The Greengrocer’s Window
American cultural institutions are learning what Václav Havel understood in Prague: the most effective censorship is the kind you perform on yourself.
In 1978, a Czech playwright who had been banned from having his work performed sat in his apartment and wrote an essay about a greengrocer. The greengrocer places a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He barely reads it. He puts it there because everyone puts one there, because not putting it there would invite questions, inspections, and trouble. The sign becomes the price of being left alone.
Václav Havel wrote “The Power of the Powerless“ in 1978. It famously uses the “greengrocer” metaphor to describe how individuals in post-totalitarian systems participate in “living within a lie” by displaying slogans they don’t believe in to avoid trouble.
Václav Havel called this “living within a lie.” He did not mean dramatic falsehoods. He meant something quieter: the daily, ambient compliance that makes an authoritarian system function without needing to use force on most of its citizens most of the time. The greengrocer is not a collaborator. He is simply a man who wants to sell onions in peace. And that, Havel argued, is exactly what makes him indispensable to the machinery.
The Salsa Show
Consider the National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL) who paused a planned 2025 exhibition on Latino civil rights and youth movements following political pressure. It is being replaced by “¡Puro Ritmo! The Musical Journey of Salsa,” scheduled for April 2026.
The museum’s parent institution is undergoing an unprecedented White House review, ordered by executive decree to purge what the administration calls “improper ideology” from the nation’s largest museum complex. Eight museums have been directed to submit exhibition content, curatorial guidelines, staff credentials, and future programming plans for political vetting.
Replacing a civil rights exhibit (focused on struggle, systemic inequality, and activism) with a salsa exhibit (focused on music and cultural celebration) represents a pivot toward “unifying” content. Critics argue this is a form of pre-emptive compliance, where institutions self-censor to ensure survival and funding.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III was ordered to submit thousands of documents, including wall texts and curatorial guidelines, for White House review. The administration threatened to withhold the institution’s $1 billion budget if it did not comply. His 2026 budget justification letter to Congress, once a three-page vision statement invoking diversity and climate research, shrank to a single page focused on the semiquincentennial and facility upgrades.
The painter Amy Sherald pulled her solo exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery after learning the museum was considering removing one of her works. Other museums have quietly followed. Exhibitions have been cancelled. Language has been adjusted. A Stanford art historian told NPR the atmosphere reminded him of McCarthyism.
The Architecture of Compliance
The pattern extends well beyond the Smithsonian’s walls. In May 2025, the administration proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts entirely. Within hours, hundreds of arts organizations received emails terminating their grants. In March 2025, an executive order was signed to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. The administration launched a comprehensive review of eight museums to ensure alignment with “American exceptionalism.”
Over half of open NEA awards were cancelled. Senior directors in dance, theater, folk arts, and design resigned. A House subcommittee subsequently proposed slashing the surviving NEA budget by thirty-five percent. The Artistic Freedom Initiative, documenting the fallout, has counted fifty-eight laws and policies restricting artistic freedom passed or implemented in a single year, more than $250 million in funding cuts to cultural institutions, and nearly 7,000 book titles banned in public schools.
These are significant numbers. But the numbers are the visible architecture. Havel’s insight was about the invisible architecture: the way institutional pressure produces compliance without requiring direct orders. A theater company in Minneapolis cancelled a production because its plot too closely mirrored traumatic current events. A snow sculpture inscribed with “ICE OUT MN” was defaced and disqualified from a state competition. An art adviser at Sotheby’s observed, publicly, that collectors were retreating from work that “makes a statement” in favor of art that is simply beautiful. The market, too, was self-censoring.
Living in Truth
Havel spent five years in prison for his writing. He was a reluctant political figure who became, almost by accident, the moral center of a dissident movement. He did not set out to lead anything. He was a playwright who liked beer and found bureaucratic absurdity genuinely funny. What radicalized him was the recognition that the system’s real power lay in its ability to make the lie ordinary. To make compliance feel like common sense.
His counter-proposal, which he called “living in truth,” was deceptively modest. It meant simply refusing to participate in the performance. The greengrocer takes down the sign. A brewer speaks honestly at a union meeting. A playwright stages a banned play in a living room. None of these acts threatened the state directly. All of them threatened the state’s most valuable resource: the presumption that everyone agreed. Havel understood that authoritarian systems depend less on true believers than on the vast, quiet middle that goes along to get along. The system doesn’t need enthusiasm. It needs silence.
The Reluctant Threshold
This is where Havel’s greengrocer meets the psychology described by Camus, Zimbardo, and the bystander researchers: the ordinary person’s journey from acquiescence to refusal. The threshold is almost never ideological. It is personal. It arrives when the cost of continued compliance begins to feel heavier than the cost of acting. For Sherald, the threshold was a single painting. For the snow sculptor in St. Paul, it was a word carved in ice.
The question Havel poses to the present moment is uncomfortable precisely because it does not involve grand heroism. It involves the small, daily decisions made by curators, grant writers, university administrators, theater directors, and museum boards. Do you adjust the exhibition language before the review letter arrives? Do you steer the grant application toward semiquincentennial themes because the funding is conditional? Do you choose the salsa show? Each accommodation, taken alone, feels reasonable. Taken together, they constitute exactly the landscape Havel described: a society performing its own compliance, so the state rarely needs to enforce it.
The Sign in the Window
The coalition statement released by more than 150 cultural institutions last August was titled “Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage.” It is a fine title. But Havel would have noted that collective courage is precisely the thing a system of individualized compliance is designed to prevent. The greengrocer does not know whether his neighbors also despise the sign. He only knows the cost of removing his own.
What Havel’s life demonstrates, and what makes it relevant to a section called Reasonable Revolutionaries, is that the first person to take down the sign rarely does so out of confidence. They do so out of a threshold crossed, a limit reached, an accumulation of small surrenders that becomes, on an ordinary Tuesday, intolerable. The act itself is modest. Its consequences are not. Because in a system sustained by the fiction of universal agreement, one honest gesture is an existential threat.
American cultural life in 2026 is full of “greengrocer’s signs.” The question is not whether someone will take one down. The question is whether that person is, perhaps, you.