At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

In an oppressive state, Havel wrote, people become co-opted in subtle ways. He gives an example: a greengrocer receives from his company’s head office a sign bearing the standard message, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He is supposed to put it in his window, and he does so, although he cares not a bean for its message — for he knows that all kinds of inconveniences may ensue if he does not. A customer who sees the notice doesn’t consciously think about it either; she has the same notice in her own office anyway. But does this mean that the sign is meaningless and harmless? No, says Havel. Each sign contributes to a world in which independence of thought and personal responsibility are quietly eaten away. The signs, in effect, emanate from the Heideggerian ‘they’, and they also help to keep it going. All over the country, even in the offices of the most senior figures, people simultaneously suffer from the system and perpetuate it, while telling themselves that none of it matters. It is a giant structure of bad faith and banality going all the way to the top. Everyone is ‘involved and enslaved’.