Why we want to be lied to

If you read one book this week

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson (Faber & Faber) R280

Shades of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train here as two passengers get talking over drinks in a Heathrow departure lounge; American businessman Ted Severson tells the enigmatic and beautiful Lily Kintner that he recently discovered his wife's infidelity and he feels like killing her. So begins a very dark journey - twisted characters, twisted plot, utterly compelling.

The issue

In terms of stupidity, jamming cellphone signals during the State of the Nation address was surely on par with Turkish authorities blocking access to YouTube ahead of last year's elections. So stupid, in fact, that suspicions concerning this appalling act of censorship naturally fall on the intelligence community in the government's security cluster departments.

Censorship, according to Robert Darnton's Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature (WW Norton), is a political act. "Not that all states impose sanctions in the same way," he writes. "Their action might be arbitrary, but they clothe them in procedures that have a tincture of legality."

It is a strange, shadowy world, this. Darnton relates how East German editors, compelled to act as censors, worked hard to improve the quality of the texts they vetted. "Despite its ideological function, the reworking of texts had resemblances to the editing done by professionals in open societies. From start to finish, the novels of the GDR bore the marks of intervention by the censors. Some censors complained that they had done most of the work."

The collapse of communism, however, and the advent of the web supposedly ushered in an era of unparalleled freedom - a view that British journalist Nick Cohen believes is dangerously naive. In his You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (Fourth Estate), he argues that the traditional opponents of free speech - religious fanaticism, plutocratic power and dictatorial states - are thriving and perhaps even finding the world a more comfortable place now than ever before. Salman Rushdie, Cohen says, "was writing in one of the most optimistic times in history" when he began The Satanic Verses.

"The appeal of censorship becomes evident when you consider whether you would be happy for others to say what they thought about you," he writes. "You would expect them to lie to you, just as they would expect you to lie to them. Humans have a bias in favour of information that bolsters their prejudices and validates their choices. Above all, our species has a confirmation bias in favour of information that upholds our good opinion of ourselves. We want our status confirmed. We want others to lie to us so that we can lie to ourselves. We want to be respected."

The bottom line

"If there is one language that isn't endangered, it's English." - Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage by Oliver Kamm (W&N)