The citizen has to put a slogan in his window, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don’t want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.
Whether the slogan is true or not is beside the point. The point is signaling compliance out of fear, not an honest discussion of the evidence, or persuasion, or any mechanism respecting the informed and open consent of the governed. In postings signs of affirmation of the regime, citizens have adapted to the conditions in which they live; but in doing so, they also help to create those conditions. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control; but at the same time, they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.
Citizens’ assistance to a lying and oppressive regime changes those who corrupt themselves. They may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and ultimately come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society. In other words, falsifying reality brings about more of that falsified reality.
Once people have compromised themselves, they are more likely to identify with their compromise, because it’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong. So instead, people double down. They heap onto their initial cowardice the additional cowardice of refusing to admit they could have been wrong. This also helps account for the viciousness with which people often treat dissenters. Dissenters are living proof that everyone does not have to comply, that it is possible to live in the truth. This shames those who have chosen temporary comfort over noble sacrifice.
Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments, themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a "secularized religion." Power relations are therefore best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear, and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified, and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful.
-- Vaclav Havel (summarized / paraphrased) 1978
