"In its efforts to organize the greatest number of forces to 'overcome nature', to 'suppress its enemies', to promote 'further growth' or to 'defend gains already made', modern society has generated huge administrative, military and police structures. These were intended to serve society, its citizens and every individual, who was to be recognized as the source of their power which was merely delegated to them. In the beginning they did no doubt recognize this. But then these structures began to behave like everyone to whom power is delegated: they began to usurp it for themselves, to the detriment of those from whom it originally derived. Certainly, there are societies where such structures are subject to some kind of control, but in most countries they are not. They are no longer governed: they govern. Unlike earlier usurpers of power, these power structures have no face, no identity. They are invulnerable to blows and to words. Their power is perhaps less ostentatious, less openly declared, but it is omnipresent and constantly growing. Those who represent it may appear in public or remain in the background, but the important thing about them is that they can be removed and replaced at any time: generals commanding an army rocket division, presidents of multinational corporations, first secretaries of self-appointed parties or heads of the secret police.

"Watching them from time to time as they wave at us from our television screens, we may suspect that compared with the power these people wield, the power of the divine pharaohs and emperors was no more than a trivial game. Nevertheless, we persuade ourselves that this is how it ought to be, that they embody the direction we are taking; they are defending our interests, serving our needs, safeguarding our security, or progress, our affluence, or whatever flashy and mendacious labels we give to our own preposterousnes s. What we fail to realize is that they are no longer acting in our name. We cannot get rid of them. They recognize neither a deity above them nor people below them. They recognize only themselves, their apparatus, their organizations and their own laws of motion, their destructive proliferation. They control a technology that can transform the face of the earth, that provides them the means to rule it and the arms to destroy it.

"As we look on while the first two possibilities become a reality and foreces gather for the third, we continue to believe that they will never do it, because they would be acting against themselves.

"But every power structure that gets out of control, every murderous authority determined to abandon its humanity in order to continue growing, flourishing and swelling in a vain longing for absolute size and absolute license, for godlike perfection, is playing with suicide."

Ivan Klima, "The Powerful and the Powerless," Jan. 1980, in The Spirit of Prague and other essays (Granta, 1994), pp. 106-7.