The Captive Mind

Milosz, yeah.

The Captive Mind.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he was very famous, yeah.

Even if one is deeply attached to liberal democracy, one should always keep in mind that there are many worthy goals, inconsistent with the movement's mechanisms and traditions, that a lot of people can or should pursue because they enrich our experience and have accompanied human strivings since time immemorial.

Besides, once we grant, and the liberal democrats usually do, that progress has been made possible by humans' incessant pursuit of creativity, inventiveness, power of imagination, and freedom of thought, and that these qualities have often changed the course of history, why should we all of a sudden acquiesce to a complacent notion that the same qualities cannot lead us beyond the liberal democratic horizon? The so-called Hegelian sting, or to put it simply, veneration of historical necessity, has been well described, mainly by Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind, which analyzes mechanisms of the communist servility of Polish intellectuals.

The author himself, let it be noted, was likewise massively stung and for the rest of his life struggled painfully with the vicissitudes of historicism, which he never entirely abandoned.

The manner of thinking that made artists and intellectuals kowtow to the communist creed and subsequently to invest all their intellectual and artistic capital to legitimize its atrocities, which Milosz recreated accurately, captures an important, if not the entire, aspect of the treason of the intelligentsia in totalitarian systems.