The Captive Mind

In an interview on Dissent

Your next book, The Captive Mind by the celebrated Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, seems to have some overtones of 1984 itself.

Yes. Milosz tried to explain – as the title suggests – how thinking people could accept communism from inside the communist system. How does one not resist or just endure, but actually place one’s mind in the system? He points to a number of ways in which the mind can adapt. You can accept one larger truth that guides your interpretation of all of the smaller untruths, accept a vision of the future that is so bright that it drives away the shadows of the various dark acts of your own time and place. Or you can collaborate on the outside but preserve an inner core of yourself that does not collaborate on the inside.

Milosz’s point was that all of these things are possible as human adaptations to a situation, but impossible as ways of preserving humanity. In fact they’re nothing more than stories people tell about themselves, as they give in to a system which is actually inferior and repressive.

It’s an interesting argument because it gives people an alibi, which is what Milosz’s publisher in Paris – Jerzy Giedroyc, also a very important Polish intellectual – recognised. He felt that this was all bunk – that people collaborated because they were scared and needed money, and that what Milosz was arguing was just superstructural nonsense. But he published it anyway, because he wanted people who did collaborate and made their way out of communism to have a story to tell about themselves.

That debate, about whether these mechanisms were authentically felt or not, continues to this day. I find it interesting that people in Poland and undergraduates around the world stake out the positions both that there was something authentic about the internalisation of collaboration, and that it really was just a straightforward calculation of one’s best interests.