My wife shamed me this past week for not wearing a surgical mask when we went to pick up her car from the body shop.  To be clear, I also do not wear a surgical mask when I go to the grocery store, my office, or to pick up take-out dinner, but, for whatever reason, Emily chose this week to give me the business about not wearing a surgical mask.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently recommended that people wear surgical masks or other cloth face covering to help slow the spread of COVID-19.  Surgical masks won’t stop someone from contracting the coronavirus, but they apparently help trap outgoing respiratory droplets from the wearer that may contain the virus, thus possibly slowing rates of contagion in others.

As I’m sure all normal people would, I thought of Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution to overthrow communism and first president of the new Czech Republic, when my wife was razzing me.  In 1978, Havel wrote a now very famous essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” in which he criticized the communist dictatorship under which he was living.  Through an allegory of a shopkeeper who is instructed to place a sign in his shop window that says “Workers of the world, unite!”, Havel attempts to explain how rigid adherence to ideology, brought on by horizontal social pressure and vertical political pressure, had long enabled the status quo regime when dictatorships were otherwise usually short-lived and localized as opposed to enduring and widespread as it was in the Soviet bloc:

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 o how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be 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 greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots.  He put them all into the window simply because it had been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that it is the way it has to be.  If he were to refuse, there could 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 “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 vital interests?

Let us take note:  if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” he would not be nearly indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth.  The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity.  To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction.  It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”  Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power.  It hides them behind the facade of something high.  And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world.  It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.  As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.  It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side.  It is directed toward people and toward God.  It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.  It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocers, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class.  The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised–in other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex process of relating to the world and of self-justification which ideology involves.  But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater importance attached to the ideological excuse.  It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime.  This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system:  that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.

Read the whole essay if you get a chance (PDF).

It’s normal for that to come to mind when discussing surgical masks with one’s spouse, right?  Perhaps, perhaps not.

To the extent that there are asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus, a surgical mask that stops outbound respiratory particulates seems like a reasonable, if not very good, recommendation.  Even though, and perhaps precisely because, I have not had any symptoms of the coronavirus, I probably should be wearing a surgical mask or other face covering when I go out.  I am not a medical doctor or epidemiologist, so you shouldn’t come to me for advice about these sorts of things.

My point is that, at least anecdotally, there seems to be a blind, stupid, and uncritical faith in America these days that government agencies can solve all of our problems if only we erect enough of them and fund them with enough of the public trust.  And again, anecdotally, the level of viciousness in some corners of social media has been ratcheted up in recent weeks as the most vocal of American political tribes tries to score points against the other by inventing new ways to blame the other for the current state of the world–usually, in my experience, a progressive Democrat calling a conservative Republican an idiot who just wants to kill people so evil corporations can make a profit (at least until conservative protests erupted this past week).  It reminds me of Alan Grayson’s infamous floor speech in the House of Representatives during the Affordable Care Act debates when he apparently abandoned all attempts to win allies to the cause or positively influence people:

What good does stuff like this do but rile up everyone who already agrees with you and entrench the people who disagree in their opposite position?

Everyone is scared right now, particularly with so much uncertainty about the effects that quarantining indefinitely will have on the economy.  Adding nastiness and shaming and smug superiority to the fear seems really inappropriate, if not wholly unhelpful.  Perhaps that is why I bristled and thought of Havel’s famous line, “I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace” when my wife, a progressive Democrat, scolded me, a small-L libertarian, for not wearing a surgical mask.

Maybe I just need to order some custom-printed surgical masks with Vaclav Havel’s face on them so that I can show the world that I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach during a pandemic.

(P.S.  I love my wife very much and would marry her again ten times over because she is so much more than her political beliefs, and getting married to her is the best thing I have ever done with my life.)