Narratives concerning the marginalized have come to dominate American institutions and popular culture. The plight of a plethora of minorities is regularly alluded to, from Justice Jackson’s allusions to America’s “legacy of discrimination” in her dissent of SFFA v. Harvard to the numerous months dedicated to racial and sexual minorities. Narratives about America’s systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and other “isms” have become prefaces to the missions of leading cultural, civic, and political institutions. Vaclav Havel dared to ask in his day what Americans cannot do today: Why are the rich and powerful telling the country that the rich and powerful are responsible for the daily oppression of the ruled? His answer for the denizens of the former Soviet Union offers important lessons for those in America today who question why so many blindly regurgitate outright lies and ahistorical Manichean narratives about our country.

Havel’s most famous play, Vyrozumění, or The Memorandum, chronicles the struggles of Josef Gross at his job as a director in an unnamed government bureau. Gross receives a memo concerning an audit that has been typed in a constructed language called Ptydepe. Unable to translate Ptydepe, Gross questions his deputy Ballas as to why his memo is written in Ptydepe. Ballas, sensing an opportunity to accumulate more prestige and power, blackmails Gross into institutionalizing Ptydepe for use in the bureau. Then he takes Gross’ job. What follows is an odyssey through the bureau, in which Gross struggles to get his memo translated and regain his old job.

The Ptydepe language serves as the object of scorn in this play. Ptydepe is a cold, calculated, and strictly scientific language, with no abbreviations, slang, or any other messiness that comes with natural languages. Ptydepe is so inhumane and thus so illogical that neither Gross nor many of his underlings can make sense of it. Ptydepe is representative of the power of dominant narratives. It does not matter that Gross cannot read Ptydepe; it matters that he does not have the proper authorization to do so.

The triumph of bureaucratic authority over truth is unfortunately a familiar feature of American life too, especially in the university world. When Professor Bret Weinstein objected to the call for white people to voluntarily leave the campus of Evergreen State University for a Day of Absence, he was run out of town by a mob. He did not have the proper authorization to object. Weinstein’s challenge to Evergreen students, that “one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color,” was a challenge to the dominant narrative of America being a white supremacist nation. But once a false narrative has been enshrined within a petty bureaucratic culture, questioning the narrative or pointing out its absurdities is useless. Much like Gross, Weinstein was blackmailed into approving the action taken against him. When that was unsuccessful, the mob resorted to open oppression, much like Ballas did in seizing Gross’ job.

In The Memorandum, Havel highlights this same maddening power of false narrative by utilizing the stage, as Gross repeatedly circles his way around and around to multiple departments, symbolizing the “vicious, vicious circle!” that Gross and others who challenge the status quo encounter. In one conversation with the Ptydepist and Ptydepe Instructor, Gross is even further flabbergasted at Ptydepe when he learns that the term “wombat” translated into Ptydepe has 319 letters, which is why so few people in the bureau are skilled at translation.

As Gross’ frustration builds, the play has become so repetitive that many in the audience are left with a similar sense of tiredness at the repetitive nature of the play, the dull, unfeeling bureaucratic set, and the absurdity of Gross’ circling round and round the stage as he dashes from one department to the next. Havel maintains suspense, however, by having the staff watcher be an ever-present character in the play. The staff watcher’s job is self-explanatory; he is charged with spying on all the bureaucrats. His obvious job serves as a contradiction to the absurdities of Ptydepe and the bureaucrats whose roles and speeches are twisted, awkward, and repetitive. The staff watcher’s job is a microcosm of Gross’ predicament as well: his menacing presence indicates to the audience that everyone knows his job is to uphold Ptydepe as the official language, regardless of how ridiculous it is. No one would dare raise that issue. The staff watcher is the consequences of conformity personified. Gross ends his day out of his job and has failed to translate his memo.

Gross refuses to let Ptydepe define his existence, despite the overwhelming number of bureaucrats in the bureau who are set against him, having bought into Ptydepe. Gross does find a reluctant secretary named Maria who can translate his memo. However, Maria does not possess the proper permit to translate Gross’ memo, as his continued presence at work is considered to be damaging. Maria serves as the foil to Gross and the system of Ptydepe. Her translation of Gross’ memo is a direct repudiation of “the automatism” of the bureau. By forgoing this “blind automatism” or the willingness to live within Ptydepe’s byzantine lie, Maria refuses to allow the system to use her to perpetuate itself. Maria’s character transcends the atheistic and suffocating Communist system. For doing so, her job is terminated. Ironically, Maria’s translation of Gross’ memo inspires the other Ptydepe learners and translators to give up on the language, while Gross regains his job from Ballas. Gross immediately replaces Ptydepe with another constructed language, but the impact of Maria’s decision to shatter the bureau’s “world of appearances trying to pass for reality” forces Gross to eventually rule that all work will be conducted in the employee’s mother language. The play ends abruptly and rather humorously as the employees break for lunch.

The banality of the ending of The Memorandum is meant to point out two phenomena: the absurdity of the dilemma the audience just saw play out, as well as the simplicity of Maria’s decision to shatter the mythos of Ptydepe by translating Gross’ memo. In a play meant to show the suffocating effect of asinine narratives, one secretary’s decision caused the complete delegitimization of the bureau’s language and way of executing its functions. Gross’ dogged persistence in trying to translate his memo and please Ballas is contrasted with Maria’s willingness to buck the system that Gross pulls out all the stops to serve. Maria’s belief that “if one doesn’t give way, truth must always come out in the end” is a repudiation of Gross’ desperation to reclaim his own office from Ballas while protecting the very system that facilitates his abuse. Gross’ supposed bravery in seeking to translate his memo pales to Maria’s willingness to sacrifice her job in order to expose the stupidity of a system that Gross, at the end of the day, still supports.

When the rich and powerful today proclaim “marginalized” narratives of America’s supposed flaws, they do so because, like Gross, they must ensure that the cogs below them maintain their automatism within their system. If a member of this elite were to be like Maria, refusing to go along with their ridiculous declarations, they would be cast out. James Bennett, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times found that out the hard way when he defended Senator Cotton’s op-ed calling for the military to restore order in the wake of the George Floyd riots. It did not matter that Bennett fundamentally disagreed with Cotton’s views; he had defended his right to speak. As Havel shows, some narratives are simply too powerful to allow for dissent, regardless of the illogical nonsense upholding it. Havel understood that these elite’s narratives’ power derives from the willingness of the bulk of society to “subordinate self-preservation to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism that drives the system.”

Havel rightly saw the hilarity and darkness that this kind of conformity bred amongst the citizens of Soviet Czechoslovakia. With every citizen hiding their true selves and allowing weak-willed men like Ballas and Gross to perpetuate the system, there ultimately was no hope once the system was turned against Gross himself. The explicit ideological composition of these narratives is what Havel says is responsible for so many lies within the systems that these ideologies control.

For Havel, “government by bureaucracy is called popular government. … [T]he complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation.” The Memorandum’s spineless bureaucrats could easily be substituted with the gelatinous-backboned college presidents who tolerate calls for genocide from their students, or the numerous politicians who excoriated social media companies to censor experts who did not believe lockdowns would stop Covid-19. In an America controlled by people like Gross and Ballas, it is the underlings like Maria that have the power to refuse to perpetuate the system. The Memorandum serves as a blueprint and a warning to the Marias of America: if you refuse to yield the truth, eventually the system will collapse. The Czech Republic today is one of the leading irreligious countries in the world, where Marias are rare and adherence to atheistic narratives other than Communism, rule. Continuing to question, lampoon, and point out the perpetuation of these supposedly “marginalized” narratives, or American Ptydepe, by the powerful will relegate them to the dustbin of history.