In my regular ramblings through downtown Santa Cruz, I often pause to peruse the bargain carts outside Bad Animal Books. Not that I need another book, but sometimes serendipity presents an unexpected gift of required or desired reading — like the recently discovered selected writings of Václav Havel, “Open Letters,” for which I cashed in $2 trade credit for the sake of some helpful perspective on how to live under an authoritarian regime.

Havel (1936-2011) was of course the Czech playwright and political dissident whose writings during the last years of Soviet-era communism made him a leader of his country’s political opposition and earned him time in prison before eventually vaulting him to the presidency in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union. “Open Letters” collects 400 pages of his essays, speeches and interviews between 1965 and 1990 — not exactly light reading, but surprisingly engaging thanks to his lucid style, reflective tone and humanistic vision.

There is little resemblance between the late-Soviet dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the early-Trumpian autocracy now taking shape in the United States. Though Vladimir Putin has personalized his intention to make Russia great again by conquering now-independent countries like Ukraine, what Havel calls “the post-totalitarian system” of the pre-Gorbachev years is a faceless bureaucracy of apparatchiks enforcing a sclerotic ideology on a population grimly conforming as a survival strategy. Dissent was not tolerated and fear turned otherwise ordinary citizens into amoral informants on their nonconforming neighbors, who were followed, bugged, harassed and sometimes arrested by the secret police.

Havel describes the soul-killing violation of people’s humanity in such conditions and poses an alternative that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with personal integrity — with what he calls “living within the truth” of one’s own experience — honest, ethical relations with others, free-ranging thought and individual creative expression. His own plays were absurdist satires that soon enough were banned in his home country, so he adapted by becoming an author of samizdat essays and declarations of independence from a rotten, corrupt and brain-dead political order.

I found Havel’s writings to be more philosophical than strictly political in his refusal to proclaim any ideology or to propose utopian solutions or to advocate for any party or program or to offer definitive answers to questions requiring a nuanced response. Instead, he calls for acknowledgment of ambiguity and refusal to accept simpleminded orthodoxies. In this acceptance of uncertainty, he reminded me of the existentialism of Albert Camus and the Taoism of Lao-tzu.

Surely when he became president of his country (an office he was elected and reelected to for more than a decade, first in Czechoslovakia, then in the Czech Republic) he had to adopt a more pragmatic and decisive approach to policy, but his modest, self-effacing attitude was the opposite of the “I alone can fix it” school of maximum-leader cult-of-personality governance. As the best democracy money can buy, the American system has long been deeply flawed, but Trump’s shamelessness in flouting every norm and law of the democratic tradition — as in mobilizing the military to suppress dissent — is off the charts of any previous administration.

That’s why it’s so hard to get our bearings in the dizzying onslaught of illegal executive orders and punitive actions against the president’s perceived enemies, from nonviolent demonstrators to museum curators, foreign students to federal judges, liberal media to nonwhite workers, high-end lawyers to hungry children. Havel’s thoughts on surviving dictatorship are anchored in bedrock principles that apply even in the most oppressive situations. “Inner emancipation,” fearlessness, living one’s truth, rejecting bad faith, honoring our humanity — these are reliable standards of moral conduct in the best or worst of times.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.