THE CAPTIVE MIND
Robert
Faggen :
This morning, we will hear four comments on
The Captive
Mind.
Andrzej Walicki
is O'Neill Professor of History at the University
of Notre Dame; his last book
Marxism alld the Leap to the Kill/l,dom
if
Freedom
contains a section on
The Captille Mil1d.
Irena Grudzmska-Gross
is cur–
rently editing a forthcoming book,
Letters from Freedom,
by
Adam Michnik.
Adam Michnik is a hero of modern democracy, one of the leaders of
Solidarity. He has fulfilled the prophecy of
The Captille Mind,
to liberate
ourselves from the demons of Hegelianism.
Edith Kurzweil
is a University
Professor at Adelphi University and the editor of
Partisan RellieUl.
Andrzej
Walicki:
I will begin by asking: in what sense, if any, has
The
Captille Mind
ceased to be relevant? It shared the fate of all books on clas–
sical totalitarianism, since they all had wrongly assumed that the
totalitarian system essentially was immune from change. Hence they all
lacked adequate tools for interpreting post-Stalinist changes.
The Captive Milld
describes communist totalitarianism as ideocratic, spiri–
tual tyranny and not merely a system of external coercion. George Orwell
defined this distinctive feature as coercion of people from within through
control of their thoughts and feelings-not merely as negative control, but also
positive control, which dictates what people should think and thereby deprives
them of the freedom to be themselves. To this end, the Stalinist state used every
means from naked terror to organized ideological pressure. External coercion
and physical fear were reinforced, sometimes even replaced, by a sort of moral
or quasi-moral terror, by organized moral blackmail, capable of paralyzing peo–
ple's will through a sort of ideocratic fear. But ideocratic unanimity was not
an end in itself, in contrast to the traditional, custom-based unanimity; it was
to be a unanirni ty of the revol utionary collective will that subordinates every–
thing to the unachieved ultimate goal. Hence the importance of the chiJiastic
ingredient of communism as a dynamic new faith, a secular religion of earth's
collective salvation, of history. This faith, Kolakowski said, endowed the indi–
vidual with the most intense feeling of the meaning of life. It was experienced
as such by the victims of the Moscow trials, for whom this meaning was more
important than life itself, and who consoled themselves with the belief that
Stalin personified the stream of history. Dismissing such testimonies as mere
expressions of interiorized physical fear fails to take into account that many
western communists and fellow travelers who
did
not live under terror were
equally infatuated with the new faith.
In
The Cod TIrat Failed,
published just a few years before
TIle Captille
Mind,
Arthur Koestler described this conversion as a mental explosion and
a true initiation into a redeeming knowledge. Orwell ignored this aspect
and concentrated on the nightmare of universal thought control without
attempting to explain the temptation of the new fa itho Milosz corrected this
