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Book Club: The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz

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The Captive Mind is a reflection of life in Poland under Soviet control. It explores the author’s confrontation with dialectic materialism and that of his fellow Authors. The observations and lessons learnt ring hauntingly relevant to our modern days.

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

Well connected to the Polish Intelligentista, the book details how the more prominent members are manoeuvred into communist forms of thinking. Dialectic Materialism highlights how man is shaped by social forces, and as such the soviet regime seeks to take the reigns of cultural production as a means of population control. To achieve this goal it moves slowly and seduces with whispers, it presents The Method as the only scientific way in which to perceive and accurately depict reality. It provides rewards and encouraging words while gently increasing the pressure to conform.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is this subjective impotence that convinces the intellectual that the one Method is right. Everything proves it is right. Dialectics: I predict the house will burn; then I pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is fulfilled.

These artists’ congresses reveal the inequality between the weapons of the dialectician and those of his adversary. A match between the two is like a duel between a foot soldier and a tank. Not that every dialectician is so very intelligent or so very well educated, but all his statements are enriched by the cumulated thought of the masters and their commentators. If every sentence he speaks is compact and effective, that is not due to his own merits, but to those of the classics he has studied

Asking himself why he cannot escape from its embrace (even if he should want to), the intellectual replies that the measure of the Method’s accuracy lies in the strength of those who rule in its name.

Not everyone can be convinced, yet Soviet society with its firm grip on social and legal institutions is a dangerous place for an infidel. A practice from Islamic countries where non-conformity faces a more upfront reprisal is adopted, Ketman. The practice of pretending to believe to avoid the wrath of the faithful and the strength of those who rule over the faithful. An adaptation (read: cope) from being made to hide one’s knowledge of the truth, the act of hiding it is artistically portrayed as a pleasurable habit. More believably, it is argued to heighten a man’s cunning.

The people of the Mussulman East believe that “He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error.” One must, therefore, keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.

The necessities which drive men to Ketman sharpen the intellect.

The most interesting aspect of the book lies in the Soviets preferred methods of control. Not content to just have writers under their thumb, control is implemented across all layers of society. Society itself is engineered to permit further methods for control. Collective farms, pitched as owning the means of production, function more importantly as a decentralised Panopticon. A humourous removal of workers’ rights, the worker is not allowed to strike as they are the owners of the factory. Denying a worker’s family access to education should they not agree to police other workers. Solving unemployment by creating an endless number of bureaucratic jobs in their factories, drastically increasing the prices of basic goods. The care to separate potential leaders from the workers. The Soviet Union was an experiment in mass social engineering.

Because Communism recognizes that rule over men’s minds is the key to rule over an entire country, the word is the cornerstone of this system. Gamma became one of the chief press organizers in the city of Lublin.

A peasant hut is the ideal place for partisans to eat, sleep, and work out plans of action. Therefore, a collective farm, where a man’s every step is easy to trace, guarantees a degree of control that is indispensable if one wants to preclude hostile underground activity.

Workers are told that a strike is a crime. Against whom are they to strike? Against themselves? After all, the means of production belong to them, the state belongs to them. But such an explanation is not very convincing. The workers, who dare not state aloud what they want, know that the goals of the state are far from identical with their own.

Even the spiritual was machined into a regime tool; Christianity had given them plenty to work with. Coinciding with man’s portrayal as nothing more than a member of a social group, guilt is similarly collectivised into historical guilt. This weaponised guilt. Guilt as a means of control. Guilt not for what you have done, but what your social group can be historically blamed for. Does this ring a bell?

The specific trick of the Christian Stalinists is to lump these two concepts of guilt, individual and historical, together, while it is only in a few instances that these concepts coincide.

In the West a man subconsciously regards society as unrelated to him. Society indicates the limits he must not exceed; in exchange for this he receives a guarantee that no one will meddle excessively in his affairs. If he loses it’s his own fault; (…) In the East there is no boundary between man and society. His game, and whether he loses or wins, is a public matter. He is never alone. If he loses it is not because of indifference on the part of his environment, but because his environment keeps him under such minute scrutiny.

Communism is openly Globalist - “Workers of the World Unite”. Their approach is not so different from what we see today. The forced mixing of people, the forced opening of borders, the forced dissolution of national identity. The erasure of individual identity, of national identity, dressed in the attire of a Utopian fantasy. A necessity for their one-world government.

The aim of all these moves is to inter-mix the population of the Union. Only by dissolving individual nationalities in the “Russian sea” can one attain the goal of a single culture and a single universal language.

One must always keep in mind the eventual goal, which is the melting down of all nations into a single mass. To this end, nationalism must be exterminated. Nationalism rests on the conviction that national culture is the expression of “national content in national form”; whereas, everybody knows that the content of national cultures has had until now a class character.

The Captive Mind is an excellent read, with lessons applicable to our modern day. It is an entry-level redpill in that it is normie appropriate, but it is also an effective redpill into the realities of Communism. While the book offers no counter-measures or forms of effective resistance, it does detail the methods and tricks used by the authoritarian Soviet regime. The book goes well with The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel, a look into life under communism in the Czech Republic.

Yet the letter I one day held in my hand was painful. It came from a family deported to Siberia from one of the Baltic states in March 1949, and was addressed to relatives in Poland. The family consisted of a mother and two daughters. Their letter was a terse account of their work on a kolkhoz. The last letters of every line were slightly stressed, and reading vertically one made out the words “Eternal Slave.” If such a letter happened to fall into my hands, then how many other, similarly disguised expressions of despair must have found their way to people who could not make any use of them. And, calculating the possibilities, how many such letters remained unwritten; how many of those who might have written them died of hunger and overwork, repeating those hopeless words, “Eternal Slave”?