would be the idea that Vaclav Havel’s essay made contact with compelled speech.  The essay opens with a vignette about the local grocer who places in the window of his shop a placard that reads “Workers of the World Unite!”  It is no different than American restaurant owners, local grocers (do any still exist?), or other shop owners placing placards that read “Black Lives Matter!” in their shop windows.  They’re declaring obeisance.  “Laissez-moi tranquille … s'il vous plait.  I am a good fellow.  I am just trying to cover payroll and pay the bills.”  They abase themselves.  They are compelled to abase themselves.  Abase yourselves or lose your livelihoods, and, possibly, lose your life.  Better, perhaps, to surrender one’s self-respect than to lose everything.

The authorities may understand this.  Abase the whole of society, and the whole of society becomes easier to control.  Make everyone publicly declare obeisance to the regime.  Even better, get people to spy on each other.  Get everyone to spy on everyone else.  Make it common knowledge that everyone is spying on everyone.  Everyone becomes debased.  Everyone abases himself, and everyone knows it.

One issue that had emerged by the late Noughties was a question over whether Lech Walesa had collaborated with the secret police in the 1970’s.  I do not know any of the details of this matter, but, absent any further research, I am comfortably inclined to believe that Lech Walesa collaborated.  I am also comfortably inclined to believe that everyone collaborated.  The whole point of maintaining secret police is to make everyone collaborate.  The whole point is to make everyone abase themselves by ostensibly spying on everyone else.  You get dragged in.  The police ask questions.  You answer honestly to the extent that you feel you can answer without getting anyone else into big trouble.  You obfuscate if you think you make a thing of it.  And, if you can’t, you reveal information.  Everyone does.  Everyone but mythical Hollywood heroes or the occasional actual hero abases himself.  Actual heroes disappear.

How do people deal with self-abasement?  Some drink.  Some drink themselves to death.  Some engineer quicker passage to the afterlife.  Most rationalize.  Some drink in order to take the edge off of the cognitive dissonance that ex post rationalization demands.  But some perceive opportunity.  They perceive opportunity to harm others and secure affirmative benefits.

Such was the case with villagers who ratted each other out in Vietnam as part of the American military’s Phoenix Program.  Interrogators came to appreciate that some villagers might bear false witness and identify other villagers as Vietcong.  Villagers might do this as a way of disposing of their rivals for property or seasonal lending.  I have no direct insight into the records of underlying interrogations, but I do have experience seeing transcripts of interrogations by inquisitors operating in Venice during the Inquisition of the 17th century Counter-reformation.  Again, inquisitors came to appreciate that witnesses might offer false testimony, all in a way of getting creditors and rivals banished, executed or otherwise neutralized.  Interrogations sometimes involved torture, but more often they involved one neighbor claiming to have seen another practicing witchcraft or, less spectacularly, trading books with Calvinists or with other such shady characters.

A few days ago I read a piece by Mollie Hemingway and Tristan Justice about the “J6 Committee” testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson.  “In Private, Cassidy Hutchinson Joked About Riot, Called J6 Committee ‘Phony,’ Praised Trump Before Changing Story.”  Recall, Ms. Hutchinson was one of the many people drawn in to the J6 Star Chamber who was to give “bombshell” testimony of Donald Trump’s conduct with respect to something-or-other.  The abundant text communications and other communications that Ms. Hutchinson exchanged with friends and others make the case themselves: her communications destroy her credibility.  Why would anyone, whether friend or foe, ever trust this person again? Hutchinson collaborated with the regime. Why?

When I first took up this idea of crafting an essay about the mechanisms of institutionalized abasement, I had not given any thought to experiences from behind the Iron Curtain or within the J6 Committee.  I had something much more modest in mind.  But, by its modesty, it might be much worse, and that is the cheap and easy appeals one can find to “religious beliefs” in opposing COVID vaccine mandates.  For example, some number of professional baseball players have been denied the opportunity to compete against the Toronto Blue Jays in Toronto.  The Canadians require people coming across the border to be vaccinated.  Some cluster of players on any given team have declined to get vaccinated and have, in turn, been subject to some volume of criticism for not just getting the vax and helping their teams compete.

I may be wrong about this, but I am sure I had read somewhere that some players have resisted getting the vax for religious reasons.  True or not, we do know that the American military has required everyone to get the vax.  Tens of thousands of service people have endeavored to avail themselves of “religious exemptions.”  The military has honored almost none of these.  A military that has satisfied only 40% of its recruiting goals for fiscal year 2021 (which ends on September 30) thus finds itself expelling tens of thousands of personnel … all for an ersatz vaccine that does not work and yet does impose grievous harms at a rate of about 1-in-5000 doses on healthy young people who would likely shake off COVID without even knowing they had contracted it.  Rationalize that.

A motivation for the essay I had in mind was not to admonish service people who have endeavored to avail themselves of religious exemptions but rather to admonish anyone else who would hide behind religious belief rather than challenge vaccine mandates head on.  Personal religious convictions are one thing.  But there are even bigger things to stand up for: not merely the rights of a given individual (oneself) but for individual rights—that is, for the rights of all individuals; the right of the individual to tell the state that it does not maintain some type of “state’s right” to compel certain action.

Instead, what we read is that one ball player or another has apologized for criticizing the rationale for vaccine mandates.  Such people abase themselves.  In other sporting news, we have Australian rugby players declining to don jerseys that feature “Pride” motifs.  They do it, because some expressions of “Pride” offend their religious sensibilities.  All well and good, but is there no one to stand up against compelled speech?  Hiding behind “religious belief” amounts to dodging the bigger issues. 

Perhaps it is too easy to criticize.  One never knows what is going on with other people.  But, good for other sportsmen like Novak Djokovic for standing up for himself and for … John McEnroe (!) for standing up for Djokovic and for the rest of us: “John McEnroe slams ‘ridiculous’ Novak Djokovic US Open vaccine ban.” (New York Post, July 10, 2022)

The former Vladimir I. Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk.

People standing in Solidarity some time in the 1980’s.