Václav Havel on Government Ethics

To commemorate the death of Václav Havel, here are some
quotations from his work that are relevant to government ethics:<br>
<br>
"The prerequisite for everything political is moral. Politics really
should be ethics put into practice."<br>
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“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and
visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time,
gain in political significance.” <br>
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Living in the Truth:  "A person who has been seduced by the
consumer value system [with] no sense of responsibility for anything
higher than his or her own personal survival, is a demoralized
person.  The system depends on this demoralization. ... Living
in the truth ... is ... an attempt to regain control over one's own
sense of responsibility.  In other words, it is clearly a moral
act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally
because it is not self-serving ... the representatives of power
invariably come to terms with those who live in the truth by
persistently ascribing utilitarian motivations to them – a lust for
power or fame or wealth – and thus they try, at least, to implicate
them in their own world, the world of general demoralization."<br>
<br>

On government corruption:  "Typical collaborators, men, that
is, with a special gift for persuading themselves at every turn that
their dirty work is a way of rescuing something, or, at least, of
preventing still worse men from stepping into their shoes."<br>
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"Genuine politics . . . – the only politics I am willing to devote
myself to – is simply a matter of serving those around us: 
serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its
deepest roots are moral because it is responsibility expressed
through action, to and for the whole."<br>
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On intimidation: "[I]t is not the absolute value of a threat which
counts, so much as its relative value.  It is not so much what
a man objectively loses, as the subjective importance it has for him
on the plane on which he lives, with its own scale of values."<br>
<br>
“The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the
circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is
said.” <br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
<br>
203-859-1959