Vaclav Havel on man after the loss of God
Man is now uncoordinated
Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Czechoslovak dissident movement and the first president of the country after the Communist government fell, had been a leading playwright by preference and calling. His thoughts appear in “It always makes sense to tell the truth,” an interview that first appeared in samizdat 1975 and was later published in Open Letters.
“All my plays so far have essentially been about a single theme: the crisis of human identity,” he told the interviewer, who asked him to explain.
I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate anything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different, relative coodinates.
And when this happened, man began to lose his inner identity, that is, his identity with himself. Along with it, of course, he lost a lot of other things, too, including a sense of his own continuity, a hierarchy of experience and values, and so on.
It’s as if we were playing for a number of different teams at once, each with different uniforms, and as though — and this is the main thing — we didn’t know which one we ultimately belonged to, which of those teams was really ours.