Emerging from Censorship

Coetzee talks about the paranoid phenomenon. When a man reacts to the world around him as though the air is filled with coded messages deriding him or plotting his destruction, he is called paranoid. For decades the South African state behaved in a paranoid fashion. Paranoia is the pathology par excellence of dictatorships. Among modern dictators Joseph Stalin was perhaps the most demonstrably and the most extremely paranoid. One of the features distinguishing modem dictatorships from earlier dictatorships is how widely and rapidly the modem dictator's paranoia, or the paranoia of a ruling clique, can be disseminated to infect the populace as a whole. In fact it has been a positive strategy of government among modern paranoid dictatorships to spread their paranoia. Stalin's Soviet Union is again the prime example: every citizen was encouraged to suspect every other citizen of being a spy or saboteur; the bonds of human sympathy and trust between people were broken down; and "Soviet society" became in fact just a name for tens of millions of individuals living on individual islands of mutual suspicion and tenor of one another.