In her new book, Monoculture – How One Story is Changing Everything , the 2011 George Orwell award winning author FS Michaels quotes Vaclav Havel on the pressures to conform in the monoculture of communist ideology in Czechoslovakia:
In a society grown rigid with ideology, Havel said, you come to accept that you live according to that society’s values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player. You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to show that you are doing it. You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done if you are to get along in life. If you fail to act as you are expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you’re above the rules, or assume you’ve dropped out of society. The society grown rigid with ideology gives you and everyone else the illusion that the way things are is the way things are meant to be; the story you hear is natural. It has been told and retold for years. Everyone tells it.
In truth, Havel said, that story is not natural; there is an enormous gap between its aims and the aims of life. Whereas life moves toward plurality and diversity and the fulfillment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity and discipline. The system, Havel said, “is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.” That world of appearances operates on a kind of automatic pilot, permeating and shaping the whole society. Though the world of appearances is partly stable, it’s also unstable because it’s built on appearances. Living within the world, you don’t have to believe in it, but you have to act as if you do to get along in life.
Sometimes the whole thing seems innocuous enough for you to shrug and say, What’s wrong with going along with the world of appearances anyway? You then accept the rules of the game, Havel said, become a player in the game, and so make the game possible in the first place.
Now, it turns out (surprise, surprise) all of the above can be applied to the dominant monoculture of today, which, as FS Michaels defines it, is the economic story that we have come to believe is the story of life itself. The story that being rational, efficient, productive, and profitable are the ultimate expressions of being in the world. This economic monoculture is changing (directly and indirectly) the way we think and act in terms of our work, our relationships with others and with the natural world, our community, our physical and spiritual health, our education, and our creativity. It is becoming the sole fabric with which we weave meaning into our lives, to the exclusion of any other possible meaning. But of course the problem is, as with the monocultures of the past, the story of economic values and assumptions isn’t the whole story of what it means to be human. It may be one story, but it isn’t the only story. It may be one part of one story, but it isn’t the whole story. By closing ourselves to everything else that makes life vibrant and diverse and worth living, by choosing only one meaning for human existence, we end up paying a heavy existential price. Just like you’ve always suspected.