There is nothing Orwellian about it: they were caught up in a system of fear and obscurantism.
The United States and its partners have long struggled to understand North Korea, where a cruel system of fear, repression and paranoia keeps the country largely impenetrable to outsiders.
"We're still a very fragile democracy, but yesterday people voted against the party in power because they are fed up with this system of fear, the lies and the manipulation," said Armando Regil, a political analyst in Mexico City.
"These are not mere excesses of the state; they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded," the report says, noting that the population lives in a system of fear and surveillance, where denouncing and turning in alleged dissidents is encouraged.
The reason for that lies in one of the characteristics of a double bind-organisation, that the occurrence of mistakes is strictly denied and due to this double bind-implemented system of fear, mistakes are not revealed because employees are afraid of first being blamed and later punished for a mistake.
President Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea since independence using a system of fear and intimidation to maintain control on society.
It appears from the responses to 'The Age' survey that women are being herded through a system of fear inducing surveillance in the antenatal period without support.
Centuries from now, when our alien overlords pore through the history books to get a sense of what humanity was like just after the turn of the millennium, they'll skip past the global warming bit, over the international threat of terrorism, and the rigged financial systems for fear of getting depressed.
Another problem is that some individuals will avoid contact with the mental health care system out of fear that their guns will be taken away if they are diagnosed with a mental illness.
National agencies are said to be highly reluctant to input information into shared EU systems for fear of betraying sources and operational methods.
