BIG SOCIETY

"A 'sincere' believer in the official Socialist ideology was potentially much more dangerous than the cynic: he was already one step from dissidence. There was the fundamental paradox of ex-Yugoslav self-management Socialism: the official ideology exhorted people all the time to participate actively in the process of self-management, to master the conditions of their life outside the 'alienated' Party and state structures; the official media deplored people's indifference, escape into privacy, and so on - however, it was precisely such an event, a truly self-managed articulation and organisation of people's interests, which the regime feared most. A whole series of markers delivered, between the lines, the injunction that such official exhortation was not be taken too literally, that a cynical attitude towards the official ideology was what the regime really wanted - the greatest catastrophe for the regime would have been for its own ideology to be taken seriously, and realised by its subjects."

Slavoj Zizek, Did somebody say totalitarianism?, 2001