“Everyone we encounter is facing an unceasing succession of choices in their own arrangements of unique circumstances, applying their own combinations of values. When people are sovereign together, they generate unpredictability. And as they do, they recognize this in one another, welcome it, and gain from it. When we apprehend others are "leib", we see them doing what we are doing: making choices in the zone between the world of things and the world of values. Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world - and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces that would rule us by predicting us - or by making us more predictable. Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers. Such unpredictability allows us to become free, together. The texture of the world of values enters our own world.” PhilosophyPoliticsFreedomAuthoritarianismHavel Book:On Freedom Source: On Freedom
“The function of the state and of its structures in such a society are limited only to that which cannot be performed by anyone else. [Quoting Valclad Havel]” UtopiaCivil SocietyHavel Book:A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Source: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster