reflections on truth, power and hope
How do we speak truth to power when power seems to shrug off truth with a dismissive grin?
In the winter, during a lupus flare Adam and I watched a series on my laptop. We bought The Hour on disc in a version that was English with French subtitles. It was made in 2011, a period drama about a (fictional) current affairs TV programme launched by BBC TV. It covers the Hungarian Revolution and Suez crisis and there is a great deal of political intrigue and a spy plot that gives it a personal edge. It had important things to say about racial tension in 50s London. And fascinating things to say about corruption in the government and senior police. Corruption that is played out in the lives of show girls abused by this system at a night club run by a man called Cilenti.
How does such a drama speak to those of us trying to live small lives well in a crazy, beautiful world? To those of us rightly seeking rest and solace so that we can go on being part of this world?
There’s a key moment at the end of the second season of The Hour, when Cilent beats Freddie, one of the main characters and an investigative journalist, almost to death. Freddie, knowing what is coming, recites a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln. (Historians are divided on whether the quote is actually traceable to Lincoln.)
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
Whoever first said this, it’s nineteenth century and prescient in an era in which billionaires, even trillionaires, control so much and poltical integrity is daily eroded as a public spectacle.
Freddie was someone clinging to an ethical journalism that assumed exposure would lead to accountability. But Cilenti meets truth not with shame but violence. The series ended on a cliffhanger but was heading towards a world where journalism was becoming more constrained, not more free. A world in which the personal cost of integrity was escalating and ‘doing the right thing’ would no longer guarantee safety.
In one sense the series tracks the end of innocence, not just for Freddie, but for the idea that institutions can be shamed into goodness. In our world today, we see this daily. It seems that power doesn’t merely test character but warps it. And we’re all too used to power protecting itself, concentrating wealth, secrecy, and force into its hands. And to truth becoming dangerous wherever it threatens this concentration.
Cilenti beating Freddie isn’t rage; it’s enforcement without fear of justice. For friends living in the US, it’s a chilling foreshadowing of ICE. For friends in the UK, it has overtones of the criminalisation of protest groups as terrorists.
In the 50s of this series, there’s a presumption that exposure and shame stop such behaviour, are the brakes on rampant power. But now the series feels painfully contemporary. We live in an era where the powerful are daily exposed and laugh in the face of it. Exposure and accountability are no longer the same thing.
Freddie nobly believes in an older moral economy: that bringing truth into the light weakens power. But power has adapted. It absorbs exposure, performs contrition if really needed, but more often mocks it. Power doesn’t hide but flaunts its immunity.
The only thing it fears is loss of power — not shame, not being known, not even being hated. It can make power feel unassailable, but Alchemical Wonderings is not a space for counsels of despair. This is a space for transformation.
History will teach us (yet again) that ‘unassailable’ isn’t the same as invulnerable. Power at scale alwaysbecomes brittle and hard to maintain. And power alwaysfears loss of compliance more than opposition. Non-participation, non-belief, refusal to perform legitimacy — these are quiet, cumulative forces. And if journalism’s role has changed, it has not vanished. Exposure still records and witnesses.
Power is vast but so is entropy.Highly centralised systems require huge energy to maintain. They don’t rest. They don’t stabilise. They defend, patch, spin, litigate, distract. That’s not strength. It’s permanent crisis management.
We are living in a complex of unsustainable systems — economically, ecologically, socially, psychologically. This too will pass, even if we have no idea how.
But we live and create now, this moment, this day. The judgement of history can be cold comfort. What of this month, this week?
There are always more questions that answers and certainties do us no favours. But perhaps ourtask isto decide what kinds of truth-telling, refusal, care, and attention are worth practising, whatever the state of the world. Integrity is not about who wins but about refusing to abandon our humanity.
In another challenging time, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, imprisoned for four years for writing a manifesto in support of an anti-Communist rock band, and who later became president of the Czech republic, said about hope
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Remarkably, in decoupling hope from a fixed outcome, Havel allows hope to thrive in the face of reality. Havel says that hope is not a strategy for winning. It’s a way of remaining human inside conditions that would prefer us to hollow out.
Freddie still believed exposure would work. Cilenti knew that power could survive exposure. Havel tells us to act truthfully anyway, because it keeps the soul alive. Hope is who we are. It’s how we stand, speak, refuse, care, create art and witness.
Hope is not naïve but post-illusion. It says we do not need the future to reassure us in order to choose how to live now. For Havel, the question of whether power is assailable or not is never the final measure. Because there is another scale against which power doesn’t succeed: smaller, slower, less visible. The scale of conscience, language, memory, relationship, love, keeping faith with humanity.
Hope is not only comfort but our ethic of living, a way of keeping our footing when the ground is unstable. The decision to resist with acts of care and rest, with acts of creativity and love, to live small lives well and to suck the marrow from life anyway (to partially quote Thoreau) is hard to measure and harder to monetise.
This is not withdrawal from the world, or abdication of our parts in it, but attention as defiance. And what flows from such attention is a withdrawal of our emotional and intellectual energy from systems that feed on despair and distraction.
Power thrives on scale, acceleration, distraction, consumption. Small lives well lived operate on specificity, slowness, embodied presence, delight. If power wants everything to become smaller, thinner, meaner, more fearful, then a tender, attentive, well-lived small life is resistance. We make meaning without needing permission from power.
It’s enough to live towards what really matters.