A tip of the PSACOT hat to Stephen Gordon’s Substack CanadianSnowmanSays.

Gordon is quoting Canadian PM Mark Carney (text and video), who is in turn quoting Václav Havel from 1978. Havel later become president of Czechoslovakia. He wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. It asked a simple question: How did the Communist system persist?

Carney explained Havel’s answer:

“A greengrocer places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.”

Havel called this “living within the lie.” The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. Its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

Then came Carney’s pivot—the line that would define his entire address:

“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”