On civic education, public authority, and the life nobody else gets to define
Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no Reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be Forgot.
– Traditional English rhyme
The scene that undoes viewers in V for Vendetta belongs to a woman writing a letter.
There are explosions, naturally. A masked man conducts Tchaikovsky from a rooftop, delivers speeches with an extravagant commitment to the letter V, and finds time between assassinations to prepare a rather good breakfast.
I can appreciate a man who understands that political conviction need not excuse a disappointing meal.
V is also for Valerie, a name that shares its Latin root valere with words like “valour,” meaning “to be strong.” In a film that runs for two hours and twelve minutes, Valerie gets but five minutes and one second, a scrap of toilet paper and a stub of a pencil.
The men have explosives and a television network.
As the heart of the whole bloody film, she gets further into me than any of them.
Today, November 5 seems a good time to consider why.
Guy Fawkes himself had the wrong idea. In 1605, he took part in a conspiracy to kill James I and blow up Parliament, hoping to establish Catholic rule. Religious persecution supplied the grievance; gunpowder supplied a catastrophically bad answer.
I remain in favour of keeping the people we want answers from available for questioning.
The original annual commemoration in the United Kingdom celebrated the plot’s failure and the survival of king and Parliament. Following the discovery and execution of the conspirators, British authority invited the population to remember how fortunate everyone had been that authority was still there. Popular culture subsequently gave the villain’s face a second career as a warning to government corruption.
One hopes somebody completed the appropriate change-of-use paperwork.
Twenty years on, Stephen Fry, who plays the character Gordon Deitrich, describes the anniversary with “a mixture of pride and shame”: pride in the filmmaking, shame at the continuing relevance of its warning about fascism.
Dystopias are among the few films one hopes will age badly.
The film’s Britain is a fascist dictatorship whose familiar promise of protection conceals the persecution, surveillance and violence through which the regime keeps itself in power. V interrupts its broadcasts with an alternative account. He also offers the sentence that has followed the film far beyond its fictional London:
People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.
There are several ways to make that sentence consequential while leaving all historical buildings still standing.
Lessons brought home
My upbringing has something to do with why I find the proposition somewhat unremarkable.
In Finland, history states that the enemy comes from the East.
In the United States, the greatest enemy is said to come from within.
The American civic inheritance I described in Customs to Declare contains a curious instruction for children: learn the rules, then admire the people who made an intolerable rule impossible to preserve.
We were repeatedly taught that public authority could be challenged, that rights had been fought for and that good people died for us to have them, and that a country could fail the standards it taught us to cherish.
Taking the lesson seriously could produce a rather inconvenient adult.
America has never lacked opportunities to examine the distance between its declared principles and its conduct. Its history includes people excluded from promises that sounded universal when somebody read them aloud in the abstract. But the promises also gave those people something to demand of the country. A principle could be used to ask a question of the person who had just finished congratulating everyone on possessing it.
Everyone Can Flourish makes a similarly ambitious promise. “Everyone” is an admirably comprehensive word. It even happens to include the person asking whether you meant it.
I, always a dedicated student, took my school lessons seriously.
On this side of the Atlantic, America almost always arrives as an appalling headline. Living between countries, I have also heard enough American accounts of Europe to know how efficiently the traffic runs in both directions. Each place can become a collection of alarming things happening to people whose ordinary lives have been edited out. The ocean is vast; yet the selection of news crossing it can be remarkably narrow.
This year’s American midterms fell two days before Bonfire Night. In the months leading up to them, Americans have been organising, demonstrating, registering voters, knocking on doors and helping one another use the machinery of an election. The No Kings movement’s autumn organising has combined protest with getting people to vote and preparing to defend the counting of those votes.
Those people belong in our understanding of America too. How much attention do we give their sustained work compared with the latest flippant remark from Donald Trump? An account of a country can become extraordinarily familiar with its president while barely introducing us to the people resisting him.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti became internationally known in January because federal agents killed them. Good was observing immigration enforcement. Pretti had been protesting and was helping another person when he was attacked. Their presence, and the presence of all protesters, mattered before their deaths became news. They were participating in the public life of their country, refusing to leave the exercise of state power unwitnessed. They should have come home. We can recognise the horror of what was done to them and still give too little attention to the civic commitment that brought them there.
That commitment belongs in the picture of America that Europeans receive, alongside the man whose administration they opposed.
More mundanely, Tuesday’s election depended on people who organised polling places, checked registrations, answered questions, helped neighbours get to the polls and counted ballots. Volunteers gave their evenings and weekends; voters made time in working days and waited their turn. Their contribution mattered without requiring them to risk their lives.
A government does not get to be the sole author of its country. The people challenging it are also making America, through the rights they exercise and the obligations they insist it honour. When our account of the country gives its president every speaking part, we grant him a peculiar victory: we let him define America even as we condemn what he is doing to it.
There is something wonderfully convenient about dissent against somebody else’s government. We can admire the courage, deplore the repression and remain on excellent terms with everyone at dinner.
Dissent travels rather well with subtitles. The local version may require someone you know to answer a question.
I have spent enough of this year being the local version to notice how quickly a civic virtue can become a personality problem. The lesson I took seriously in America did not come with instructions to stop applying it when I moved.
A practical examination
On 23 September, I reported the conduct of the Government of Åland to Finland’s Parliamentary Ombudsman. The complaint is registered under diary number EOAK/8021/2026.
I had asked for accurate recognition of my contribution to an international publication on human flourishing and clarity about the use of my work. A narrow copyright issue that could have easily been sorted out.
Instead, I was told to remove my work, stop contacting the publisher and lead author, and seek permission to link my name to my own writing or describe its history with the government. Officials refused to correct damaging claims contradicted by records and my lawyer’s response. Documents were and are withheld, relevant emails were said not to exist, and the formal decision needed to appeal was never provided despite my lawyer’s express written request when submitting the original inquiries.
The officials concerned handled objections to their own conduct. Their public accounts misrepresented the government’s actions and my role as an author. My complaint also asks whether procedures and legal costs were used to make me comply, how this relates to my earlier treatment as an employee, and who should have ensured independent review and corrected the officials’ conduct.
I have already published the correspondence. It is available for anyone who wishes to compare the instructions with the evidence supplied in response. The plot is more readily followed if one keeps the emails in chronological order.
This is also my recommendation to people writing them.
An administration’s interests, its account of events and its instructions to a person are all proper subjects for scrutiny. An official title adds responsibility to that encounter. It cannot reasonably be expected to settle every disagreement in advance.
Using an oversight mechanism also makes a distinction that gets lost surprisingly easily. The people presently exercising authority do not own the institutions through which they exercise it. Their account of the public interest is open to examination. Asking another public authority to examine their conduct is one way of taking the democratic arrangement seriously.
My education has thus acquired a practical component this year.
There have been costs. I have had to consider money, work, relationships, reputation and the future I want to build here the entire time. These are among the things that give an instruction weight before anybody establishes whether the instruction deserves to be obeyed.
Back to the film: Evey eventually reaches a point where fear can no longer obtain her timid cooperation. What interests me is that change in the authority fear possesses. We can understand the possible consequences of a refusal and still decide that compliance asks too much of us.
Any decent government should have to consider consequences too: whether its account withstands examination, whether its reasons can be defended, whether somebody outside its own hierarchy agrees with what it has done.
That is the sort of discomfort a democratic institution should be equipped to survive. It may even learn something.
We have invested considerable sums in the possibility.
But once I had made the complaint, another question remained:
How much of my life would have to stand beside it, continually explaining why it deserved to exist?
The last inch of us
Valerie is an actress. She is also a woman who notices another girl’s wrists, falls in love, leaves home, finds work and eventually makes a life with Ruth. Her first film matters to her because it is where they met. She is embarrassed that her only autobiography will be written on toilet paper. Even here, she has her humour, her preferences, her own sense of what makes a story worth telling.
The letter gives us a person before the regime can supply its category for her.
When she tells her parents that she is a lesbian, her father tells her to leave and never return. Her mother weeps and says nothing. Valerie wonders whether telling them the truth about herself was selfish. It is here that she first writes about integrity:
Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us. And within that inch, we are free…
Her integrity includes the truth of whom she loves. Other people’s refusal to accept that truth cannot make it shameful.
Later, the government acquires the power to destroy the home she makes with Ruth, separate them, imprison her and end her life. It also wants the authority to tell her what that life was worth.
Valerie refuses the second claim while suffering the consequences of the first.
I had roses and apologized to no one.
The roses belonged to a home, a relationship, three years she remembers as the best of her life. Their value does not expire because of what came for them afterwards. The place where Valerie dies cannot reach backwards and make loving Ruth a mistake.
Near the end of the letter, she returns to that last inch:
I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch. But one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile, and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us…
By now, we know something of what she is preserving. We have met the girl, the actress, the lover. We know how she notices the world, what she values, how she loves and what she refuses to surrender.
The letter is that last inch taking physical form. Valerie is still the author of her own life.
And as one final act, she offers the reader the unconditional love her own parents denied her.
I hope that – whoever you are – you escape this place. I hope that the world turns, and that things get better.
But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may not meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you: I love you. With all my heart. I love you.
She cannot know who will read her words. She will never see what becomes of them. Her reader owes her no allegiance, no particular achievement, no proof of deserving it.
It is worth noting that Valerie’s character has had real-life counterparts.
In Auschwitz, Zlatka Pitluk made a birthday booklet for fellow prisoner Fania Fainer. Eighteen other women added messages. They risked beating or death to celebrate her twentieth birthday. Fainer donated her booklet, now dubbed the “The Heart of Auschwitz,” to the Montreal Holocaust Museum. She died in 2025 at the age of 100.
In Terezín, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis taught imprisoned children to draw, giving them room for their memories, feelings and imaginations. Before her deportation to Auschwitz, she hid their drawings in two suitcases. She and most of her pupils were murdered; the drawings survived. Even there, another person was worth making something for.
I think, too, of Irma Sonnenberg Menkel’s account of caring for Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen. Writing in 1997, she remembered:
When she slipped into a coma, I took her in my arms.
Before Anne became a voice read around the world, she was a sick girl asking another prisoner for reassurance. Irma could not make her well. She could still hold her. The value of that act survives the terrible fact that it could not save her.
In the face of certain death, the last inch of Valerie still has room for someone else.
The letter is one of the most beautiful things ever written for the screen. Its unrepentant humanity is almost unbearable. Reduced to a category with no control over what will happen to her, she still insists on saying what her life means.
And she lets me ask a question I have only approached from the edges before:
How do we demand recognition from an institution without accepting its authority to decide what we are?
A world worth having
A government should recognise the people it serves without claiming the authority to define who they are.
Recognition has practical consequences. It means respecting rights, acknowledging contributions and taking people’s needs seriously. Public decisions can determine whether someone has somewhere to live, access to education or the opportunity to develop her abilities. Those responsibilities are substantial.
They give government a part in making a life possible, without making it the author of that life.
Valerie makes the boundary tangible. Her certainty about her love offers no compensation for its destruction. It preserves the truth that there was something there to destroy, something the regime’s description could never adequately name.
Both truths remain. The wrong requires an answer. The person remains someone whose loves, convictions, ambitions and possibilities exceed the purposes of the institution dealing with her. Her value exceeds the answer she receives.
A rather demanding account of freedom. In the end, getting rid of a tyrannical government still leaves the question of how people are going to live together. The film supplies rather more detail on the demolition than on the constitutional arrangements afterwards.
Fair enough. Constitutional arrangements are difficult to set to Tchaikovsky.
But this question matters. A government can fall without the habits that sustained it disappearing. People can oppose domination while retaining a remarkable appetite for deciding what somebody else needs.
V himself is difficult company for this argument. His commitment gives resistance its force, but his treatment of Evey reproduces the captivity, terror and deception he condemns in the regime. And horrifically, he actually believes the result justifies what he does to her.
The film gives her emergence from fear extraordinary force, but his certainty should trouble us. Someone who intends to liberate another person can still appoint himself the authority over what she must endure.
I would not recommend his mentoring programme.
Her subsequent freedom has to include the possibility of leaving him, although he has now fallen in love with her, while deciding what she will do next. And leave him she does.
The difficulty reaches beyond V. We have histories, rights, needs, loyalties and understandings of our own. Parents, teachers, employers and governments can sincerely want people to thrive while having very specific ideas about what thriving ought to look like. The pupil may eventually ask the teacher, the employer or the government to observe the principle she was taught. A democratic education should be able to survive that.
A person capable of thought, attachment, imagination and judgement will have purposes an institution did not assign. She may recognise a contradiction in its account. She may want a different future than what was hoped or planned.
She may contribute something generous and then decline the terms on which others propose to use it.
An institution sincerely interested in human agency has to make room for what happens when someone exercises it.
This can be especially awkward for an initiative devoted to human flourishing. The humans may flourish in directions the initiative’s leadership had not approved.
They may develop opinions about its management.
They may ask to see the supporting documents.
Encouraging someone to find her voice can produce the unforeseen consequence of having to listen to it.
Sometimes those lives will challenge our arrangements, which is uncomfortable. Sometimes they will need our assistance, which might also be costly.
She may disagree with us. She may leave. She may make a life we would never have chosen.
If she gets no answers, she may even write the UN.
In a flourishing world, there has to be room for that life.
Flourishing is resistance
When I say that flourishing is resistance, I mean something more demanding than becoming impressively good at enduring things.
Resistance cannot become the sole use to which a person puts herself. I want to keep the convictions that brought me to this point. I also want the freedom to follow a thought that has nothing to do with a dispute, to write something because it delights me, to discover that an afternoon contains no requirement to establish my position on anything.
There is a distinction between keeping a record and becoming its filing cabinet.
The fifth of November asks us to remember. There are acts worth recording, decisions worth examining and promises worth insisting upon. The American education I carried across the Atlantic has proved inconveniently durable on those subjects.
Apparently, some lessons survive being taken abroad.
But remembrance has other work as well. There was a life before the dispute. There is a person whose interests keep extending beyond it. The refusal to surrender that possibility belongs to what I mean by flourishing.
Valerie accounts for her flourishing through the life she recounts: what she notices, the work she loves, the love she gives and the home she makes. The most significant love is what she shows herself, recognising her intrinsic value regardless of the world around her.
Those particulars give substance to everything political language can otherwise leave abstract.
Freedom matters because there are people who want to do something with it.
Her letter carries that understanding into her relationship with its reader.
That kind of generosity, the kind borne towards those we will never meet, belongs at the centre of an account of human flourishing. We help sustain people whose lives will continue beyond our knowledge of them. Much of what makes those lives valuable will never become ours to witness, let alone direct.
It also gives resistance a purpose beyond defeating an enemy. A politics capable of bringing people into the streets must eventually make room for them to go home: to raise children, pursue an unlikely interest, fall in love, make something beautiful or have an afternoon of spectacularly little historical significance.
The possibility of such an afternoon is quite a substantial political achievement.
Hobbes’s bleak account of life without a common power includes the loss of arts, letters and the confidence to build for a future. Good governance makes room for those things, and for the apparently unimportant hours in which people can enjoy them. The ordinariness is kind of the point. A person should have time to simply live without continually having to defend the conditions that make living possible.
V gives resistance its spectacle.
Evey has choices to make, because the future belongs to her and other survivors.
With her last act, Valerie leaves a stranger something with which to face the darkness. Her words find V, a man whose methods she might never have approved of. She offers her love without knowing whose life it will enter or what he will make of it.
I keep returning to the women.
Valerie gives us something worth remembering: the world contains people we will never meet whose freedom, happiness and capacity to love are worth caring about.
We do not have to know their names to care what happens to them.
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