In recent days, I have been returning to a simple but increasingly neglected idea: that a person’s core sense of identity should grow primarily out of the life he actually lives. His work, his relationships, his hobbies, perhaps his faith—and, naturally, the language he speaks. Politics, by contrast, ought to remain something peripheral. This should be reflected not only in how central it is to our self-understanding, but also in how much time, emotional energy, and moral weight we assign to it.
When identity, life purpose, and self-respect become overly bound up with politics, the result is unhealthy—not only psychologically, but politically as well. It encourages pathologies that deform public life, above all radicalization, which makes rational problem-solving nearly impossible.
This is easier said than done. Politics today comes wrapped in a powerful propaganda of grandeur. We are constantly presented with cinematic images—Hollywood visions of “the people” rising heroically against tyrants. Curiously, both sides of nearly every conflict imagine themselves in precisely this role. Against such imagery, ordinary life appears dull, even contemptible.
Some people manage to ground their identity in a craft, a calling, or a faith. A motorcyclist can be a motorcyclist. A believer can be a believer. A master of his trade can take pride in excellence. But for many, this is not so easy. Millions work in offices or factories, in jobs that appear—at least to themselves—devoid of anything noble or elevated.
Here we encounter something that has quietly disappeared, and whose absence is proving impossible to replace: public admiration for ordinary work. Not admiration for income, status, or “success,” but for the daily heroism of producing something real.
Where are the statues of miners, farmers, and factory workers? Where are the statues of shop clerks and saleswomen?
It may be tempting to dismiss this as a relic of the communist era, but that would be a mistake. A substantial share of the surviving public sculptures that honor labor date back to the interwar Czechoslovak Republic—the era of Masaryk, not Marx.
Nor can this loss be blamed solely on the neoliberal turn of the 1990s. That period may have delivered the final blow, but the erosion of respect for work had begun earlier. By then, the meaning had already begun to drain away.
This points to something we must repair. We need to restore a sense of heroism to physical work that produces tangible results. Economic trends are, interestingly, moving in this direction: skilled tradesmen increasingly earn more than managers—let alone academics. Reality has a way of asserting itself.
In the Czech public sphere, almost the only figure who consistently fills the space with respect for physical labor is the “concrete king,” Tomáš Březina. His podcasts—especially those devoted to construction and agriculture—are worth attention precisely because they treat work not as a means of self-branding, but as a source of dignity.
A healthy society cannot survive on political exaltation alone. It needs quieter virtues. It needs pride in work that does not pretend to be revolutionary, but is real.