Under constant watch there is no safe way to communicate: staying silent makes people unbearable to each other, and speaking makes them look foolish or exposes them. Words do damage, but so does holding them back, so every choice costs something.
Where anyone might be an informant, trust becomes too dangerous to give, and people are told to treat friends as out of the question. Fear becomes the one thing that binds people together, alongside boredom and betrayal.
Men who take part in cruelty at work go home and kiss their children, and the children grow up with the same appetite and join in. Steady pressure from coworkers to take part shows how a whole society is pulled into the same complicity.
When the state searches belongings, fills the air with loudspeakers and tells people what events mean, the simple wish to be alone turns into evidence against you. The real struggle becomes how to live so that your life fits what you honestly think.
The state's enforcers are pictured as plum thieves, peasants whose senses are dulled by greedily eating unripe fruit. Its power rests on a mix of greed, stupidity and brutality rather than on any cleverness.