Above the Parapet

Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas - Better to die on your feet than live on your knees

Mark Carney, the Canadia Prime Minister, made an interesting and well-publicised speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

His theme was on the importance of being open and honest about widely accepted beliefs we all know to be at least “partially false”. He urged middle-nations to call out the cosy view of the “rules-based international order” which is routinely abused by the powerful.

And a strong message that he conveyed was about honesty and abandoning pretence.

To illustrate his point about the importance of taking a stand and abandoning pretence he used the example of the greengrocer, living in an authoritarian state.

The greengrocer habitually puts a sign “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window each day even though he doesn’t believe the slogan but understands it is necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime and ensure he stays out of trouble.

One morning he decides he will no longer put out the sign because it advertises his humiliation and submission. His seemingly trivial action enables him to live more honestly even if he risks official penalties.

This parable was taken from an influential 1978 essay by the Czech playwright Václav Havel titled “The Power of the Powerless”.

Havel, who became President of his country in 1989 after the Soviet-backed, communist government collapsed, argued that private individuals can help overturn repressive systems simply by refusing to participate in expected rituals of obedience, no matter how minor.

And random acts of resistance like the greengrocer’s can give courage to others similarly tired of enforced conformity in totalitarian states — or in liberal democracies.

The greengrocer lived in an authoritarian state. The consequences of dissent were obvious. But taking a stand was important, as much to live with one’s own conscience as to demonstrate resistance.

In our society we lack open authoritarianism but it is there nevertheless. The conformity of the mass, the orthodox view imposes its own tyranny. And Havel would recognize it.

The social script here is less about ideological proclamation and more about performed consensus: enthusiastic affirmations of particular framings of Treaty partnership, climate virtue, wellbeing economics, or whatever the current orthodoxy demands. The substance matters less than the performance.

Professionals, academics, journalists and public figures learn quickly which views require careful qualification and which can be stated plainly. The greengrocer’s sign becomes a land acknowledgement delivered without conviction, or a formulaic diversity statement attached to a funding application, or the careful social media self-censorship of anyone in a public-facing role.

The content is less important than the ritual function — it announces I am safe, I belong, I conform, I will not cause disruption.

What Havel saw so clearly is that totalitarian systems don’t primarily run on violence — they run on the complicity of the population. Each person who goes along with the ritual reinforces the illusion that the ritual reflects genuine consensus. Each greengrocer who puts up the sign makes it harder for the next one to refuse.

New Zealand’s version of this operates through social rather than state coercion, which in some ways makes it harder to name and resist. The mechanisms include professional risk — academics, doctors, lawyers and journalists who dissent from consensus positions on certain topics face reputational damage, complaints processes, or exclusion from institutional spaces.

They also include the particular New Zealand cultural trait sometimes called the “tall poppy” syndrome combined with an ethic of communal harmony that can pathologise robust disagreement as aggression or bad faith.

The country is small and the networks are tight; the social cost of being known as a dissenter is higher in a place where everyone knows everyone.

The result is a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship that Havel would recognise immediately. People do not need to be explicitly punished very often because they have already internalised the boundaries. The chilling effect does the work that overt coercion would otherwise have to do.

The New Zealand consensus is not a single monolithic ideology but a cluster of positions that have achieved a kind of sacral status — meaning they can be referenced but not examined, supported but not criticised without triggering accusations of bad faith or prejudice.

Some of the most charged include the application of Treaty principles across virtually all public policy, certain framings within debates about Māori sovereignty and co-governance, consensus around specific approaches to climate and housing policy, and more recently, questions that surfaced sharply during the COVID period around public health mandates and institutional authority.

In each of these areas, what Havel would notice is not necessarily that the underlying positions are wrong — some may be well-grounded — but that they have been removed from the space of legitimate debate. The sign in the window has been hung. To question them is to be located, socially and professionally, as the kind of person who questions them, which is itself a disqualifying mark.

Havel’s prescription is deceptively simple and genuinely demanding: live in truth. This does not mean launching political movements or writing manifestos. It means refusing to perform agreement you do not feel. It means saying plainly, in your own sphere, what you actually think.

The greengrocer who refuses to put up the sign does something that seems trivially small but is in fact a profound disruption — he breaks the illusion of consensus, and that rupture, once made, cannot be completely repaired.

In a New Zealand context this looks like the scientist who publishes findings that complicate the preferred narrative, even knowing it will generate institutional discomfort.

It looks like the journalist who covers a story the consensus would prefer left alone.

It looks like the professional who declines to sign the ritual statement and explains why calmly and without apology.

It looks like the historian who prefers to deal in objective facts rather than subjective “stories” and won’t bow to a critical theory neo-Marxist dialectic.

It looks like the council member who won’t participate in a prayer (disguised as a karakia) before a meeting because of its religious significance.

It looks like your author who will not use Aotearoa for New Zealand or insert te reo words into a narrative written in English.

It looks like the ordinary person who says at a dinner table, “I don’t think that’s quite right,” and is willing to sit with the social discomfort that follows.

What Havel emphasises is that this is not heroism in any dramatic sense — it is simply the refusal to participate in the agreed-upon falseness. And its power is precisely that it is available to anyone. You do not need a platform or an institution or a movement. You need only the willingness to say what you see.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to note where the comparison strains. Havel was writing about a system backed by secret police, imprisonment, and the constant threat of violence.

New Zealand’s pressures are real but they are categorically different — losing a grant or being criticised on social media is not the same as losing your freedom or your livelihood entirely. The dissenter in New Zealand is uncomfortable, not imprisoned. Overstating the comparison would itself be a kind of bad faith.

But Havel’s insight survives even this qualification, because his deeper point was never about the severity of the coercion. It was about the mechanism — the way that ordinary people, through small daily acts of compliance and self-censorship, become the unwitting administrators of a system that constrains truth.

That mechanism operates across very different political contexts, including democratic and relatively free ones. What matters is whether the culture makes it genuinely possible to say uncomfortable things, or whether the social costs of doing so are high enough that most people, most of the time, simply do not.

By that measure, New Zealand — like most contemporary liberal democracies — has room to do better. And the path forward, as Havel would have it, runs through the same place it always has: individual people choosing, in their own small spheres, to stop performing narratives they do not hold. To refuse to conform to a set of beliefs to which they do not nor will they subscribe.