This chapter contrasts two distinct forms of trickster discourse. Classical patterns are characteristic of open dictatorships with their immense threats, societal-level insanity, and the resulting, powerful counter-discourses. After their collapse, such ferocious systems could either give way to more democratic social settings, or to the obscurity and hidden callousness of a “soft” dictatorship, sustaining the (dys)functional absurdities of permanent liminality. Soft dictatorships mostly refrain from open terror but are invariably costly in terms of the subjects’ psychosocial wellbeing. A soft dictatorship is killing one softly, and its common consequence is identicide. By contrasting the classical and more refined ways of manipulation in the “happiest barracks” of the Soviet bloc, the analysis concentrates on societal-level double bind relations as an impasse established and consolidated by the contemporary discourse, rich in empty, floating, and reversed signifiers. These relations result in a profound learning experience and latent, long-term impacts through transgenerational transfers.