A greengrocer places the slogan 'Workers of the world, unite!' in his shop window not because he believes it but because it is expected and refusing would invite trouble; the sign actually signals 'I obey and so leave me in peace.' The day he stops displaying it and begins saying what he thinks, he steps out of living within the lie and the regime retaliates, revealing how much the system depended on his ritual compliance.
People sustain an oppressive order by routinely performing rituals and repeating slogans they do not believe, each participant both victim and enforcer because their outward conformity pressures everyone else to conform too. The system runs not on belief but on this shared willingness to act as if one believed.
Ideology supplies individuals a veil of appearances behind which they can hide their conformity from themselves, letting them obey while believing they serve a higher cause rather than mere self-interest. It functions as a bridge of excuses between the system and the person, reconciling them to lives of accommodation.
Because the post-totalitarian system is built on universal participation in the lie, any individual act of living truthfully, simply refusing the ritual and speaking as one actually sees things, threatens the whole structure disproportionately to its size. This is why regimes punish seemingly trivial dissent so harshly: the deviation exposes the lie as a lie to everyone else.
Rather than a clean split between an oppressive 'them' and an innocent 'us,' the conflict runs through every individual, since each is simultaneously a prop of the system and a potential source of its undoing. This reframes responsibility: the line between accomplice and resister is drawn daily by one's own small choices, not by position or class.