The extreme solutions calm us by removing any occasion for thought: large state and tiny market (Stalinists), or large market and tiny state (libertarians). When we give ourselves over to these total solutions, we are pacified, no longer wrestling with the world. We have an answer for everything, like a simple computer program. We have retreated from the borderland of the unpredictable into the safe space of automatic replies. Havel defined ideology as a “bridge of excuses between the system and the individual.”
