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PARTISAN REVIEW
reductionism by describing "the power of attraction exercised by totalitar–
ian thinking." Above all, he analyzed the multiple ways of resisting
ideocratic pressures through different combinations of maintaining outward
confornuty along with a sense of separate identity. This was neither an
Orwellian description of total enslavement from within, nor an analysis of
total conmutment. But Orwell's 1984,
The Cod That Failed,
and Milosz's
The
Captive Mind
were all written at the time when communist totalitarianism
seemed to have stabilized and had fully developed the ideocratic features
that imposed a sort of collective hypnosis on the population, and, at the
same time, had a mesmerizing effect on the progressive intellectuals in the
West, especially in France. Therefore, the classical fear of totalitarianism
then tended to perceive it as final and basically unchangeable.
The soul of 1955-56 undermined this fatalism. The disappearance of
ideocracy was most rapid and obvious in Poland.
In
the Soviet Union, the
changes were much slower, but visible enough to cause Hannah Arendt to
proclaim in the sixties the beginning of an authentic, though never unequiv–
ocal,
process of detotali tarianization. This was not a morally uplifting process.
On the contrary, Ernest Gellner aptly noticed that mass murder under Stalin
did not undermine conviction, but that the squalor of Brezhnev's era did. The
living faith had disappeared. "The really existing" socialism cannot be seen as
a messianic creed, nor are corrupt
apparatchiks
new Christians.
Milosz developed the concept of Ketman to describe ci tizens engaged
in the so-called people's democracies in a conscious mass play to deceive
their rulers.
It
is not a mechanism of enslavement but of resistance. The
term "Ketman" had been coined in Islamic civilization, as a sophisticated
technique of minucry and deception bound up wi th a form of posi tive self–
assertion through interpreting the obligatory faith in one's own special way
and thus saving one's separate identity. People playing Ketman were afraid
of the
mullahs,
but were superior to them and enjoyed deceiving them. Thus
Ketman must be clearly distinguished from other forms of adaptation to
ideocratic pressures, from the blind commi tment of people fully identified
with the new faith. Milosz describes them as having swallowed the pill of
Murti-Bing.
The essence of Ketman was "a game played in defense of one's
thought and feelings." The dependence of the Ketlnan players on the new
faith was only partial, not total. The attitude toward the imposed ideologi–
cal self involved an active, although disguised, resistance. Hence it is
misleading to read Ketman as a self-justifYing mechanism of capitulation
leading inevitably to full mental captivi ty. True, Milosz did not predict any
weakening of ideological pressures, and he declared in this book his lack of
belief in the possibility of outwitting the totalitarian devil. This judgment
sterruned from his pessimistic and, at that time, fully justified diagnosis. He
demonstrated that under totali tarianism all forms of resistance were
