If the upending of democratic society by the Trump administration were a literal nightmare, then it would be plausible to expect to wake up to a reasonably sane reality. The dream could be shaken off. Or if the venomous ideology of this administration could be understood as performative, dystopian theater of the absurd, then it would be possible to laugh, however nervously, at the ridiculousness of its palpable lies and its self-serving manipulations of public policy, the legislature, the courts, the armed services, and foreign relations.
But the relentless, rapidly fluctuating situation is neither dream nor fiction.
People find themselves, like Hector pursued to his death by a raging Achilles, caught in a living trauma, “endless as in a dream…when a [person] can’t catch another fleeing on ahead and…can never escape” (Fagles translation). This allusion isn’t hysterical or exaggerated. The presence of a vengeful and cruel antagonist, in the guise of government leadership, produces a kind of anxiety paralysis. Even if your work or activism supports opposition, such an onslaught feels like running in place or spinning in circles, not knowing where to turn, what to do, or even how to breathe.
In The Power of the Powerless, Czech playwright Václav Havel applied the term “post-totalitarian” to the society in which he lived under a communist regime that would not collapse for another decade. He wrote that he did “not wish to imply by the prefix ‘post-’ that the system [was] no longer totalitarian; [but was] …totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships.” Havel referred to pervasive, hyper-possessive ideological systems not simply communist or fascist but that even then, in 1978, included the consumerist, market-driven, and media-saturated processes of the democratic West. In the nearly fifty years since he wrote The Power of the Powerless, the global trend toward authoritarian oligarchy, including the active oligarchical power grab by the Trump administration, has borne out Havel’s analysis.
A friend who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia observes that most painful are assaults on what we have come to regard as baseline and developing democratic normalcy–racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ equity, public health and education, climate protections, and economic fairness. And my friend reminds me that in the former Czechoslovakia, it was those who saw “their freedoms confiscated” who lost hope. Over the years, I used to suggest to my students, as we gathered in Prague to study the 20th century totalitarianisms that traumatized the former Czechoslovakia, that our “hearts were big enough to hold the pain,” that grief was only possible in the presence of love. But living with grief and resisting oppression is easier said than done.
Then, as now, an active function of a post-totalitarian system is to suppress and compress each life, each living thought and action, into its ideological system: to normalize its purposes, processes, principles, vocabularies, and activities in the lived experience of individual people. It does so by controlling the full range of media, by media overload, by fear-inducing tactics, and by turning lies into realities to which a person must conform. As Havel wrote, “This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it…[and because] the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything…Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie” (emphasis Havel’s).
Lies, the accommodation of lies, and bellicosity flood each day. Consider every instance of “sane-washing,” every attempt to explain the Trump administration’s lies and activities as “normal” or “policy-driven,” every excuse, submission, or instance of silence by an elected official, law firm, business leader, or university president, and every hysterical but action-empty fundraising text or email from the Democratic Party. These looping experiences leave the individual citizen feeling defeated, as if they can do nothing except sink into a helpless, voiceless surrender to an implacable post-totalitarian state. In part this sense of helplessness comes from the feeling of being insignificant, of being one of the “powerless,” as Havel named individuals living within totalitarian systems. But the feeling is not accidental. It arises from a drive toward normalizing obedience to 21st century tyranny.
Havel’s response in The Power of the Powerless—a courageous response, let’s not forget, for which, among other actions, he spent 4 ½ years in prison—was to defend the integrity of individual people, the capacity of humans to think freely for themselves and behave as who they are in everyday life and not as who they are expected to be. In 2018, Timothy Snyder, writing in an introduction to The Power of the Powerless, put it this way: “Now, as under late communism, what threatens normalizers in power is the possibility that people will speak to one another in real life.”
The radically human is tender, or as another friend of mine has put it since the 2016 election, “Kindness is the new activism.” It is also unmediated and, again as Snyder wrote in his introduction to The Power of the Powerless, “…begins with salvaging unmediated experiences from mediated ones.” It is a voiced, living human experience that is at once private and shared. It is a commitment to accurate information and to every person’s right to a humanistic, honest education, one that doesn’t deliver doctrines but teaches both the acquisition and scrutiny of knowledge and that allows questioning and wrestling with difficult ideas, histories, and contexts. And it is hopeful, in the sense that my Czech friend suggested, because it exacts control over what can be controlled: individual integrity and moral courage.
Havel didn’t see this process as either easy or as something made possible by systems. He wrote, “In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existences. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie…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.” Havel makes it clear that the choice to live within the truth—to live within an active, unflinching consciousness despite the dispiriting directives and frequent threats (or acts) of authoritarianism—is a constant struggle. But this struggle reinforces its own necessity and ultimate effectiveness. A bit later, Havel writes, “A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.”
In the pain and danger of the current moment—occurring in a hyper-consumerist, self-oriented, media-saturated daily life dominated by screens and social media (a world far more isolating and impersonal than the now quaint-seeming 1970s in which television was the primary delivery system for distraction and waking sleep)—it can be perplexing to even imagine how to create a better life, to live with integrity day by day.
A model and metaphor for today can be found in the synthetic creations called “low-modulus soft networks,” the bio-inspired, elastic materials that mimic human tissues and can be used to mend human bodies. In recent years, interdisciplinary collaborations between biology, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and engineering have resulted in the creation of supple artificial materials variously described as “open,” “stretchable,” “matching the non-linear properties of biological tissues,” and “soft and fatigue-resistant.” Like human cartilage, ligaments, fascia, and skin, which absorb shocks and move flexibly to protect the structure of the body, these “soft networks” adapt, cushion, sustain, and repair the living self. A search of peer-reviewed academic literature on the term “soft networks” yields fascinating research about this scientific work (a search in Google Scholar, accessible outside of an academic library, is an example here).
The creation in biophysics of flexible synthetic systems evokes a method for humanistic antithesis to authoritarian control. In practice this method consists of individuals who commit to two things:
- to unflinching honest thought and speech and
- to creating direct person-to-person webs of mutual support that they actively maintain and adapt.
As people in the United States face a fast-moving, violently ideological mechanism that threatens to break democratic citizenship, it makes sense to return to the human, which while vulnerable and ripe with pathos, is also capable of healing and sustaining itself. Conditions in which structures are dying—not only civic systems but private philanthropies and nonprofit organizations—means that people need to think and act without the sanction of embedded, reliable systems that feel safe and comprehensible. Of necessity, they can act instead as a network of individual humans who link like the nodes in a synthetic soft network to remain vibrantly alive.
To manufacture a soft network that mimics human tissues with their ability to mend a broken body, scientists must first understand the human. They must understand how the living organism elastically repairs itself. For example, the awareness of skin’s capacity to stretch and grow in response to wounding gives rise, in biophysics, to imagining and then creating a nonbiological material that can mimic skin’s adaptability. Politically and culturally, this process offers a trope for reclaiming what Havel called “humanity’s rightful dignity” and for restoring broken civic structures and protecting human rights.
Individuals can use this model to construct a web of strong social connections that expand civic cohesion and mutual support. Forming soft networks of resistance is not starting an organization but establishing chains of integrity. Communal resistance crafted by networks based on individual nodes and points of connection can shift organically, mirroring the strength of the “supple and fatigue-resistant” human being who links to others and maintains the capacity to, as Havel put it, “create a better life.” Such a process can enable individuals to survive with integrity even in the face of fear, weariness, and temptations to comply, capitulate, or become complicit.
The first step involves accepting an internal invitation in which each person considers, first and foremost, what they need to sustain their own freedom of thought and moral integrity—to paraphrase Snyder, “to speak to [oneself] in real life.” Such self-reflection is a fraught process but fundamental to resisting fear, manipulation, conspiracy theory, dogma, and insular self-soothing.
Second, synthetic soft networks model a linking process, which manifests in our analogue as direct person-to-person communication. In soft networks of resistance, this process means systematically reaching out and connecting in person to each individual’s own human network through direct conversations between individuals and in small groups, in phone or online calls, and by mail or email—i.e., in communication outside of social media but, of necessity, sometimes via digital means. Humans in soft networks who “speak to one another in real life” would openly share with one another not only their concerns but their commitments, actions, and action items as specific needs arise.
When, as now, there is a sense that there is too much for any individual to grasp, much less attend to, and that there is no one to help (certainly not strained systems or institutions), soft networks stretch and expand, moving flexibly to allow gaps to be filled, to support and cushion various parts of the social structure, adapting to help tend human and civil needs. Soft communal networks overlap, forming layers like an epithelium, supporting living systems in multiple locations and ways.
In practice, soft networks suggest a form of solidarity that accommodates and responds to fragmentation. They depend on organic, individualized actions, each singularity in its place like a cell that is part of a larger body. Within such networks, each individual determines and constantly reassesses how they access accurate information and how they share information and act to support immediate civic needs.
Although they cultivate empathy, soft networks are also not based in nor on friendship nor are they merely personal since for many people right now, the “personal” means vulnerability. Instead, soft networks make tangible a joining together of points of determined strength, based on trust, mutual respect, and recognition of shared humanness and belonging. They begin with a commitment and connection to the honest self and extend to forming and reforming connections between self and others as a foundational line of defense for democracy.
Many people already maintain this kind of practice. And, after all, this is at least in part what the concept of “solidarity” means: that each one cares for the other, as well as for oneself. But the metaphor of a living, flexible system made up of active individual parts—a low-modulus soft human network, an expansive rhizomatous tissue of care—is one that offers a sustaining and adaptable working model at a time when fragmentation, helplessness, and isolation are rampant.
