The Pyongyang Department Store — A Parable About Lies
The Story
Theodore Dalrymple — British essayist and writer on the wilder fringes of Marxism — visited Pyongyang, North Korea, around 15 years ago. He went into a department store in the capital.
The setup is already absurd:
- North Korea has no real consumer infrastructure.
- Citizens are required to be self-sufficient — but all trade and commerce is illegal.
- So you must do everything yourself to survive, yet everything you would do to survive is a crime.
- Despite this, the regime maintains a department store in Pyongyang, because the communists — having supposedly transcended the petty wants of the capitalist world — still need to demonstrate that they can match capitalist abundance.
The store has escalators, multiple stories, and hundreds of people milling around shelves stocked with goods. But none of it is real. Identical plastic bowls lined up on shelves. A simulacrum of a department store.
The Pretend Customers
Dalrymple noticed nobody was actually buying anything. So he picked one of the “shoppers” and followed them. The person rode the escalator up, walked around the store, rode the escalator down, then rode the escalator back up and walked around again.
That was their job. Eight hours a day, act like a customer — and look happy doing it — or else. There was nothing to buy.
The Pen
Dalrymple decided to poke at the lie (a dangerous thing to do in North Korea). He went up to a shelf of pens to actually buy one. A crowd gathered to watch, because no one in this department store ever buys anything — it isn’t a department store, it’s a huge lie.
He got the pen:
- The box was the worst-quality cardboard imaginable, printed to look Western.
- The ink of the printing was saturated into the cardboard; the box barely held together.
- The pen couldn’t write.
- The clip broke off as soon as he handled it.
- The eraser didn’t work.
It wasn’t a pen. It was a lie that looked like a pen.
The Lesson
The whole department store was a lie. The whole country was a lie — full of false products, none of them being not-purchased by people who weren’t customers but had to act like customers or else.
That is how far a lie can go: until every single thing is a lie. And that is hell.
How Do You Stay Out of There?
Don’t lie.
You’ll be tempted to think, “I can get away with it.” Probably not — and even if you can, the question is structural, not tactical:
Are you going to have faith in the lie, or are you going to have faith in the truth?
If you have faith in the truth, you can consult yourself about the truth — your own perception, conscience, and judgment become reliable instruments. If you have faith in the lie, every part of you, and eventually every part of the world around you, becomes a fake pen in a fake box on a fake shelf in a fake store.
Key Points
- A society built on lies eventually has to fake even its abundance, its commerce, and its customers.
- Totalitarianism doesn’t just punish dissent — it conscripts everyone into performing the lie.
- The personal version of this is small, daily lies: each one is a fake pen on your own shelf.
- The antidote is not cleverness but faith in truth — the practice of telling the truth, especially when it costs you.
- Truth is what makes self-consultation possible. Without it, you can’t even trust your own judgment.
Source
- Theodore Dalrymple, book on the wilder fringes of Marxism (exact title to confirm — possibly The Wilder Shores of Marx by Anthony Daniels / Theodore Dalrymple, 1990).