The Captive Mind

Miłosz — a Polish poet who served the new communist government as a cultural attaché before defecting in 1951, and who won the Nobel in 1980 — writes about how intelligent people talk themselves into a totalitarian order. Two images carry the book: the Murti-Bing pill, borrowed from a Witkiewicz novel, which relieves its taker of the burden of thinking for himself; and Ketman, a term he takes from Persian Islam for permitted dissimulation, the concealed inner dissent that becomes a source of pride and then of dependence. Four central chapters portray real Polish writers under the names Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, and account for exactly what each of them traded and what he got for it.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s Marxism and collective psychology section, which is less a study of Marxist doctrine than of how a doctrine takes hold of people; Miłosz is the section’s account from inside, by someone who complied before he left.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Marxism and Collective Psychology. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Totalitarianism — the order the book describes from within.
• Socialism — the doctrine its subjects accommodated themselves to.
• Ideology — the mechanism of capture is the book’s subject.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.