You’ve probably seen the video making the rounds today of the “Peak AWFL” meltdown in a Minneapolis yoga studio.
You can see a bunch of obvious themes in this mega-cringe showdown, starting with the feminization thesis advanced by Helen Andrews and the problem of Cluster B politics that Christopher Rufo has described. But the moment couldn’t be any more thoroughly on the nose, because note what the controversy is: A private company took down an anti-ICE sign. The meltdown is about the display of a political slogan.
What’s happening here is the absolute dead center of a problem the dissident writer Václav Havel discussed in his famous long essay on “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel argued that an insistence on speaking truth is political dynamite against a system or regime that demands compliance.
In the third section of that essay — it starts on page 5, if you click on the link — he discusses a greengrocer who hangs a sign in the window of his shop. Havel writes that the grocer “does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses.” What he means by hanging up the sign, Havel says, is please leave me alone. He puts the sign in the window “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. … 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.”
But all of that please-leave-me-alone compliance, Havel says, is a trick. It leads us to the accident of seeing agreement everywhere. Everyone has that sign, so everyone must believe what it says. The act of going along to get along is a legitimizing act, a political surrender that hides disagreement. It’s a lie, and it has a cost.
Hellbound and Down 