Five societies, one question
When honesty is dangerous, ordinary people learn to say one thing in public and keep another in private. This page looks at five places where that happened, what it cost, and what it says about conscience, belonging and courage.
The economist Timur Kuran calls it preference falsification: misrepresenting what you want or believe because of perceived social pressure. In Private Truths, Public Lies (Harvard University Press, 1995) he argues that it is everywhere, and that its consequences are large. It distorts collective decisions, warps what people know, preserves widely disliked arrangements, and hides political possibilities from the people living inside them.
The Czech playwright Václav Havel gave the idea its most famous picture in his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless. A manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop puts a slogan among the onions and carrots. He is not enthusiastic about the unity of workers. He puts it there because everyone does, and because refusing would bring trouble.
“I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
Havel's harder point is that the greengrocer is not only a victim. By accepting a life inside the lie, he writes, individuals “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” The sign is a small act, and the system is made of small acts.
Five cases follow, taken backward from the most recent. Each asks what a public gesture means when refusing it is dangerous. The chart shows how long the pressure lasted in each. It ran from a dozen years to more than three centuries.
Bars mark the periods discussed on this page, not the full history of each state. The Soviet bar starts with the Brezhnev era.
Soviet bloc · c. 1964–1989
The terror of the Stalin years had eased, but the demand for agreement had not. David Satter, writing for the Hoover Institution, describes a state that presented itself as a democracy whose only difference from the West was the population's extraordinary unanimity. It had a parliament, unions, courts and a press to match.
Punishment for stepping out of line came in grades. Some dissidents lost jobs or places at university. Some went to labor camps. Some were confined to psychiatric hospitals under the diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia,” developed in the 1960s by the psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky and his colleagues. It let a doctor diagnose schizophrenia when no psychotic symptoms were present, on the theory that they would appear later. Patients held under it were given heavy doses of antipsychotic drugs, and some received insulin comas or electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia.
The term itself is older. A Soviet psychiatrist used it in the 1930s for a slowly developing form of childhood illness, and the political use came later. Most researchers of the subject believe the Communist Party and the KGB wanted such a tool.
Havel was writing about Czechoslovakia, not the Soviet Union, and he called the system post-totalitarian. Mass terror had given way to habit and the fear of small penalties. In his account the greengrocer hides his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unity of the world's workers.
How many people privately disbelieved? The split between believer and cynic may be too neat. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak argues in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton University Press, 2005) that many Soviet citizens took part in the system's rituals in ways that were neither belief nor disbelief. The claim that the Party and KGB ordered up “sluggish schizophrenia” is the majority view among experts, not a fully documented settled fact.
China · 1966–1976
In 1966 Mao Zedong encouraged students to attack the “Four Olds”: old ideas, customs, culture and habits of mind. Red Guards raided homes, vandalized temples and libraries, and staged struggle sessions, public confrontations in which teachers, officials and intellectuals were denounced, forced to confess and often beaten. Britannica notes that many elderly people and intellectuals were physically abused, and many died.
A former Red Guard, quoted in a teaching article from the Association for Asian Studies, remembers writing posters denouncing authors he had never read. His class copied phrases from newspapers. They forced teachers to wear caps and collars that said things like “I am a monster.” At first, he says, the posters were fun.
A study in the Journal of Asian Studies finds that Beijing's Red Guard factions did not form mainly from older social divisions. They formed as struggles to justify earlier actions and to avoid the fate of political victims. Fear and fervor fed each other, and each round of denunciation raised the price of hesitating.
Family loyalty was a target. The system sorted people into “red” and “black” categories and urged children of “bad” backgrounds to draw a line between themselves and their parents. Some students from suspect families attacked class enemies even when the victims were their own parents. In the late 1960s the army sent millions of urban Red Guards to live in the countryside, which ended the movement's street phase. China's own official assessment later called the period a decade of turmoil and placed much of the blame on Mao and his circle.
When did it end? Some historians point to the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969. The Chinese government and many scholars date the end to Mao's death in September 1976. Archives remain restricted, so casualty figures are estimates. The line between coerced and sincere participation is also blurred: children of “red” families started the movement in Mao's defense, while students from suspect categories joined to prove loyalty.
Germany · 1933–1945
Gleichschaltung, usually translated as “coordination” or “synchronization,” was the Nazi effort from 1933 to bring political, social and cultural life under party control. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that all other political parties were abolished by July 14, 1933. Organizations of every kind were disbanded and replaced with Nazi-approved ones, and membership required political reliability and proof of “Aryan” ancestry. Even leisure was organized, through the Strength through Joy program.
Speech was policed as well. A law of December 20, 1934, against “treacherous attacks” on the state and party made malicious criticism of the party or its leaders a crime. It is often called the “malicious gossip” law, and cases were tried in special courts. The People's Court, created in April 1934, handled treason and high treason.
The Gestapo did not need to be everywhere. The historian Robert Gellately found that many cases began with denunciations by ordinary people, whose motives ranged from personal grudges and self-interest to real conviction (Backing Hitler, Oxford University Press, 2001).
This case fits Kuran's idea least neatly. The Holocaust Encyclopedia states that Hitler's government was popular with most Germans, so many people were not pretending. Jews, Roma and Black Germans were excluded from the “national community” as racial outsiders, and for them there was no sign to hang in the window. Some Germans still resisted, from ordinary non-compliance to the failed plot of July 20, 1944. Hundreds were executed at Plötzensee prison in Berlin for opposing the regime.
How central was denunciation? Gellately argues that it drove much of the Gestapo's work. Critics such as Eric Johnson argue that the Gestapo was proactive against Communists, Socialists and Jews, and that a focus on denunciation risks shifting the blame onto ordinary citizens and away from the perpetrators. Both sides agree that public support and police coercion worked together.
Tokugawa Japan · 1614–1873
The Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in the early 1610s. After the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638, in which mostly Christian peasants rose against heavy taxes and famine, Portuguese traders were expelled. In 1641 the Dutch were confined to the island of Dejima, cutting off contact with the Christian world.
Two devices did most of the work. Under the terauke system every household registered with a Buddhist temple, which certified that it was not Christian. Fumie, images of Christ or Mary, were first used in Nagasaki in 1628. People who would not step on them were identified as Christians and sent for interrogation. Torture included ana-tsurushi, hanging a person upside down in a pit, in some accounts with the head in filth, until the victim recanted or died.
Many communities stepped, registered and kept believing. They became the Kakure Kirishitan, the Hidden Christians. Without priests, lay leaders performed baptisms and kept the calendar of holy days. Statues of Mary were disguised as Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy. Their prayers, called orasho, kept fragments of Latin and Portuguese (“Ave Maria gratia plena” became “Abe Mariya hashiyabena”) and were chanted to the rhythm of Buddhist sutras.
In 1865 a group of villagers approached a French priest at the new Ōura Church in Nagasaki and told him their hearts were the same as his. The ban was officially lifted in 1873. Some hidden communities then rejoined the Catholic Church, and others kept their inherited practice. On Ikitsuki island, just under 90 percent of 11,000 residents were believers in 1954. By 2017 fewer than 300 remained, and the number has fallen further since.
Is the surviving tradition still Christianity? Researchers describe a distinct Japanese religion that grew from Catholic roots and took in Buddhist and Shinto elements. One academic study notes that most practitioners did not understand what their prayers meant. How far that counts as Christian is a question that scholars and practitioners answer differently.
Spain and Portugal · 1478–1834
The story of the conversos begins before 1492. After the anti-Jewish massacres of 1391, many Jews in Castile and Aragon were baptized. Hostility then shifted onto their converted descendants, who were accused of being false Christians. The historian Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, in an essay for the New Mexico History Museum's exhibition Fractured Faiths, notes that the accusation often carried a second charge: that they had converted to gain wealth and power.
Isabella and Ferdinand obtained papal approval for an Inquisition in 1478 to judge heresy among the conversos. In 1492, after the conquest of Granada, the Alhambra Decree, signed March 31, ordered the remaining Jews of their kingdoms to convert or leave by the end of July, according to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Estimates of how many people were affected vary widely. Those who stayed were baptized and joined the class the Inquisition was already watching.
Accusers looked for signs of secret Jewish practice, such as clean linen on Friday, avoiding pork, or washing the dead. The Inquisition's public ceremony was the auto-da-fé, at which sentences were read. Those condemned to death were handed to the secular authorities to be burned. Britannica's timeline puts the number burned at about 2,000 during Torquemada's fifteen years as grand inquisitor.
Muslims faced a parallel path. The surrender terms for Granada promised freedom of religion, but pressure to convert grew in the late 1490s, and a revolt in 1499–1501 ended the guarantees. In 1502 Castile ordered Muslims to convert or leave, and Aragon followed in 1526. The converts, called Moriscos, were expelled between 1609 and 1614, and estimates of the number range from about 270,000 to 300,000. Portugal forced its Jews to convert in 1497 and established its own Inquisition in 1536.
Spain formally rescinded the Alhambra Decree in 1968. A 2015 law offered citizenship to descendants of the expelled Sephardic Jews, and 132,226 people applied before the window closed in 2019.
How many conversos actually kept Jewish practice? Some historians see widespread crypto-Judaism. Others see many sincere Christians who were denounced by rivals or targeted by suspicion of their ancestry. The main records come from the Inquisition itself, a hostile source, which makes the question hard to settle.