Laudator Temporis Acti

Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 277-278:

The Stasi have been dismantled yet the apparatus of continuous surveillance looks familiar to us. The Wall fell, but we haven't stopped living in a world that punishes us when we believe other than we are meant to believe, no matter how liberal what we are meant to believe appears. Say the wrong thing about race at a British university, for example, and you can kiss goodbye to your career. If you happen to be the ruined academic, you will think, with reason, you are living in a police state. Someone has been telling lies about you. For it is a lie that some things are unsayable.

That we can fear the monolithic state in one context and be its agents in another is one of those paradoxes to which human nature is subject. Universities are bulwarks against tyranny but at the same time practise ruthless tyrannies of their own. Imaginatively, though — regardless of our being spies and informers in reality — we are all so many inmates of the Gulags, each our own lonely warrior of individualism standing up against authority and those who do its dirty work. Thus we slip at once into the person of Joseph K. about whom someone has lied and who is arrested one fine morning for an unnamed crime he has not committed.