In the literal sense, the West triumphed in the Cold War. Nevertheless, a kind of creeping sovietization has overtaken it as if in revenge. I don’t want to exaggerate or exaggerate much: We don’t yet fear the midnight knock on the door, we are still free to go where we like, and we are not obliged to spend much of our lives seeking everyday commodities of which there are perpetual shortages. On the contrary, abundance is so general that when we do not immediately find what we want, we feel a sense of grievance, as if our fundamental rights have been violated.
In what sense, then, are we being sovietized? I think the process is subtle and all the more insidious for that. I came to the conclusion when I traveled in what was then the Eastern Bloc that the ubiquitous propaganda was not intended to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate; for citizens (if that is the proper word for them under that system) had not merely to avoid contradicting it in public, but actually to agree with it in public. Therefore, from the point of view of the ruling power, the less true and more outrageously false the propaganda was, the better. For to force people to assent to propositions that are outrageously false, on pain of losing their livelihoods or worse, was to crush them morally and psychologically, and thus make them docile, easily manipulated, and complicit in their own enslavement.
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Increasingly in our daily lives, we find ourselves in analogous situations, especially if we have the misfortune to work for bureaucracies, whether governmental, quasi-governmental, supposedly independent, or commercial. We must not only keep silent about propositions that we find not only false but ridiculous but assent to them, to show…