In the Czech context of the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor F. Flagg Taylor writes: “[Vaclav] Benda saw that the Communist regime either sought to infiltrate and co-opt independent social structures for its own purposes, or to de-legitimate and destroy them. It sought to maintain a populace of isolated individuals without any habits or desires for association.” In other words, as he put it, the Iron Curtain had not just descended between East and West, but between one individual and another, or even between an individual’s own body and his soul.
Benda recognized that any hopes for the regime’s fundamental reform or even moderation were futile. It was time to ignore the regime’s official structures and build new ones where human community could be rediscovered and human life could be lived decently.
Benda explained: “In concrete terms, this means taking over for the use of the parallel polis every space that the state has temporarily abandoned or which it has never occurred to it to occupy in the first place. It means winning over for the support of common aims ... everything alive in society and its culture in the broadest sense of the word. It means winning over anything that has managed somehow to survive the disfavor of the times (e.g., the Church) or that was able, despite unfavorable times, to come into being.”
The parallel polis is not, Benda emphasized, a ghetto or an underground; it is not a black-market system hiding in the shadows. As the word polis suggests, the purpose of these institutions was to eventually renew the wider society, not to retreat from it entirely. “The strategic aim of the parallel polis,” Benda wrote, “should be the growth, or the renewal, of civic and political culture—and along with it, an identical structuring of society, creating bonds of responsibility and fellow-feeling.”Benda acknowledged that every institution of the parallel polis was a David facing the Goliath of a massively powerful totalitarian state. Any one or another of these institutions could be crushed by the state machinery if the state specifically targeted it for liquidation.
Plan of Action
The parallel polis requires a deliberate strategy; it does not develop automatically. As Benda proposed in his own day, I am convinced it is time to build these new parallel institutions of civil society. We need to be thinking in 50-year increments. This means planting mustard seeds that may not fully germinate in our lifetimes. I suggest that today’s Parallel Polis should be grounded in three principles: sovereignty, solidarity, subsidiarity. I will conclude with five brief points to illustrate the application of these principles in our current moment. (I am simply going to state these points, since time does not allow me to argue for or explain each one.)First: Governments during COVID demanded we become disempowered and isolated. People globally ceded their sovereignty and abandoned social solidarity. By contrast, the new parallel institutions of civil society must return sovereignty to individuals, families, and communities and strengthen social solidarity.
Second: Markets, communications, and governing structures have become increasingly centralized at a national and global level, robbing individuals, families, and local communities of legitimate authority, privacy, and freedom. Thus, the new institutions must be grounded in technologies and models of decentralized communications, information sharing, authority, and markets of productivity and exchange.
Third: Individuals, families, and local communities especially have been robbed of their legitimate authority and targeted. To rectify this, the new institutions must support the principle of subsidiarity and empower practical efforts at the local level.
Fourth: Fear has been weaponized to coerce individuals, families, and communities to cede their sovereignty and even make them forget they once had it. To help individuals, families, and small communities reclaim their sovereignty—their ability to self-govern—we must help people overcome their fear and find their courage.
Fifth: With the rollout of new mechanisms of social surveillance and control—the biosecurity model of governance, biometric digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, surveillance capitalism, and so on—the temporal window to reclaim solidarity and regain sovereignty is closing fast. Therefore, the time to begin is now.