On Freedom

Snyder presents unpredictability as the second form of freedom, emerging from sovereignty and expressed when individuals act from values in ways that authorities and machines cannot forecast. He traces this idea through the work and life of Václav Havel and the Eastern European dissident milieu, then extends it to contemporary media systems and digital manipulation.

Snyder describes how Havel, a Czech poet and playwright who was imprisoned for his activism against the Soviet government of Czechoslovakia and later became the first president of the democratic Czech Republic, used his art to critique Czechoslovakia’s period of “normalization,” when ideology was hollowed out and conformity replaced belief. In Havel’s play Audience, a blacklisted writer employed at a brewery is pressed by his brewmaster, who collaborates with the secret police, to write surveillance reports on himself; he complies. The piece depicts a society in which people accept roles in a predictable machinery and slide from cynicism into nihilism. In 1978, after a clandestine mountaintop meeting with Polish dissidents, Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless, a book-length essay arguing that modern tyranny requires not sincere devotion but predictability, which channels life toward “the most probable states” (81).