Ideology in Menders

“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.” – Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless”

The Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and president Václav Havel passed last Sunday, and the theatre world has been rightly grieving the loss – read Ian W. Hill and Edward Einhorn’s moving memories of meeting Havel during the 2006 Havel Festival.

Knowing his work only a little, I turned to his seminal essay “The Power of the Powerless” originally written in October of 1978. The essay caught fire the following year, when Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, felt the movement in a moment of crisis: “Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing…Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up…When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay.”

The essay, while rooted in the specifics of the Velvet Revolution, speaks powerfully to our current revolutionary moment. His writing on the power of ideology to warp the human spirit is especially relevant to our upcoming production of Menders, a play set in the future within a highly-regimented walled state not all that different from the “post-totalitarian system” of oppression his essay dissects.  Here is more:

“Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states.”

This system functions most effectively through ideology, which encourages participants to “force life into its most probable states” themselves. This ideology may be initiated through selective violence, but soon no threat is needed – it simply becomes easier to hang the flags and slogans in your store window than swim against the pernicious current.

Then soon enough, there comes that day when the ideology becomes the air the community breathes – and that’s just where we begin in Menders.

Two soldiers, newly minted from the Academy, patrol the wall that protects their city from an unnamed threat. They do so with the absolute conviction that the wall is right, but when their mentor Drew begins to tell them subversive stories of life beyond the wall, their faith in the system wavers. The strongest walls are those we build ourselves, however, and the power of Drew’s stories may not be enough.

As Havel notes in the essay, this kind of ideology is so effective because it does not just emerge from a hierarchy of violence, but from human nature itself:

“The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history, nor is it history somehow gone off its rails…It can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system…In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.”

This challenge of the messy, creative vitality of life and identity against the systems that seek to force them into their “most probable states” is one of the central actions of Menders, and as rehearsals continue, we’re increasingly excited to share this play with you.

There are still some $10 tickets available for opening weekend with the code ‘BRICK10’ – please join us for this beautiful and important new play.