When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he was not offering a manifesto in any conventional political sense. Nor was he outlining a program for opposition or regime change.

Instead, he set out to analyse a distinctive form of domination that did not rely primarily on terror, spectacle or charismatic authority, but on routine compliance and the internalisation of untruth.

His central claim was disarmingly simple.

Systems of coercive power endure not only because of police power or elite control, but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to be false. They live, as Havel put it, “within a lie”.

His most famous example was of the greengrocer who displays the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” – not to express revolutionary zeal but to signal conformity. The sign communicates obedience and a willingness to perform the expected ritual – thus helping to sustain a system whose strength lies in habituation. What matters is not belief, but participation. The slogan functions less as political content than as a social password, marking the bearer as safe and nonthreatening.

Havel’s originality lay in shifting attention away from rulers and institutions towards everyday behaviour. Tyranny, in his account, is not only upheld by party elites or security services, but by countless small acts of acquiescence that create what he described as a “post-totalitarian” order.

Such systems normalise untruth.

Havel’s essay, written nearly 50 years ago, speaks with striking force to the present moment. Across a range of democracies, leaders now display increasingly authoritarian reflexes, while public life is sustained by ritualised language masking the erosion of norms and constrains.

Addressing the World Economic Forum last month, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney invoked Havel’s essay, recalling his example of the greengrocer and his sign.

Carney suggested a contemporary “life within a lie” now operates at the level of the international system, where states perform commitment to rules, reciprocity and shared values as those principles are selectively applied or quietly abandoned. The danger lies less in open rule-breaking than in the collective pretence that the system still functions as........

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