Robert E. Lighthizer
At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January, dozens of senior officials from around the world sat alongside multinational CEOs, fresh off their private jets, and applauded Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for what they saw as speaking truth to power. Carney gave an address inspired by a 1978 essay by Vaclav Havel, who was then a Czech poet and Soviet dissident and later served as his country’s first president in the postcommunist era. The essay, titled “The Power of the Powerless,” sought to explain how the communist system survived.
In it, Havel imagined a greengrocer who, like all the shopkeepers around him, places a sign in his window that reads “Workers of the World, Unite!”—even though none of them believe in the communist system. Havel called this “living within a lie” and argued that the Soviet dystopia could come to an end when that archetypal shopkeeper decided he could no longer play along and took the sign down.
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