Vol. 4, Issue 17: Our Forgotten Future
Vaclav Havel, Meaning, and the Ongoing Postmodern Crisis
I was a history major in college which, for me, was fun.
It meant I got to read a lot and it meant I got to have strong opinions about things. And if you know me, you know that I love to read and I have a lot of strong opinions about things.*
*For instance, ketchup on hot dogs. No. Just … no. Crocs on adults. Again, no.
But one of the unexpected benefits of studying history is that it forces you to spend real time with people who understood the world before we did, people who lived through foundational changes, governmental and institutional collapses, revolutions, and rebirths. People whose warnings are often clearer in hindsight than they ever were in the moment.
One of those voices for me is Václav Havel. Havel’s is a name that, fifteen years after his death, feels increasingly absent from our memory. And that’s a mistake, because I don’t know that anyone saw our current moment with as clearly as he did.
Havel was a lot of things: a playwright, an essayist, a dissident who was imprisoned by a Communist regime that feared the power of truth told plainly*. Then, in one of history’s least predictable career trajectories, he became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic.
*The power of truth told plainly is feared by a lot of people because a lot of people don’t like telling it and even more don’t want to face it
Havel was a gentle guy, philosophical, as non-ideological as one can get, and had very little interest in power for himself. In spite of that, he became one of the most important political figures of the late 20th century and a symbol of the moral force that helped collapse authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.*
*And let’s just say he’s turning over in his grave at people like Viktor Orban in power
Today, outside Central Europe or certain academic circles, he’s largely forgotten. But on July 4, 1994, just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Havel delivered a lecture at Independence Hall in Philadelphia (published in the New York Times Op-Ed column under “The New Measure of Man” - subscription required) that reads now like prophecy. Liberal democracy was ascendant. Capitalism was triumphant. The future seemed both pre-destined and bright.
Havel instead saw danger.
He saw a tension between the modern age that he believed had already ended and something post-modern that we were stepping into blindly. And crucially (and very insightfully), he believed we were ill-equipped to confront it.
Havel’s point was that the world we inhabited had exhausted itself. The Enlightenment promised that reason, science, and progress would solve human problems, but had proven incomplete. Yes, modernity had created prosperity and, for many, freedom. But it had also created alienation, spiritual directionlessness, and a loss of meaning.
He described the world as a kind of “civilizational rubble,” a place where new meaning was “painfully being born.”
Years ago, those words felt powerful, if a bit melodramatic. Today, they feel diagnostic.
We live in a world where institutional trust has been eroded, narratives are totally fragmented, and every old certainty that we thought we knew whether political, social or economic feels like it’s lost its pull. We are connected to everything, all the time, and somehow less sure than ever what any of it means or is for.*
*Or in the words of my friend Franky: “Shit is the smartest it’s ever been and shit is still so stupid”
Havel wasn’t describing that moment. He was describing this one.
Havel warned that modern rationalism, while extraordinarily powerful, could only describe “the surface of things.” It could measure, predict, optimize, analyze. But it could not answer the questions of meaning that societies depend on to remain coherent.
Replace “rationalism” with “big data,” “algorithmic feeds,” or “AI,” and you have the present day.
We know more about the “what” than any generation in history. But the “why” feels increasingly out of reach.
This is where our friend Carl Jung again becomes weirdly useful. Jung believed that human beings require shared myths, symbols, and paradigms (what he called the collective unconscious) not in a fairytale sense but as emotional and psychological glue. Without shared narratives that tell us who we are, what matters, and how to live together, societies fracture.
And *gestures broadly*: can’t think of a better word than “fractured” to describe where we are right now*.
*Dumpster fire is also appropriate
Without shared meaning, people retreat into primal identities like political tribes, online factions, conspiracy movements, ethnic nationalism, etc. These aren’t just political phenomena; they are the desperate attempts of our developed human brains to force coherence onto a world that no longer offers it to us.
When nothing feels grounded, people cling to whatever feels firm. Even if it’s rage. Even if it’s false. Even if, sometimes especially if, it’s self-destructive.
This is the crisis Havel foresaw: not a crisis of systems, but a crisis of soul.
Related and relevant, Havel also posited that globalization had transformed only the surface of human life. We built global markets, global information networks, global supply chains, but without any corresponding global ethic, identity, or emotional foundation.
And so we ended up with contradictions that define our current moment:
We have a global economy but no global sense of responsibility.
A worldwide internet but completely separate information ecosystems in echo chambers.
Shared crises (climate change, pandemics, AI, ethnic cleansing) but utterly divergent moral compasses about how to confront them.
We can trade across borders instantly, but we can’t agree on what’s true no matter how basic the truth.
This kind of surface-level connectivity doesn’t unify the world; it actually intensifies cultural friction*. The more contact we have, the more conflict we feel, because the underlying frameworks that should help us interpret one another simply aren’t there.
*In many ways, the internet broadly has done so much to improve lives, but my hot take is that it’s a pretty strong societal net negative
We know of each other. We do not know about each other.
Havel believed that technical solutions like treaties, institutions and policies are necessary but insufficient. Without shared values, technical solutions fail or simply postpone the problem.
We see this in real time:
Climate agreements stall because nations protect short-term corporate interests.
Migration crises become political weapons instead of humanitarian priorities.
Democracies backslide because the rituals remain but the moral commitments fade.
The problem isn’t engineering. The problem is meaning.
Havel proposed that the values we need lie beneath ideology: humility, responsibility, human dignity, reverence for the world. Not partisan values. Human values.
He invoked ideas like the anthropic principle* or the Gaia hypothesis** not as scientific arguments but as attempts to articulate awe and those are reminders that we exist within something much larger than ourselves.
*the proposition that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing observers in the first place
**that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. Thanks to Wikipedia for this one
His point wasn’t that these frameworks were correct; it was that they were critical to our survival. Humans require a story about the whole picture. When we lose that story, everything else becomes noise.
So Havel arrived at a radical conclusion: the only real solution is self-transcendence.
That doesn’t mean abandoning identity or dissolving individuality. It means seeing ourselves as part of something larger: our community, our planet, our fragile shared future. It means holding our identities lightly, not wielding them as weapons.
Jung would agree. Individuation, in his sense, is not isolation but integration. It is becoming your full self precisely so you can connect to others without fear.
Self-transcendence is not a spiritual luxury. It is a civic necessity.
Because in an interconnected world, ego is a recipe for conflict. And tribalism is a recipe for collapse. We either learn to rise above ourselves, or we will continue pulling each other down.
This is why Havel matters now, maybe more than ever.
He endured oppression, imprisonment, and surveillance. He found moral clarity in the darkest conditions. And when history unexpectedly handed him power, he led with humility and inclusiveness rather than victory laps and a “mandate”. He governed as someone who believed politics was fundamentally a moral act.
We don’t talk about Havel much anymore, but maybe we should.
Because the world he warned us about is the one we’re living in. It’s a world of fragmentation, alienation, and meaninglessness. And the world he hoped we might build, a world rooted in dignity, humility, shared values, and a sense of the sacred, is still possible.
But not inevitable.
To get there, we have to do something profoundly simple and extraordinarily difficult: recover a sense of meaning, not just for ourselves but for the whole we share.
We have to remember, as Havel wrote, “the miracle of being.”
And we have to embrace it, but also take responsibility for it.
OK, folks, here’s where we’re at:
We’ve got Thanksgiving this week here in the U.S. and we’re all going to take some time to recharge these batteries and focus on ending the year right.
I’ve got one or maybe two more of these in me before I call it for the year.
I’ll also be in NYC for some holiday parties and for the winter break, so let’s maybe get together and say hi to one another. If you’re interested, you know where to find me.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, friends.