‘There is more than one kind of captivity.’1 So remarked the historian and political commentator Tony Judt in 2010. At the time, he was confined in New York, paralysed from the neck down, and shortly to die from the condition he had suffered for years, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But he was writing here about another time and place, and in praise of Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, a remarkable prose work published in 1953.
Miłosz was renowned as a poet, his contribution eventually marked by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. After the Second World War, he was admired by some in his native Poland as an avantgarde poet, even if his writings were as yet limited and not well known abroad. He was appointed, in recognition of his personal gifts and reputation, as a cultural attaché, part of the diplomatic service of the Polish government, despite his ambiguous political views. In 1951 he defected. Miłosz was to make his name in that decade as a fierce critic of Stalinism, although he was also a caustic observer of certain aspects of life in the West. His book The Captive Mind richly illustrated the basic point that Judt was making; yes, there is more than one kind of captivity, and more than one mode of adaptation, compromise, stubborn persistence and rebellion, in both a totalitarian system and a liberal democracy.
Miłosz provided a much-quoted phrase, ‘the captive mind’, and, through his long writing career, compelling letters, prose and verse to illustrate the acute psychological dilemmas and life choices faced by many people in Poland. The book on the captive mind considered varieties of personal endurance, collusion, evasion, confrontation and escape, adding important nuances to the understandings of brainwashing we have already explored. It was a work of its time, even if it has implications for other times too regarding the way we may accommodate to power, or compromise our beliefs in a kind of grey zone. It should be said that the compromised figures who appear in Miłosz’s study of the captive mind are largely male, white, educated people, individual intellectuals tormented by the conflict between personal freedom and collective allegiance, aesthetic expression and personal survival. His vision can be contrasted with other striking explorations made in the 1950s and 60s, a plethora of new analyses of captivity under Stalinist rule and in Western states too.
Earlier we looked at narratives about military and political prisoners suddenly placed at the mercy of jailors and interrogators; people helpless in custody, before, during and after the Korean War. Miłosz presents us with characters who are not prisoners, strictly speaking, and who can maintain a certain room for manoeuvre. He did not ignore the fate of the millions who were arrested, but he also wrote of those who lived outside such walls; citizens who accommodated political realities, as best they could, and perhaps cheered on the very forces that then constrained them; or those who only gradually realised quite how far they were truly walled-in, constricted and controlled, as well as, perhaps, beguiled, inside the Soviet empire. Here were populations no sooner liberated, as he put it, from the horrors of Nazi Berlin than subjected to those of Stalinist Moscow, obliged to deal each in their own fashion with this fate. As Miłosz showed, different mentalities were possible under the Soviet system, not just some uniform outcome. There is more than one kind of captivity, more than one kind of psychic response to captivity, and more than one kind of psychological analysis of that state as well.
This chapter revisits post-war accounts of totalitarian states and total institutions. It explores ideas about the impact of such regimes on citizens, and reflects upon Miłosz’s depictions of people living and dying, complying but sometimes also defying a terrifyingly coercive surveillance society. Taking a lead from his study, the arc of the present discussion moves from the past to the present, and from the East to the West, from the Stalinist state to other arrangements of political life that may also entrap, enmesh and tempt. Miłosz was interested in the negotiations we may undertake with ourselves and others to make a new life possible or more agreeable. The Captive Mind offers several angles from which to consider what societies can do to shape thought and behaviour, and to assess how people sometimes adapt adroitly, as well as horribly self-damagingly, to their environments. Miłosz did not downplay the differences between totalitarian and liberal democratic states; however, he complicated various prevalent Cold War assumptions, providing an eloquent rebuttal of the myopic views of Soviet communism he found among some Western left-wing intellectuals, and of the claims, common on the Right, that the whole population in communist countries was being brainwashed, turned into an automaton-like mass.
Miłosz revealed later that, when writing The Captive Mind, he had been unsure if those in the West who read it, but who had not lived in such a state as Nazi-occupied Poland or under Stalinist communism, could really fathom what he described. He had struggled, as did many other émigré writers, men and women, who found their way from Eastern Europe to the West, fully to explain to new readerships what life was like under communism, or to present their own predicaments and complex sense of identity.2 So much, as the writer Eva Hoffman would put it later, in her own remarkable book about this migration, is ‘lost in translation’.3 Hoffman herself would be transplanted at the start of her teens, moving with her Jewish parents, who had managed to survive the war, hidden in Poland, from Cracow to Vancouver and later to the United States, and eventually England.
Miłosz wanted to convey something of the ravaged Polish society that he had lived in and ultimately escaped, and of the dilemmas that that society posed. By the time he left, Poland was firmly under the grip of the Polish Communist Party, itself functioning under the controlling gaze of Moscow. The country was slowly rebuilding after the devastation of the war.
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had both invaded Poland. The land and the people were split, reflecting a prior agreement between Hitler and Stalin to partition that territory; the deal, which had various secret protocols, was named after the ministers who worked out the details: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. It was signed in Moscow in August that year, mere days before Hitler authorised the invasion of Poland, triggering the onset of the Second World War. In the west of Poland, then, Nazi occupation; a terrifying wreckage of a former society, a garrison and prison-house world, containing still more terrible prisons. These included the Warsaw Ghetto, and the concentration camps, to which the ghettoised population would be forced. The sites in southern Poland, now known simply by the shorthand, Auschwitz, were not only used for slave labour but were also central to the delivery of the ‘Final Solution’, the genocide of the Jewish population. That policy had been formally authorised, following a decade of ever-intensifying brutal persecution and mass murder, at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. In 1939, meanwhile, the eastern part of the state of Poland had begun its long encounter with Stalin and with the Gulag, that other world of totalitarianism. This nation thus provided the meeting ground of these two deadly systems in Europe.
While all this was known to many people in the West, they were not necessarily aware of what life was really like for those who lived in Poland through the war years and who then sought to survive in the new regime that emerged after 1945. Hoffman remarked on this mismatch – between the big picture that emerged in the West, totalitarianism, and the day-to-day lived experience, in all its many varieties, for individuals and families. She noted the way Poland and other parts of the Soviet empire were characteristically seen from afar, in stylised, abstract terms:
For the decades of the Cold War, Eastern Europe was cut off from living contact with the West. Moreover, in the American imagination, Poland, like other countries in the region, was perceived as the totalitarian, evil empire – the new archenemy. I think that those images attached themselves to earlier conceptions of Eastern Europe as a savage or primitive realm, and became reified, or petrified, into a kind of mythology that seemed to be in no need of examination or revision.4
It is worth dwelling not only on the political landscape of Poland, but also on the word ‘totalitarianism’ that was used to characterise it. Although Miłosz also used the term, he showed how much could be lost by such general concepts, if we do not consider the many ordinary choices and potential compromises required in everyday life in such a state. The most influential general account of totalitarianism was provided in the work of another émigré to the United States, Hannah Arendt. Her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was published in 1951, two years before The Captive Mind.
Arendt looked for common elements rather than the peculiar local conditions in each polity; she wrote about a widespread, dehumanising form of state, and wanted to examine the catastrophic consequences for people’s thinking. She explained how in such a state, ‘because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspect by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behaviour’. The systematic assault on freedom of thought was at the heart of the issue. For to be able to think, she insisted, one must possess the ‘capacity to change one’s mind’. The totalitarian state was built on propaganda, lies and an atmosphere of perpetual ‘mutual suspicion’. This sense of suspicion shaped public exchanges and personal relationships, ‘even outside the special purview of the secret police’. In fact, there was nowhere really beyond that purview, she noted, for a form of policing was constantly present in society and the psyche. Policing and terror were not confined to forces of law and order as such.
The term ‘totalitarianism’ had first made an impact in Europe three decades earlier, in the period after the First World War. The idea was initially welcomed by some commentators, especially pro-fascist philosophers: the total state was regarded by certain intellectuals as a positive and desirable prospect. Champions of fascism and Nazism conveyed their approbation of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s totalising ambitions, their endeavours to unify and harmonise the state and people, to bring economy, society, culture and law all together as one. A new total state was promised by these leaders and parties, and was to be achieved, they insisted, by eliminating the contradictions, inefficiencies, delays, corruption and hypocrisies of more moderate conservative and monarchical states, or the old ‘discredited’ liberal societies. ‘Totalitarianism’ later came to be used in the more critical and now more familiar approach of Orwell, Arendt, Miłosz and others. It was a controversial term, post-war as well, since it assumed the goals of communism (under Stalin) and of Nazism (under Hitler) were broadly comparable, if not even identical. For those who advocated the value of the term ‘totalitarianism’, the point was to see the underlying similarities between states that are willing and able to use any means to close down entirely all opposition. The modus operandi of such states is terror. To live in such a state is to know the governing power faces no curb and can act with impunity; to be aware that it can make draconian assaults upon an individual person or dissident group, at any time, and characterise its actions as essential preventative measures against ‘internal enemies’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘traitors’, who pose some mortal threat to the people.
However, both Arendt and Miłosz challenged the assumption that the aim of a totalitarian system is to ensure that each and every person is brainwashed into a condition of total conviction. Instead, the goal is to daze, confuse and intimidate populations, to disorientate and disable thinking, and to achieve a kind of blitzkrieg on truth. So, under totalitarianism you might end up completely lost as to what words like truth now really meant, or even as to whether the distinction between truth and lying really matters. Arendt wrote: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.’5 In a passage in Mein Kampf, Hitler had speculated on that very possibility; on how a world can be built on lies, a people effectively stupefied, not necessarily fully persuaded. Of course, he blamed the Jews for the lying (itself a fundamental lie on his part). If lies are big enough, he had mused, those lies may endure, and perhaps go unchallenged. Lies may be so colossal, say in official propaganda, that nobody can really believe the lies’ authors have the ‘impudence’, as he put it, to distort the truth so drastically.6
Totalitarianism, post-war writers such as Arendt and Miłosz explained, is built around lies, obfuscations and the sowing of deliberate, massive confusion. Totalitarian states had built a huge apparatus to orchestrate bodies and minds, through mass party membership, communication, education, culture and constant police repression. Ultimately the system required a vast and terrifying security state, even if it paid lip service to plebiscites or parliament. The latter, if still there, was just for rubber stamping decisions. Such states used new technological means to repress, and to disseminate their own core messages, including many lies great and small; they subjected their populations daily to centrally controlled ‘news’, or disinformation, and kept up a constant barrage of symbols, exhortations and denunciations, via radio, film, newspapers, magazines, as well as slogans, songs, pamphlets, pageants, marches, parades, rallies, popular dramas, etc. Perhaps people believed the political messages, or maybe they just gave up on believing, merely seeking to survive by paying the necessary dues. A totalitarian political system, those writers also explained, strips away entirely the protection of ‘suspect’ minorities, snuffs out freedom of the press and destroys all other liberal and democratic bulwarks (such as different political parties, open elections and a separation of governing powers, with an independent judiciary).
Of course, the totalitarian authorities might claim to be doing the opposite, explained these analysts, looking after all the good people within its realm, allowing discussion, fostering democracy, safeguarding minorities. The states that Arendt and other theorists of totalitarianism described were shown to have much in common, and to stand in dramatic counterpoint to liberal democracies. Following that approach, one might want to compare the operation of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, albeit noting differences. It would be less plausible to associate, let alone equate, conditions in such states with those now faced by the vast majority of people in the present-day European Union, even if we can note how some totalitarian impulses, or draconian policy directives, may nonetheless return, like ghosts from the past, and threaten our freedoms.
The idea of the ‘totality’ occupied a central place in such Cold War accounts. It could apply to a vast society or to a tiny island. The point was the exercise of absolute power, the assault on the barrier between truth and lies, and the presumed entitlement to and attempted exertion of total control over all subjects. After all, as the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman argued, ‘total institutions’ with absolute power over their inmates have been created for some people within a liberal society, even as the majority population around them enjoy greater freedoms.
Goffman and others began to think about these examples as micro-totalitarian entities for their inhabitants. They suggested that some prisons, or the worst kind of closed hospital wards, might hold their populations helplessly confined. Some categories of people can be dehumanised by our ‘liberal’ system, made entirely abject, left in impossible catch-22 situations, and treated as dispensable, inferior, even dregs, by government officials and sections of the press. But for others, even a majority, in such a society, conditions might differ and ‘total control’ not be an appropriate description at all. Admittedly, there are some governments in states today in the European Union, including Poland and Hungary, that have undermined their own fragile liberal and democratic safeguards, moving manifestly into an authoritarian style, ready to declare and then exploit conditions of ‘emergency’, and to crush dissent. But dire as recent developments there and in some other parts of Europe are, still we cannot equate them with the full horrors of Nazi Germany and the Soviet empire which Miłosz and Arendt were talking about back in the early 1950s.
Arendt had insisted in The Origins of Totalitarianism that whatever liberties we may now enjoy in a democracy, we always need to remain vigilant, watching out for the emergence or re-emergence of totalitarian propensities. She also pointed out how nineteenth-century imperialism, in which Britain and France were central players, provided crucial foundations and pre-figurations of what later would become a modern totalitarian politics: i.e. a form of governance based upon notions of racial superiority, the exertion of power, a range of modern armaments, the exploitation of rapidly advancing technologies, and the assumed right to enact at the centre whatever violence the state needed at its peripheries, thus to dominate vast territories and disparate peoples, and to make that total claim to jurisdiction. Arendt was interested too in the origins of the very idea of a ‘world politics’; she sought to trace the lineage of that notion, from imperialism to totalitarianism.
Arendt, moreover, noted that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led citizens to live with the police state inside their heads, and to deal somehow or other with the lies, even if not to swallow them wholesale. Such states might use any number of legal forms as carapace, but ultimately they claimed the right to take anybody away, on suspicion, while choreographing what passed as truth. The state assumed the absolute prerogative, in principle, to interfere in every nook and cranny of civil society; there was no separation of state and society in this creed. Of course, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and their conquered territories were, in practice, too complex for this, even at the height of the terror under Hitler or Stalin, and every last action could not be policed. But the assumption was that the state had no legitimate restraints, and was entitled to adjudicate who is unworthy of life; how citizens engage with each other; and what art is shown, books read (or burned), films produced, education provided, dance, music and sport sanctioned.
To openly dissent in a totalitarian state is to place your life on the line; to risk being denounced at once as part of the so-called degenerate and parasitical internal enemy, or an ally of a dangerous foreign power, to be expunged.7 For the Jews or the Roma people in Nazi Germany and Hitler’s occupied territories the option did not exist to fit in with the regime, but for gentiles it mostly did. In theory, the whole population in Germany, aside from the Jews and other ‘degenerates’, were supposed now to give themselves over entirely to further the shared cause, the vision of the Volk, perpetuated by the Nazi Party: a single people, presided over by a single leader. During the 1930s ‘working towards the Führer’ was cast as the fundamental goal, the aim to which all good Germans should aspire.8 If you did not know what the leader thought or wanted, you had to ‘work towards’ him, fulfil his assumed desire, put the pieces together, realise his ultimate mission.
The other ideology that theorists of totalitarianism were most focused upon exploring in the 1950s was Stalinism. This ideology was based on elements already clearly present in the thought of Lenin, who had justified the need for a centralised party leadership to steer the potentially wrong-headed mass in the ‘correct’ Marxist direction. This was much to the horror of some other revolutionaries, notably Rosa Luxemburg (originally from Poland, but based in Germany), who wanted to allow revolution to have a more spontaneous and uncertain direction, so that the leaders would learn from the people, as revolution unfolded, in open ways, not just shepherd the population and insist where their history should take them.
From Lenin to Stalin came a politics intent upon pursuing a singular plan, while vigilantly silencing all unwelcome dissent. Stalin himself was to grow ever more extreme in that mission, and ever more venerated by the Party as the great leader, the force whose superior mind ultimately governed the lesser ones of his comrades. Here was the supreme arbiter of policy, even as the ideology espoused the equality of all. In practice, there were many contradictions, and Stalinism created a world of favoured and constantly jockeying appointees, the nomenklatura, caught up in an endless struggle between purges and routes to promotion. The requirement of Stalin and his circle was total loyalty; the price of dissent, or sometimes just of suspicion about possible dissent, was imprisonment or death.
During the war, in Nazi-occupied Poland, Miłosz had on occasion aided acts of resistance. There were cases of individual people and groups that willingly laid down their lives in skirmishes and acts of sabotage against the occupiers, however hopeless the odds. Some Poles hid Jewish people, relayed clandestine messages and assisted fugitives. Others collaborated passively or actively, offering sustenance, support and labour to the German authorities, blackmailing Jewish families and plundering their property. While some Polish policemen helped German forces in hunting Jews, others participated in underground resistance, or even on occasion collaborated with and resisted the Nazis by turns.9 Many Poles sought just to stay alive and avoid being noticed, as Miłosz observed, struggling in bleak conditions to hold on and to protect their families. He would write prose, as well as poems, that recognised the indifference, callousness, denials or complicities of many Poles in face of the carnage.
The entire land, he insisted, was bound up thereafter with this history of occupation, of misery, that struggle for survival, amid so much unfathomable cruelty, and so much denial. His earliest memories of life in what became the state of Lithuania, where he was born, and later of Warsaw and the Polish countryside, where he would survive, under the occupation, overshadowed a good deal of his poetry; he provided many musings on what it meant for him and for others to live through that history, and to endure thereafter, when so many hadn’t survived, abandoned to their fate. In one of his elegies that appeared in the 1960s, he asked how one could live at that time, responding at once to the question to admit that he could not say. Nonetheless, he sought concise words to evoke the devastation, alluded to all that was taken, and pointed to those such as himself, who, while not reduced to ashes themselves, lived on with remorse:
We learned so much, this you know well:
how, gradually, what could not be taken away
is taken. People, countrysides.
And the heart does not die when one thinks it should,
we smile, there is tea and bread on the table.
And only remorse that we did not love
the poor ashes in Sachsenhausen
with absolute love, beyond human power.10
Poland, liberated from the Nazis in 1945, was reunited, albeit with the loss of substantial territory, and now under the domination of the Soviet Union and its Red Army. Remaining spaces for civil society, and for artistic or political expression, independent and critical of the leadership, were relentlessly pared back from the second half of the 1940s onwards. Artists were expected to denounce the West and actively champion the aesthetic style of the Party, socialist realism. Soviet-style penal facilities for political opponents continued to operate, a fearsome prospect for those who caused trouble.11 Society, including the entire artistic ‘community’, was to be brought together as far as possible, Miłosz explained, under this new communist mission; workers, soldiers and artists all working, ideally, for this one great cause, and celebrating the genius of Lenin, Stalin and the Party.
The Warsaw Pact was formally created in 1955 to institutionalise the alliance between the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland and the other satellite nations; the Polish army became the second-largest force inside that new international organisation. The Pact required each member state to defend any other attacked by an outside force, and, in this respect, mirrored NATO. The Roman Catholic Church retained a strong presence in Poland, although heavily hemmed in, and at times actively attacked by the Polish government. Soon statues of Stalin sprouted up in villages and towns all over the country. A network of informants and secret police was also swiftly built up, post-war. Such uses of state power – the reality of close observation and, where necessary, coercion of any prominent doubters and waverers – became assumed facts of life, shadowing the movements of those who were ‘free’, outside of labour camps, to go about their business. All those who wanted to stay alive, including Miłosz’s friends and peers, had, at the very least, to watch their step and keep up the appearance of support for the Party wherever a wall might have ears.12
Miłosz called Warsaw the ‘most agonising spot in the whole of terrorised Europe’; he wrote of a world in which one feared arrest, a land where hardship, death and suffering were everywhere obvious. People grew wary of speaking out, or even of being seen at all. Many had already learned during the war to say nothing and just walk on by, even if they saw a corpse on the street; expressing nothing untoward remained a survival strategy for many thereafter.
The Polish population, this implied, reeled as it moved from the immediate dangers and mortal challenges of wartime to the new society in the years that followed. Some chose to ally themselves fully with the Party, or conversely opted for opposition and even martyrdom. And in between those options, people might make countless gross adjustments or subtle accommodations in regard to the communist authorities. For a time, the political situation in post-war Poland was more fluid, a government coalition of sorts; you could try to just go about your work and your leisure, get enough food on the table, do the minimum, remain unobserved – but the Party’s grip was growing ever tighter.
Miłosz sketched a picture of a society where experiences and personal solutions to the conundrum varied, but one thing was entirely shared: nobody could ever be sure where surveillance began or ended. The population, especially the intelligentsia, were either signed up to the Party, or were obliged to cloak their feelings; to watch themselves and others, to police their own conduct all the time. But in the end, for public intellectual figures like Miłosz, silence was not possible. He and others were counted upon actively to endorse party positions whatever they thought privately.
Miłosz invites us to think about the burdens of a particular national and personal history, but also to consider the different ways we can talk ourselves into a kind of stomach-churning allegiance, or semi-allegiance, to new forms of power. Citizens might accommodate any new reality, and thus endorse or at least accept their own subordination to a party line, for many reasons other than brainwashing; from an instinct to survive to a vaguer longing for harmony and happiness, or some inchoate wish to be part of the ‘masses’. We are not all broken down and forced to conform. We may be tempted, he suggested, to take a kind of happiness pill, and rationalise our own shifting positions, collusions and betrayals. Moreover, he wrote about how people can attempt to split entirely their public and private selves into compartments when this is what the circumstances necessitate.
Miłosz added a further arresting observation: from the point of view of the political system, it might not really matter anyway. Totalitarianism worked even if some of its subjects operated cynically, hypocritically or ambivalently. To speak what you do not believe and to listen to others doing the same could even become a shared style of life. Miłosz recognised how a totalitarian state, or a total institution, can exert extreme forms of behavioural control over its population; governments can seek to dominate all aspects of personal expression and to interfere as far as possible with dissident thinking. A battery of techniques can be applied: if not to homogenise all opinion, then at least to silence the tongues of opponents. And yet, people may not privately agree at all, but rather go on telling themselves all manner of stories about what is happening to them, or inside them, as they publicly do what is asked of them.
*
Reading The Captive Mind, I found myself recalling a famous proposition articulated by the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosophical writer Blaise Pascal. It dealt with different possible grounds for prayer. We need to discriminate, Pascal showed, between those who pray because they believe, wholeheartedly, in what they are doing, and those who might operate according to a precautionary principle, reckoning it prudent to pray, whatever their doubts. He made an argument in favour of prayer as a sensible gamble, in case God does exist, since who knows for sure? If God does not exist, nothing is lost except the time spent in prayer. If you wager the other way, fail to pray, actively reject prayer, and God does exist, the price is far higher.
What Miłosz draws out is how if one citizen saw another in their acts of (secular) devotion, in Poland, paying homage to Stalin and his acolytes, or lauding the wonders of socialist realism, they may ask themselves silently if this comrade is a true believer, or a person who is going through the motions because it is the safe bet. Let’s mention here another philosopher, writing in the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, who sought to design a perfectly rational and efficient prison. He called it the panopticon. One of its crucial features, as Michel Foucault famously showed in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, was that the prisoner should never know for sure if they were being watched from the central control tower. In a state such as that which Miłosz had fled, citizens knew the eyes and ears of the surveying power always were or might be there, even without a literal tower. To survive, you needed to assume that the state (or some informant whose views would be relayed to an agency of the state) could be present. The problem was internalised, so you tried to mind your speech, not speak your mind, become your own censor, and read between lines when others were speaking. You might believe, or you might ‘believe’, but either way you needed to make a decent show of it. Perhaps you could retain the split between inner and outer protestations, forever, or maybe after a while, practice made perfect, and the mask would become your actual face.
As a young man, before the war, Miłosz had felt a sympathy with the ideals of socialism and had a strong distaste for the authoritarian direction of the 1930s government in Poland. After the war, and before the Stalinist net closed in fully over Eastern Europe, he sought to retain, however precariously, a certain independence. Even though he was not formally a mouthpiece, or even a member, of the Communist Party, his standing led to him being appointed a cultural attaché and given an opportunity to present Polish culture abroad. Losing hope that the Party would reform and bring a greater degree of enlightenment and freedom for the whole people, he faced an agonising political choice: would he follow the requirement, as an artist, and as a spokesman, to espouse socialist realism, the aesthetic creed that he personally despised? It sickened him to do so. He also feared the net was closing in on him personally, as his discomfort and coded reservations had not gone unobserved in Warsaw. He felt he was living on borrowed time, not yet fully a suspect, but clearly not quite trusted either by his own government. He was moved closer to home, withdrawn from Washington to Paris, and he feared that at any time he’d be recalled to his country. So, in 1951, he became a defector.
When he wrote The Captive Mind, then, Miłosz was already something of an outsider in both societies, seeking to find a new space for himself. He looked at both systems critically and quizzically. He lived in Western Europe for years, but in 1960 would move again, thanks to an attractive university job offer in Berkeley. But although he had a new kind of security and comfort in California, he was never in fact fully settled. He continued to write, still in many ways as an outsider, never entirely acclimatised, certainly never uncritically attuned to American life, any more than he had previously felt at home in the French literary scene. He remained a Polish writer in exile, acutely conscious of how much is lost in translation.
During his years in France in the 1950s, Miłosz could not fail to be aware of conflicts within the Western European Left, and especially among French intellectuals, about whether and how critically to support communism, and how far, if at all, to condone the variety that had emerged in Russia, or later in China. Some would stay silent in face of growing doubt, and all the evidence about vast numbers of people oppressed, imprisoned and killed; prominent intellectuals would offer rationalisations for supporting Stalinism, or sometimes Maoism, and for avoiding open criticism of the Communist Party. From the comfort of a university lecture room, in the pages of journals, or from the table of a chic café on the Left Bank, notable writers, free enough in their own movements, insisted you had to take a side despite the mass of evidence of Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes and horrific miscalculations, costing the lives of millions.
Those who spoke out more critically against the Communist Party, such as Albert Camus (a writer and person whom Miłosz admired), were singled out and criticised by others for betraying the Left. Indeed, Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre fell out dramatically over their respective political attitudes in 1952, just at the time when Miłosz was writing his book.13
For some erstwhile Western supporters of the Soviet system, the dream evaporated later, perhaps with the crushing of Hungarian dissent in 1956 or with the sight on TV of tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968; for others, it came through reading translated Russian and Eastern European novels, memoirs and histories. Some of those accounts were devastating. Testimonies from survivors of the Gulag were mounting up; stories from people who had been subjected to arbitrary arrest, interrogation, long stints of penal servitude, or indeterminate years of internal exile.
Into the Whirlwind is the title of a book (first published outside the Soviet Union in 1967; it would not be issued in full, in Russia, until 1990) by one of those victims of Stalinism, Yevgenia Ginzburg. She had been found guilty in a brief hearing in Moscow in 1937 of participating in a supposed Trotskyist plot: there was no appeal. Ginzburg ended up serving an eighteen-year sentence. For those in the West who wanted to know what had happened to so many victims in Siberia and throughout the penal system across the Soviet sphere, testimonies and reports were emerging in the decades post-war. The mass of data and personal narrative eventually could not be dismissed by those on the Left, except perhaps by the most obdurate deniers, as lies confected in right-wing Western propaganda. This literature and news reporting confronted and often confounded former apologists. There was now proof enough of the monstrous oppression, the dogmatic beliefs, tragic cruelties and the madness of what Stalin and the Party unleashed, for all those who wanted to know, even before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novels began to appear, with much publicity, in English translation in the 1960s. Solzhenitsyn’s vast non-fiction work, The Gulag Archipelago – assembled between 1958 and 1968, hidden from the KGB, successfully smuggled abroad and then finally brought out by English and French publishing houses in 1973 – caused a further storm in the West.14
The Captive Mind was hailed by several influential Western readers in the 1950s as a major work of political psychology, and a blow for freedom in the Cold War. Miłosz was praised by luminaries in the arts, philosophy and sciences, including Heinrich Böll, Karl Jaspers and Albert Einstein. He would find himself compared to Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, André Gide, John Dos Passos and Albert Camus, and, later, likened to Solzhenitsyn and Milan Kundera (critics of both East and West, communism and capitalism). It was a list very largely if not exclusively made up of valiant men, of letters and science.15 Miłosz was elevated to a kind of pantheon, celebrated sometimes in ways he did not quite recognise, as a champion of the Cold War West, led by the United States. Miłosz certainly rejected the lure of communist one-party rule and reductive Marxist histories where ‘class struggle’ was all. He wrote, with grim hostility, about how the Poles had found themselves living under a single and intolerable ‘philosophy’, ‘dialectical materialism’. And yet he also pointed to patterns of conformity he found in the West, rejecting the polarised thinking that he identified in the attitudes of governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain.16 In a later preface he noted that the book caused some confusion and debate at the time – a sell-out for fervent Leftists, and too socialist in sympathy in the eyes of conservatives.
To reinforce his account of people’s intricate psychological acrobatics (performing, while not believing), Miłosz made use of another instructive story, previously told in 1865 by the French writer and diplomat Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. It concerns the concept of ‘Ketman’ (or kitmƗn, in Persian). Gobineau had grotesque theories about ‘race’ and ‘miscegenation’, but his value, for Miłosz, did not lie in his racial views but rather his description of a (supposed) medieval society based on the total divorce between public expression and inner belief. According to Gobineau’s account, there were no ‘true’ Muslims in that long-ago Persia, even though everybody in that society might appear devout. Rather, people there were familiar with dissimulating, taking it for granted that the observances were needed to fit in and avoid disapproval and risk of punishment.
For Miłosz, this idea was beautifully suggestive of the contemporary Polish predicament. Under Stalin’s rule, he argued, there was even less room for personal, political and artistic freedom than had existed in the medieval Persia that Gobineau portrayed.17 In his exploration of Ketman in Poland, Miłosz went further, however, than simply to note the constant role-playing and the erosion of art and public debate. He suggested that there could be a potential perverse form of enjoyment in this never-ending accommodating charade. Some people might gain a secret gratification from toeing the necessary political line, and doing so effectively, a bit like a tightrope walker, impressed at themselves for avoiding the dangerous drop through their own rhetorical subterfuge. Might one gain silent satisfaction, he asked, in thus disjoining mind from speech, keeping the private recesses of the self under lock and key, safe from scrutiny?
Miłosz added:
A constant and universal masquerade creates an aura that is hard to bear, yet it grants the performers certain not inconsiderable satisfactions. To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one) – these actions lead one to prize one’s cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.18
He recognised how he and his comrades were caught in a society that degraded authentic human relations and, in the end, produced a terrible destitution of the self. This was a vision of a world where people breathed or vomited the corrupted air (I adapt that image from a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, another remarkable Polish writer, who had close links with Miłosz); a world where diplomatic evasion comes to be assumed, and sometimes achieved with aplomb.19 The question is not only what atrocious regimes can force populations to do, but also what as individuals we may revolt against or stomach, make ourselves perform, and subsequently justify to ourselves and even enjoy: the compartmentalisation, or active mendacity, as the price of just getting by, perhaps even succeeding. Social conditioning, Miłosz suggests, is not just imposed from on high: it is a two-way psychological street, a network of unspoken and tacit trades that exist between people and other people, as well as parties, systems or states. But such splits are not simply conscious or remediable by act of will either.
Many of us, Miłosz suggested, negotiate, acquiesce, genuflect, driven on by a mixture of motives and pressures, trying to endure, or get ahead, despite dispiriting circumstances, in that vast murky field of compromises. One obvious temptation, as he points out, is to deny reality, attempt to remove oneself entirely, switch off, stupefy oneself with drugs and escapist daydreams; or seek, even with a certain appetite for obedience, to submit to the voice of an external authority that insists there is no possible room for any doubt. In this respect, The Captive Mind might invite closer comparison with Huxley’s Brave New World, rather than the main lesson of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It points to our human propensity to shift moods and attitudes, to dissemble, to retreat into an altered state of consciousness, to flirt with suicide, a wish to be done with the world as it is, or a dazed willingness to endure, and allow the system to roll on regardless.
There may be also a positive attraction, not just a terror, in having another party dictate what a person should think, Miłosz acutely observed, a certain comfort and calm in feeling oneself to be exempted from the worrisome burden of thinking at all. It is possible to desire unconsciously to be mind-less and obedient. This idea had previously been explored by Erich Fromm, a German intellectual and psychoanalyst and for some years an important associate of the Frankfurt School. He had sought to consider, in studies of the psychopathology of Nazism, how people might allow an external leader to become their guiding ego, or perhaps their auxiliary superego. Fromm, unlike Miłosz, drew directly upon Freudian theory. His main point was to focus attention upon the desire people might feel to have the burden of perception and interpretation, and the load of internal responsibility for deciding and choosing, lifted away. Fromm suggested that a person with a need in their own mind to submit to an authority figure might seek a cruel surrogate father in political life, a wish that might be fulfilled by a fascistic overseer.
Miłosz had recognised the varieties of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of governance, and the diversity of human experiences within such systems. He suggested that a people need not be completely broken and fully brainwashed, but rather might be just tempted, or desperately inclined, to accept an implicit deal to make life safer and easier. In either system, minds could be distorted, indoctrinated or medicated. Some influential critics of the medicalised treatment of the ‘mad’ in the West, such as the psychiatrists Ronnie Laing (in Britain) and Franco Basaglia (in Italy), would develop their own critiques of captive minds, pointing out influentially during the 1960s and 70s how warehouse-like hospitals and the vast expansion in the distribution of pharmaceutical treatments served as a terrible palliative, even as the ‘care system’ dehumanised and alienated people. Anti-psychiatry campaigners protested that mental distress should not just be adjusted by chemical means but linked to social and familial patterns, or traced back to deeper socio-political sources.
Amid the intensifying political disquiet and increasing economic upheaval and social decay witnessed in many Western cities during the 1960s and 70s, arguments about the use of sedating drugs (prescribed for some, or bought on the street by others) assumed growing significance and came to be linked to critique of capitalism. Proponents of that emerging anti-psychiatry movement, such as Laing, stated that rather than just treating and quieting the pathology of individuals, society needed radical transformation, for the madness also lay there. In short, Valium and a range of other medications to dampen moods became social and political issues. In accepting such treatment, embracing the chemical arsenal from anti-depressants to anti-psychotic drugs, the mental health profession and the people they treated were arguably accepting their hopeless alienation in the system; rather than moving beyond their individual suffering to find creative personal solutions, or to unite to challenge the current dispensation, they remained lonely, out of the way, dazed, said critics, by chemical coshes, held in liquid straitjackets.20
Miłosz was writing that study in advance of the explosive Western debates of the 1960s and 70s about civil rights and the brute power of the state. In those decades, numerous new groups sought to ‘raise political consciousness’ in the West, to invite fellow citizens to refuse to fit in with the prevailing system; networks proliferated – not only of trade unionists and striking workers, but also of students, anti-war demonstrators, protestors against racial discrimination and neo-imperialism, feminist activists, anti-psychiatry campaigners. However, as though prefiguring some of those arguments about the pressure to conform to an unconscionable political state, Miłosz wrote of a stupefying drug in his 1953 study. This was the ‘Murti-Bing pill’.
Miłosz took the name Murti-Bing from Insatiability, a 1930 novel by a Polish writer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, which depicted a European society in total decay and threatened by a Sino-Mongolian army and ruthless leader. At a certain point in this tale, pedlars arrive selling an Eastern remedy, an instantly transformative pill. You can take it as an anticipation of Valium if you wish, or as a metaphor for other kinds of measures to provide false reassurance, distort perception or accommodate some new political reality, without the citizenry even noticing, intent only on blotting out individual perception and pain. Suddenly the Murti-Bing pill was on offer everywhere, to all. Insatiability suggested that under the influence of this pill, a medicated population would no longer experience, as reality, the invasion it had suffered by a hostile army. They would blind themselves to all tragedy, living contentedly in a new dream world, with the illusion of being healthy individuals, beneficiaries of a charmed life, surrounded by the pathologically unfortunate discontented other people who had failed to take the necessary dosage and duly adjust. In Miłosz’s account, some of his compatriots, including fellow artists, had become such pill-swallowers, neutralising their doubts and imagining themselves as the enlightened ones, interpreting life and reality accurately through that singular philosophy, dialectical materialism. It was a particular form of accommodation to power and ultimately to the Kremlin.21
In other words, Miłosz used this novel to suggest that some of his peers had dulled their brains and buried all doubts about the metaphysical justice of Stalinism in order to enjoy an un-troublingly simple vision. They were commanded to echo the Party’s account of the social purpose of art. As he bitterly put it, the pill-swallowers in the circles of writers and artists he knew ceased to experiment with paint in imaginative ways, or trouble themselves with composing ‘difficult’ music, but simply churned out stirring ‘marches and odes’, in tune with the odious political times.22
He was struck how some people in that society also managed to bury themselves entirely in technical work: scientists, for instance, bunkered down in a lab, engrossed in their tasks, as far as possible trying to be oblivious of all the disturbance that surrounded or even enabled it. Denial and alienation can take many forms, of course. Some people may wish only to work, others to sleep, as means of escape. Parallels with what he had already witnessed during his sojourn in the United States, after 1945, were not lost on him either. His acute observations of life in the communist East invite comparisons as well as discriminations; recognition of the differences that exist between political states, and of the variety of accommodations, addictions, seductions or rationalisations that may occur in our lives. After all, we can easily get into a kind of wilful blindness; these days the drug might be workaholism, immersion in celebrity culture, compulsive shopping or browsing online. There are various spaces we can enter to make everyday reality recede, for a while, just like for those who live mesmerised in the sunless, air-conditioned 24/7 casinos of Las Vegas, so long as the money lasts to slot into machines or to bet at the roulette table.
Alongside the pill-swallowers, Miłosz also wrote about the widely shared human need for ‘even the most illusory certainty’.23 If some of his contemporaries sought to be entirely convinced, and others preferred a blissed-out state of wilful ignorance, others still, he acknowledged, were trying to attune, adapt and make do, without such complete affirmation or denial, but rather just to act on the precautionary principle, not to rock the boat, and hope that one day the world would turn again for the better. The question as to what ultimately drove some people to deny and disavow – to take the pill – he left to the reader.
In a new preface to the 1981 edition of The Captive Mind, Miłosz explained that he was concerned with the willingness of so many citizens to accept totalitarian terror ‘for the sake of a hypothetic future’. History also revealed, he suggested, the vulnerability of the ‘modern mind’ to ‘seduction by socio-political doctrines’. Seduction, maybe, but also resignation to a state of mind in which questioning the state could seem futile, dangerous and hopelessly exhausting. The focus was on Eastern Europe, but that book also invited comparison with life in the West. In a market-based economy, after all, you also go about your business, dealing with the reality, and probably accept the terms of trade in practice even if you might disagree in principle, concluding that capitalism is harmful to you. We may be open to such adaptation, to seduction, or to ‘gaming the system’, but do not necessarily see ourselves as prisoners, zombified victims of mind-numbing forces. What especially interests me here is the situation he depicted in which people are doing just enough to collaborate and conform, while still possessing some personal agency and continuing privately, perhaps, to voice the word ‘no’, albeit not out loud.
Miłosz made the important point that people make inferences about each other, but they may well elect to keep those inferences to themselves. Sometimes they must do so to survive. Utterances and feelings are not necessarily the same thing, as we all know. There are many situations in conversation where we opt not to press the point and ask someone else what they really mean or how they have compromised; and even if we do, and they answer, we might not be sure it’s the truth. In the best of times, let alone the worst, such as Miłosz’s own, we do not know for certain what other people are thinking, or at least all that they are thinking, either when they are speaking or when they are silent. Every interaction involves decisions, mostly unspoken, sometimes even unconscious, about how much to assume about another person’s words, and how far we allow someone else to know what we are secretly thinking, in so far as we are conscious of that, in the privacy of our own minds.
The American psychologist Stanley Milgram added his own perspective on this kind of silent process of figuring out what lies behind other people’s speech, through a series of experiments in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This new project came after his famous investigation (in the early 1960s at Yale University) of obedience. In the latter, Milgram had controversially claimed to show how many, perhaps even a majority, might comply blindly with an authority. You did not have to be an Adolf Eichmann, he argued, to be a potentially murderous kind of civil servant or apparatchik, hiding behind the defence of just obeying orders. It was a powerful and stimulating body of work that generated much necessary soul-searching. However, the ethics of Milgram’s experiments, which entailed the participation of hapless volunteers, were problematic, as he tricked and possibly also traumatised people to play a part in an unexpected and painful game; perhaps, said later critics, the experiment itself was an exercise in the callousness or cruelty it purported merely to study.
In the much later experimental project Milgram conducted around 1980, he took up ideas about role play and performance; he now sought to investigate the ways we may interpret and fill in the gaps in conversation. He was fascinated by what theatre could tell us about human relations in everyday life, and the implicit assumptions we make about other minds. He may also have been influenced by experiments with AI and human–machine interaction, for example the ‘Turing Test’. This was the proposed test famously devised by the polymath Alan Turing, in a 1950 paper. First known as the ‘imitation game’, the aim was to consider if a machine can simulate behaviour that is impossible for a person to distinguish from ordinary human responses.
We may be held captive, Milgram now suggested, not only by the authority figures and coercive forces that weigh upon us directly; we are also guided by tacit conventions and cues, social mores, and polite guidelines that suffuse conversations between people. He wanted to know to what degree two conversationalists are making unspoken assumptions about each other. Can we be sure, after all, that the character sitting right there opposite us in animated discussion really thinks those thoughts, or even actually scripts those thoughts they are voicing? Might we be held captive by those deeply built-in assumptions?
Milgram designed a new experiment to explore these questions at his university in New York. The test was based on a late-nineteenth-century French play, Cyrano de Bergerac; its purpose was to find out whether people could discern if their interlocutor was really speaking for themselves, being authentic, or just parroting lines fed to them by an off-stage prompter via a secret earpiece. The prompter was Professor Milgram, no less, who provided the words while hidden in another room. He found that people mostly try to fill in awkward gaps and make allowances for the contrived rhetoric being recited to them by their interlocutor. In this way they seek to smooth over their awareness (if any) that the person they are talking to could be merely an actor keeping to the allotted lines.24 Conventions about speech might inhibit as well as guide us, sculp our thoughts, and constrict our actions.
We may well automatically accommodate, make allowances, avoid disturbing strangers, helping the conversation along, fearful of making trouble or sticking our necks out and embarrassing someone, even when we think something is a bit ‘off’. For Milgram, this builtin assumption that the person speaking to you is thinking what they say also had potential social uses. Maybe, he speculated, the experiment would help create a society in which troubled mothers could be advised secretly by experts on how to talk to their babies, in real time, through the hidden earpiece; hostage negotiators could receive useful input from a support team even as they talked to kidnappers; police might relay what psychiatrists, listening in, told them to say, and politicians could continue to recycle party lines, as required, via earpieces, or at least teleprompters. Ronald Reagan, the former actor, was in power at the time, and relied upon such technology to help him along when memory faded.
*
Evidently Miłosz was not unique, post-war, in writing of society’s endless pressures to conform, the myriad performances, ruses and subterfuges that may be required to survive; nor in exploring how role play and masks might hide or, worse, become our inner worlds and govern our social relationships. Not long before he wrote his book, a landmark work, The Second Sex, had been published, not about role play under communism, but about the schooling of women from cradle to grave to accept their subordination. Simone de Beau-voir’s great 1949 study championed equality, calling for women to exercise their freedom and avoid ‘bad faith’. Her account charted women’s oppression in patriarchal societies, and showed how they are groomed to accept their supposed inferiority, dress up, play a character, perform roles, be, for men, a ‘second sex’ – in short, subordinated. The most famous line in the book was: ‘One is not born but becomes woman.’ (Earlier, Joan Riviere, writer and psychoanalyst, and patient and translator of Freud, had anticipated at least one element of this post-war feminist argument in a notable paper in 1929, suggesting how ‘womanliness’ might be a kind of masquerade, expected or assumed of women, to spare men from anxiety and feelings of inferiority.)25
The 1950s was a decade that brought much new discussion of performances, masks and roles in different political milieu, in social struggles, in the workplace and in domestic situations. The term ‘role-play’ itself had appeared in the English language (1950, according to the OED). In 1956, the theme was influentially elaborated upon by Erving Goffman in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Here is Goffman’s opening account and elaboration in that book:
When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.
Goffman noted that the performer might be fully taken in by their own act, sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which they ‘stage’ is true. Both performer and listener may be convinced that they are simply being themselves, and it would take the sociologist or some other external observer to note the stylised nature of what is being presented. But Goffman then adds another possibility, strikingly close to Miłosz’s point, a situation where the performer may not be taken in at all by their own routine, may take a more cynical view and then ‘enjoy a certain gleeful spiritual aggression’, an ‘unprofessional pleasure’ from this ‘masquerade’.26 That (cynical) capacity to ‘delude’ the audience might be justified as good for the audience or the community; a doctor, a mechanic or even a politician, playing the role of professional fixer, might be performing to the listener for some apparently or genuinely benign purpose; to save time, spare the other anxiety, get the job done. But there might also be a gratifying – perverse – dividend for the performer, i.e. in being in the know and exulting while the listener is not aware of what is really happening. Goffman believed people can savour such a state of controlling theatre, and the sense of getting away with it, thereby exercising a secret sense of mastery over others.
These scenarios about performance and subterfuge, either systematically and cruelly imposed on captive populations or artfully played with and used by social actors, who are in a more ordinary sense at liberty, seemed to hang in the air of that time. A range of writers and critics in this period drew analogies between theatre and politics, explored the many ways that language might be used ‘performatively’ and showed how roles might be required, as well as artfully adopted, in social situations, used by citizens to survive, to persuade, to help a person fit in, to bargain or to provide the mask-wearer with silent enjoyment at the other’s expense. But a different kind of role play or mask-wearing was also suggested in this period, one that might occur in earliest infancy, when the crucial process of nurture went badly awry.
Psychoanalysts were especially interested in elaborating on these themes, post-war, and moreover in considering not just general social or psychological pressures to become ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’, but also to play an (empty) role, in lieu of developing any authentic identity. Clinicians explored how damaging experiences with the primary carer very early in life might result in the infant adopting a kind of impenetrable armour, keeping out dangers, but also trapping the real self in an imprisoning second skin. An inner core might remain; or perhaps in the most serious cases, the assumed persona or mask might be all there was. Of course, none of us is entirely free of masks, or able to function without some sense of a social performance, as Goffman had explained. Even with a benign upbringing or reasonably supportive societal context, all of us may be expected to occupy a plethora of roles, to fulfil our social commitments, or become at times, for our own reasons and needs, and when pressured, more like caricatures of ourselves or echoes of others. Who has not slid imperceptibly into character, perhaps as a child in a family, donning some familiar role as expected: the ‘dreamer’, ‘little angel’, ‘joker’, ‘high-achiever’, ‘troublemaker’, ‘disappointment’, ‘doubter’, etc.
The ‘false self’, wrote the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, a decade after The Captive Mind was published, ‘is built up on a basis of compliance’. This false self, he observed, can have a defensive function: the protection of the true self. A child may desperately cling to some inner core, even if – Winnicott surmised – the parent had trouble tuning into the genuine messages emerging from that core self. Here was another approach to the captive state of the mind, and the way people might, from earliest life, have to insulate something precious, and also copy, slip into the guise of another, or even end up hollowed out, nothing other than their psychological masks or designated character.
Winnicott was among a group of psychoanalysts who wrote, during the war years and after, about such early infantile developments, and our internalised, vital relationships. Through that dire period of European history, he and his peers were also active in considering the challenge for any psyche, and any society, of sustaining a way of functioning based upon liberty and democracy. Anna Freud had written a major book in 1936 which bears upon that question too, through her consideration of the ego and its defences. This reflected her deep concern at how, or even whether, a rational and questioning part of the self would survive intact or succumb to other forces in the modern age of extremes. She considered how people might have strong or weak resilience, struggle with fragile egos thanks to a combination of factors, including their constitutions, upbringing, relationships, drives; they might be drawn in turn to the most irrational and destructive political parties; most immediately for her, of course, the Nazis.27
These clinicians were mindful that the ego was vulnerable not only to being waylaid by the mind’s own id or superego, but also to being recruited by the skills of totalitarian propagandists. Ernst Kris, another analyst, made a sharp-edged distinction in 1941 between the forms of propaganda that he said were characteristic of totalitarian and democratic political systems. In the former, propaganda ‘covers the range from persuasion to hypnotism’; while under democratic conditions, the range is ‘from persuasion to education’. In the totalitarian case, the propaganda is all about ‘domination of the individual’; in the democratic case, at best, it ‘aims at the rule of reason within the individual’. So, analysts looked at the operation of particular political systems, valorised democracy and recognised its vulnerability. They also warned of our wavering unconscious identifications, the instability of the self, and the risks of reversion to what another analyst, Erik Erikson, along with Lifton, called ‘totalism’.
We internalise elements of others to form our egos, mused such clinicians; the ego is always a complex amalgam, not a unity, comprising diverse identifications, and in part unconscious too. However, some grow stronger and more solid than others, they argued. They worried, for good reason, about how conditions in a family, an institution or a state might function so as to mean there’s no option for that emerging ego but to mimic or serve another. What if we have no viable defences that ultimately work, or no secret (treasured) interior space that can survive, through adversity, beneath the desperate, artful and essential mask, or the imperious calls of others? For Winnicott,
A principle governing human life could be formulated in the following words: only the true self can feel real, but the true self must never be affected by external reality, must never comply. When the false self becomes exploited and treated as real there is a growing sense in the individual of futility and despair.
A society could fall into a state of shared cultural despair, other writers would argue, leading people to abandon all caution, fall in with some crazed party, and seek false ‘solutions’.
Miłosz shows us that even, or perhaps especially, in the fraught, extreme circumstances of that era in Nazi and Stalinist Poland, people are variable, so such labels as ‘true’ and ‘false’ self should be treated with caution. Political states too are always more complicated than the shorthand terms that we use routinely to divide them, such as ‘liberal’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘imperial’, etc. Indeed, the tensions between liberalism and democracy (the former focused on individuals, the latter on majoritarian decisions) may be swept under the carpet by blithe talk that a state is some paragon of ‘liberal democracy’.
Just as clinicians continue to debate, or sometimes renounce, general diagnostic labels about people’s mental health, wondering if a person is best seen as, say, neurotic, psychotic, borderline, or at the very borderline of that so-called borderline condition, so academics still argue over the contours of political statehood. We need such epithets about persons and states; they offer useful starting points, but also require critical scrutiny. As we begin to fill in more details, we may start to observe what is lost in translation, between the particular case and the general model. Miłosz, as we have seen, firmly contrasts East and West, totalitarianism and liberal societies. But he also looks at each case more questioningly. For each person’s and nation’s history is not just an exemplar, but also a story that is distinct. Poland, for him, was an oppressed society, but was not just a cypher for ‘Eastern Europe’ in general. He wanted to explore certain affinities as well as differences between lived experiences. And he invited us to notice how easily a language of politics goes stale, turns into mere phrase-making that freezes our thought.
Cold War rhetoric, the ‘totalitarian world’ versus ‘free world’, of course begged many questions. Where should we draw convincing lines, for example in defining a particular state as liberal democratic? What skeletons lay in the cupboard of the so-called land of the free? How do we resolve the contradictions between liberty and security? When might a description of a state as ‘free’ or ‘democratic’ seem adequate, and when does it become mere window dressing, a mask for imperialism, or for fascism? And where might we most appropriately set the boundary in our time between an authoritarian and totalitarian system? In the West today, the textbook cases that clearly are not in much dispute as totalitarian entities include North Korea. But opinions vary over the accuracy of ‘totalitarian’ to satisfactorily describe, say, 1950s apartheid South Africa, or brutal military regimes that have ruled Latin American states, for example Chile during the 1970s and after. And what of Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping’s China? Take the latter: the measures used there today against the Uighur minority, as we have seen, pass the yardstick of ‘totalitarian’, but what about the captivity of the rest of the population, or even of those who are granted privileged status and Party support, so long as they abide by the explicit and unspoken rules?
For example, on 2 November 2021 an internationally renowned Chinese tennis player, Peng Shuai, posted a long note on Weibo, protesting at how a senior Party official had forced her to have sex with him three years earlier while pretending that theirs was a romantic relationship. Her message went viral, fuel for the growing #MeToo movement in China, but so did news of her subsequent disappearance and mysterious reappearance in various staged images. An interview in December in which she denied that she had ever accused anyone only increased doubts about her freedom and safety, fuelled discussion of totalitarianism and intensified calls abroad to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Hearing of her retraction of the earlier claims of assault, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei suggested she was simply required to be a ‘soldier’ of the Communist Party. ‘She is a sports person, which is like being a soldier in the army. Any person in sport is considered as property of the Party.’28
One approach would suggest that during the 1990s, China, after a brief thaw and embryonic signs of liberalisation, reverted to type as totalitarian state. However, some commentators reach for other designations, such as authoritarian capitalist one-party system, or point to regional variations, suggesting shades of totalitarianism, or an interim stage, ‘approaching totalitarianism’. Still others would suggest that to call China one single ‘total’ society is itself an illusion.
For prominent voices in the US Republican Party, the preferred term, however, is usually ‘totalitarian’ for China and ‘free’ for the United States, although sometimes with slight qualifications, with words such as ‘becoming’ added in, as though the issue is not entirely settled. Consider a recent opinion piece by the historian Lee Edwards, to be found on the website of the ultra-conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation: in response to the question ‘Is China totalitarian?’, his answer is yes, or almost. Edwards writes, ‘[b]y any reasonable measure, the PRC is becoming a totalitarian state whose actions are dictated and determined by Xi Jinping and the Communist Party he heads’.29 In support, he cites former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s six traits to define a totalitarian state: an official ideology, a single political party typically led by a supreme leader, a secret police, party control of mass communications, party control of the military and a centrally directed economy. That state of ‘becoming totalitarian’, Edwards explains, could be traced through a series of moments in history – from the first phases of the People’s Republic through the Cultural Revolution to the later one-party settlement, which accommodates a version of capitalism.
In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, it became clear that the Party, under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, had decided to crush all movements that advocated for radical political reform and liberalisation, and to silence the right to engage in politics beyond the remit of the Party. Dissenters were brutally beaten, imprisoned, tortured and then often ‘re-educated’ during the nationwide clampdown that followed. Through the 1990s, the Chinese leadership remained intent, however, on its own new experiment, combining one-party rule with measures to promote an increasingly liberalised economy based around the massive global export of cheap goods. The problem, answered with both tanks and with rising living standards, was how to tame any rebellious mood of individualism and political liberalism, or old-style Maoist backlash, that such an economic liberalisation might then unleash.
The significance of the rebellion in 1989, dissidents continue to insist, lay in its defiance of the notion that the Chinese people had no burning desire for freedom of mind and no need for constitutional democracy. The Chinese novelist, dissident and exile Ma Jian claimed that Tiananmen exposed a regime prepared to massacre its own unarmed citizens to maintain power at all costs. He added:
It is both mistaken and morally repugnant to argue that the deaths were necessary to ‘re-establish order’ and guarantee future growth … [U]nder the slogan of authoritarian capitalism, [the Party] has filled the bellies of the Chinese people while shackling their minds; encouraged a lust for material wealth while stifling the desire to reflect on the past and ask questions about the present.30
This repressive set of policies during the 1990s was followed, after 2000, by a vast new digitally enhanced apparatus for state surveillance and control of citizens’ social behaviour. Today it is not only the Uighurs who are surveyed to a degree that might have surprised Orwell, Arendt or Miłosz. The state now possesses an unprecedented capacity to monitor the behaviour of its 1.4 billion citizens. China not only utilises a great ‘firewall’, blocking unwelcome foreign websites and creating wherever possible an alternative, highly orchestrated version of cyber reality compared with that available in the West; it also builds up detailed profiles of its citizens.31
Despite the restrictions on internet use, digital technology in China is a vital resource for the individual as well as for the state. Online, customers can browse as they wish, as free individuals, within the prescribed limits. They can make their own choices, not least about what to acquire; click Amazon China or other shopping emporia, such as Alibaba. The buyer, however, must not only consider the seller but also the political state that lurks in the background of the marketplace: purchasing items online, or even just browsing, sends a message not only to advertisers and businesses, but also potentially (or so you must assume) to surveillance authorities.
It is through this capacity for constant state-run observation online that the Chinese leadership has sought to control the explosive problem of individualism and capitalist growth in a one-party state. So, while a person has the freedom to procure an item (or not), they might well also consider, ‘what am I saying to “them”?’, i.e. to the ‘eyes’ of state power, through such actions. ‘Is what I am doing right or wrong, seen from that vantage point? What will or might the consequence be?’ The online footprint of every individual can also be integrated with other material copiously available to the monitoring agencies: evidence gathered via phone calls and texts, video footage, and through informants, that all establish an indelible record. Villages, towns, cities and highways each have their forests of cameras: the population’s movements are recorded across much of the terrain, day and night.
The digital revolution, in its current Chinese version, does not just enable the state to conduct speedy checks to expose a subject’s credit worthiness, but also to construct an ever more elaborate political ‘credit’ score. A political ‘credit’ (determined through a series of algorithms) is enhanced if a person consistently makes the right clicks; good online conduct can open doors to better prospects of many kinds and allow an individual to advance in the system or have a more comfortable life. Getting tickets to travel around the nation or abroad, for example, is easier with a good score. A seriously bad score may, in the end, lead to a knock on your door. No doubt in some cases this is true, but it may be a simplified version as well. The form of the Chinese social credit system that we read about so often in the West may reflect part of the Chinese political reality, but it may also serve self-congratulatory Western narratives, redolent of the Cold War, where ‘we’ enjoy unrestricted freedom while ‘they’ suffer ‘totalitarianism’.
The systems of course are very different. All the same, behaviour online in the West is also monitored by corporations and we are fed information (or rather mostly advertisements) thanks to algorithms, coaxed to become addicted and to consume ever more so as to fuel capitalist enterprises. Information is harvested and exploited by political parties and governments, and tracked as necessary by intelligence agencies (the NSA in the United States and GCHQ in the UK). We may or may not be aware we give licence to snooping by businesses as we tick those boxes that say ‘agree’, without reading the small print. Western journalists often draw sharp contrasts between surveillance in China (or still more extremely in North Korea) and the liberty of the West. They also, however, sometimes make more disquieting comparisons between ‘their’ and ‘our’ ‘panoptical’ societies.32
The argument about the top-down complete totalitarian control of the people by the Chinese Communist Party, as scholars have argued, also risks a serious over-simplification. For the CCP now exercises power in a more complex and nuanced and often two-way fashion than such an account of total repression and complete mastery would suggest. While the Party does indeed employ a vast network of surveillance and coercive policing, it also uses all means possible to gauge opinion and then, quite frequently, to adjust policy, to see off social discontent, or to meet grievances. A larger argument has also been made, not only about China, but more generally about how contemporary non-democratic regimes may ‘mimic’ democratic forms of sampling and interaction, thus creating spaces of continuing dialogue and adjustment by the regime in response to citizens’ feedback. So, police action and the threat of brutal imprisonment may coexist with other allowable forms of protest and criticism. A politics of crackdown and dialogue, a firm response to those who go too far, along with the state’s acute sensitivity to public opinion, may all operate in a delicate balance. The internet serves to survey, but also to observe and accumulate disparate views, and then helps the leadership and the bureaucracies to adjust state policy, where it is deemed possible within the larger goal of the Party, to maintain mass consent.33
To think of societies as ‘panoptical’ also bears some further examination. As we have seen, the panopticon, as presented by Bentham, was a prison in which every prisoner could be seen but would never know when exactly. From the point of view of the authorities, or the state, Bentham argued, this was a rational and efficient way to organise things; the task of surveillance was always to be assumed; it would shape behaviour and mean a minimum of expenditure on guard duties. Through the constant possibility of observation, a seeing eye had to be assumed by the prisoner, and perhaps thereby internalised. During the twentieth century new ways of analysing the impact of bodily and mental captivity, and of conceiving the place of incarceration and surveillance within society, the economy and mass psychology, were also developed.
‘The prison–industrial complex’ in the US, wrote the journalist Eric Schlosser in 1998, ‘is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind.’34 That coinage, first found in the 1970s, emerged to prominence during the 1990s. The phrase echoed another, ‘the military–industrial complex’, introduced into common parlance by President Eisenhower in his valedictory speech in January 1961. It described the infrastructure and the enormous scale of human labour in the field of defence, intelligence and military research. In both cases, ‘complex’ is an appropriately ambiguous word, to convey both a material reality and a psychic problem. Preceding the coinage ‘prison–industrial complex’, we should also recall the concept of the total institution, and the place this occupied, alongside discourse on totalitarianism in post-war political thought. High-security prisons, like the worst psychiatric asylums, became important reference points in Cold War discussions about both the West and the East. For, as critics pointed out, total institutions could also exist, largely unremarked, in a seemingly liberal society.
In the 1950s, Goffman had analysed the total institution, explaining how sites and mechanisms were created so that authorities could hive off a particular population, and there destroy barriers between a person’s private and public life. In the total institution, officialdom could tear away a citizen’s identity, remove all life-enhancing opportunities and means of personal fulfilment that others (outside in that same society) enjoy. The total institution, Goffman pointed out, intentionally breaks the divide between the inner and the outer, and between any notion of labour and leisure, workplace and home; it exerts blanket control and surveillance of the designated ‘inmate’. A context for this kind of analysis by Goffman and others was the institutionalisation of large numbers of people in the post-war West, not just in the ‘totalitarian’ East, or in the Western past.
The political reasons for concentrating people inside such places, Goffman showed, varied considerably. The total institution could be based upon blueprints that were more-or-less sinister in their intent; some had originated in notions of social care, rather than simple repression, products of a world where families are no longer able or willing to nurse the elderly, or to house the seriously mentally ill. Some total institutions, as pictured by Goffman, were in part educational in aim, or at least had been created to produce efficient, intense and rapid training (including, for example, military barracks). Others, however, were built and administered entirely for the purposes of segregating and dehumanising those regarded by the governing authorities, or its various proxies, as socially dangerous or psychologically deviant.
These institutions provide the site of punishment and aim at full managerial control of internees. Some were there to serve as a mode of deterrence for all; others rather as warehouses, driven by the need to keep a minority confined and out of sight. A common characteristic of total institutions, Goffman argued, is that they create ‘inmates’; these are the people whose character is boiled down to their location inside the system, reduced often enough to prison number, mugshot or vital statistics. Indeed, the moment a person is placed in custody inside such an institution, Goffman claimed, they are stripped not only of their freedom to come and go, but also of their prior identities as three-dimensional individuals with a delicate web of relationships. The institution reduces identity to basic functions, and monitors, or sometimes eliminates, contact with the outside community – former workmates, friends, family or any other support systems.35 The aim, he warned, is to regulate minds and bodies. Liveliness or ‘spirit’ in inmates is broken, either by deliberate design, or simply as a byproduct of the structure and deadening routine.
Inside the total institution, the ‘self is systematically, if often unintentionally, mortified’, Goffman memorably wrote. He set out this thesis in a 1957 essay, subsequently republished in various texts.36 In this kind of sealed-off silo, which clearly bears some comparison to a totalitarian polity, the inmate is always subjected to a sharp hierarchy, a world of vertical power. There is no guaranteed field of privacy, no protected area for autonomous personal choice, no option of complete unobserved refuge for the inmate in such a place. Each phase of the inmate’s daily activity may be carried out in the enforced company of others (unless the individual is placed in punitive isolation, where they are also potentially held under constant observation); each human being is governed in such a site by some supposedly rational plan ‘purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institution’.
The re-education facilities for the Uighurs are one example of a set of institutions aiming at the wholesale control and reconstitution of a particular population. But total institutions are not of course all alike, and nor are they confined to any one part of the world; witness the grim revelations in recent years of religious correctional facilities in the United States, provided with state funding, which house troubled teenagers in sites that cut them off almost entirely from family and friends, for months, and operate draconian systems of reward and punishment, shared slogans, and shunning and silencing for any perceived insubordination.37 Or consider the inhuman re-education programmes that were organised and meted out by the Canadian state to children from the Inuit peoples of the Arctic regions, forcibly removing them from their communities to be ‘remade’ or ‘assimilated’. Scholars, recently reviewing what has happened to that population, point out how Goffman’s argument still has validity. As he had shown, institutional arrangements aim to annihilate the past, denying the inmates access to their former familial and cultural memories.38
Goffman’s point was that supposedly therapeutic or educational institutions (as well as penal ones), no less than political states, can, at worst, be turned into soul-destroying processing plants that seek to neutralise as well as to reorder the minds of captive inmates. Some Western mental health facilities, as well as prisons, he argued, may aim not only to capture, coerce, intimidate and mortify, but also to mould. An asylum can become a depository, with broken-spirited denizens. It may not matter if you are in the West or the East; if you are confined in a closed ward, you may be subject to the worst kind of re-educative ‘nursing’, where there is no accountability or supervision, and almost anything at all can be done to the body and mind, regardless of the mode of liberal government operating outside the walls of that closed institution. The fate of IRA prisoners in British detention facilities during the Troubles, subjected to what later came to be known as ‘enhanced interrogation’, that is to say torture under another name, is also well described in other accounts of the history of brainwashing. Britain was not ‘totalitarian’, but such facilities aimed to overwhelm entirely the psychic defences of the imprisoned subject.39
During the 1960s and after, academics influenced by Goffman, Foucault and others examined the variety of social institutions – from clinics to schools, asylums to prisons – analysing each nexus of power and knowledge, and exploring how regimes of ‘truth’ and systems of thought operated across the Cold War divide. One notable consequence of such critique, as mentioned, was the anti-psychiatry movement; in various countries in the Western world it made real waves, while in the Soviet Union anguished protests circulated in samizdat publications. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s novel (1962), adapted as a film (1975), directed by the Czech émigré Miloš Forman, chimed in with this mood, offering dramatic insight into the terrors and powers that might lurk in a ‘therapeutic’ psychiatric unit.40 It was a vivid story that gained a wide audience and resonated with what came to be called the ‘counterculture’. Kesey’s tale set out in stark form an argument that would be elaborated more formally within the broader anti-psychiatry movement. Along with the work of Goffman and Laing, a major influence on the field of anti-psychiatry was Foucault’s history of madness, first published in 1961.41 It told the story of the discourse of psychiatry and, he said, of the silencing of the ‘mad’.
Kesey’s novel showed how doctors, nurses and care assistants could operate with impunity in the institution. The story portrayed how mental asylums could become the very reverse of the ideals they claim to uphold, repositories entirely for guarding and breaking, remoulding or simply rendering invisible neglected, difficult or unruly people, and thus sustaining a form of living death. The protagonist Randle Patrick McMurphy (memorably played by Jack Nicholson in the film adaptation) is an Irish-American petty criminal and brawler committed to a psychiatric institution. McMurphy is rebellious, branded by the system a recidivist or incorrigible. He is a Korean War veteran who had already led a breakout from a POW camp. McMurphy had believed he was choosing the softer option by faking insanity and thus avoiding the prison work farm. Ultimately, however, this choice proves disastrous – McMurphy is given a lobotomy and reduced to a vegetative state.
There is a clear message about contemporary oppression and the role of ‘psy’. Kesey wanted to suggest how easily those outside the asylum might also be bound by their own straitjackets. Staff in the institution ‘treating’ McMurphy and company may be active sadists or just bureaucrats and officials, servants of a system, abdicating independent thought, going about their business routinely and indifferently. Such a facility of ‘care’ in the West could breach every ethical constraint, endeavouring to destroy people, without ending their biological lives. Moreover, the story requires that we note the relationship of past and present conquests; that we consider the politics of such an institution today, and locate it in a history of capture, control and oppression that was integral to the making of the United States. Several of the subordinate staff in the facility are Black; one of the patients, long institutionalised, and who elects to be mute, is Native American. Kesey’s story alludes to the past, the reality of slavery, and the murderous process that was required for the settler population to move the frontiers west. It is a history where stolen terrain was treated as though virgin land; a history that witnessed the destruction of a way of life, the violent ‘pacification’ of resistance, the stifling enclosure of the Native American population.
Kesey offered the story as a warning about the total institution, and invited consideration of complicity, denial, deception and violence in the way a state goes about rendering recalcitrant people safe. Perhaps it is also a kind of parable: inviting the readers to ask themselves, how free are they to make their own paths, think their own thoughts, exercise freedom?
Such fictions saw institutions as microcosms or used them as parables. Many had already been penned, showing what could be done to patients, as well as to prisoners, in the name of reform or therapy. The Victorian period has no shortage of novels, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), exploring wrongful confinement in asylums, highlighting the drama of ordinary people put away for no good reason at all. But the fear took on new shapes in the age of ‘brainwashing’, a time when electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), lobotomy and modern drugs could serve, in the guise of a new humanitarianism, to ‘silence’ patients and medicate citizens.42 Lobotomy was always highly controversial, despite being heavily promoted by some doctors post-war (notably a cavalier American surgeon, Walter Freeman), and became less common beyond the 1960s. It was dwarfed in scale by the uses made of drugs – for instance, Chlorpromazine, a non-invasive alternative treatment for severe mental illness, which came onto the market in 1954.43
The 1960s and 70s witnessed a variety of popular critiques of the asylum as precisely sites of ‘the captive mind’, or symbols of a brainwashed larger society. Writers such as Laing asked, what if the mad are reacting as best they can to a ‘mad’ world outside, albeit in often disturbed and self-destructive ways? At the same time, some feminist writers revisited a Victorian literature on hysteria, wondering whether these ‘disturbed’ women were better understood as rebels against patriarchy; ‘the mad woman in the attic’ conceived here as a subject who refused, in body and soul, or in the unconscious, to live inside an intolerable and stifling world. The clinic, the prison, the asylum – and the ‘psy’ professions that sustained them – became fields of extensive academic exploration and practical protest. Kate Millett, author of the influential book Sexual Politics, was mentally unwell in the 1970s and found herself involuntarily confined and medicated in a US asylum, later describing her experiences in agonising terms, in her own version of that cuckoo’s nest:
How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.44
During the same decade, there was increasingly prominent critique on TV and the newspapers, and in the US Congress, about what the Soviet government was doing to intimidate and pacify political dissidents in its own psychiatric hospitals.45 In the second half of the twentieth century, much attention was also paid in the West to remarkable true-life stories of psychic and physical survival, stubborn persistence or even creative triumph, against all the odds, in clinics, prisons and camps. Numerous testimonies emerged about the Nazi camp system, including the writings of Primo Levi; and about the Gulag, with the revelations of Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg and others, showing how the Stalinist system of punishment and exile operated, and what was endured. Levi, it should be added, was only a temporary survivor: four decades after his release and return to Italy from Auschwitz, in 1987, he fell down the stairs of his building in Turin, crushing his skull, leading to much speculation about whether the fall was a suicide or accident. What was not in doubt was that Levi was suffering severe depression at the time.46
Exceptional cases, where long-term inmates of camps, prisons or total institutions somehow remain psychologically ‘uncaptured’, dignified, critical, alert, still somehow themselves, after enduring years, even decades, of existence behind bars, understandably attract our sense of awe. Seemingly miraculous, these stories stand out as exceptions to the ordinary rule – the devastation of the long-term inmate, the irrecoverable harmful legacies. The universally admired real-life case of a mind persisting intact in a terrible custodial system is Nelson Mandela. He was imprisoned in South Africa between 1962 and 1990, held on charges of conspiring to overthrow the apartheid political state, yet he emerged an indomitable figure, still so clearly his own person, a leader willing to negotiate, but not sell out, and then to preside in the new state. His autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, is peppered with acute and strikingly compassionate observations about the jailors and oppressors as well as the inmates and countless other victims of this system. He sought to avoid dehumanising his captors: ‘I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going.’ He viewed his guards as subject to their own forms of mind control, and in their own way ‘captives’, concluding ‘that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed’. He went on, ‘[a] man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness’. Mandela also observed how ‘[t]he oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity’.47 This might be compared with the many observations by the psychiatrist, writer and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon, about how the mentalities of the coloniser and the colonised were always locked up together. Brian Keenan, held hostage, tortured and beaten by an Islamist faction in Lebanon, came to similar conclusions, born of his own experience and observation, remarking on the appalling impact of the kidnapping on the mental state of the prisoners, but also the grotesque psychic imprisonment, inside a creed, of his guards.48
Sometimes the wish we may have to hold on to the unsullied, ‘uncaptivated’ and fully uncorrupted hero leaders, who walk from custody, is thwarted, and those previously hailed as resplendently free in spirit follow a different and disillusioning path. Many felt this about Winnie Mandela, a victim herself of long oppression and harassment. We are forced mostly to make sense of mixed legacies, and sometimes betrayals, the good and the bad, perhaps laudable aspirations as well as collusions, compromises, cruelties; in short, stories that preclude in most cases the endurance of singular mythological and transcendent images. When a hero ‘falls’ we may project our sense of shame and guilt onto the broken idol. We are encouraged to idealise former political prisoners, and then be disappointed when they fail to meet great expectations. Aung San Suu Kyi was named as a true heir to Gandhi’s vision of non-violent politics by Time magazine in 1999, but her conduct during the second half of the 2010s led to much bitter disappointment and painful reassessment. Her shocking unwillingness, from high office, properly to condemn, let alone halt, her state’s systematic persecution of the Rohingya people led many former liberal admirers to withdraw their endorsements. Some called for her to be stripped of the former international honours she had received. Following a further military crackdown in Myanmar in 2021, she found herself once again under arrest.
Much of the 1950s discourse on brainwashing, as we witnessed earlier, was concerned with the fate of prisoners, held alone, or amid fellow victims, broken and then re-educated. But as was so clear from the testimony of American POW Clarence Adams, who endured captivity in the Korean War, those supposed victims of brainwashing answered back, providing rhetorical challenges to Western complacency. Not all supposedly mind-controlled prisoners, such as Adams, who ‘fell’ for Mao or his communist cause, would accept the stark contrast proposed by the press, politicians and so many Cold War pundits between the free-thinking, free-living citizen in Western liberal societies and the fate of those ‘captive minds’, the Eastern victims of totalitarianism. It was essential, for Adams and many others, to insist on the daily lived reality of racial oppression in the United States. They did not buy the Cold War rhetoric about freedom and pointed to the racial system still so firmly in place around a century after the Civil War ended.
Such rhetorical challenges to congratulatory stories about the ‘Land of Liberty’ post-war were part of a long tradition; some echoed the compelling language of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, the Christian academic and first African-American president of Howard University (1926–60). In a lecture at Harvard in 1922, Johnson had spoken about the broken hopes of the Black population, the ‘widespread disintegration’ of their faith in the capacity of the federal government ever to deliver its promises. He alluded to bitter Black soldiers, returning from war, to find the revival of old racism, and even the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.49 Others, after 1945, sought to rework and draw conclusions in line with nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigners who derided fantastical claims that the United States was a bastion of human freedom. They might recall the words spoken by former slave, writer and campaigner Frederick Douglass. Posing the question ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’, he declared to the Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, in 1852:
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.50
In fact, post-war, at thriving centres of African-American intellectual life, such as Howard University where Johnson presided, there were to be many new lines of inquiry and a plethora of different critiques and calls for radical change, derived from both religious and secular ways of thinking; a host of new explorations of US self-delusion, racism and imperialism. Prisons too, however oppressive, could become for some men and women new centres of learning, protest and writing; places to provide lived examples of struggle.
Just as Douglass had declared that America was the very essence of barbarism, George Jackson, a Black prisoner and an uncompromising and outspoken figure, would take the same view a century later. As he served out an indefinite sentence in California during the 1960s, Jackson would make the claim, based on his experience of racism, that the US population was ‘brainwashed’ to believe the illusion that all its citizens were free. In his clear, contentious political analyses, sent out in letters from jail, many addressed to his parents, he sought to enlighten all those who retained illusions about the nature of the American state, and called for active resistance as well as a revolution in mind. He rebutted any idea that people of colour had ever experienced liberty in the United States or could ever do so in future, within the prevailing system. The nation’s self-presentation was for him based around a colossal lie, and he suspected those living under communist rule enjoyed far greater opportunities and liberties than any Black person possessed in his country.
The 1960s was a time of civil rights protests across the United States, with public opinion dividing not only between those ‘for’ and ‘against’ transformations, but also between moderate approaches based on reform, and outright calls for insurrection and revolution. Black leaders, such as Malcolm X, represented one strand of opinion, arguing that the state deliberately kept Black people in conditions of permanent debility – physical, moral and psychological. He too was intent upon exposing the illusion of freedom portrayed in the idea of the United States as a great and wondrous melting pot.
As the novelist and essayist James Baldwin wrote in 1962, ‘one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long’.51 Whatever political programme might follow, or personal solutions might be found (in Baldwin’s case, self-imposed exile in Paris), the first task, many writers and activists agreed, was to analyse the day-to-day reality of conditioning and brainwashing for an entire population. The African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote ten years later of her political awakening: ‘I – who have “gone the gamut” from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun – am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now.’52
Toni Morrison, herself a graduate from Howard, would later reflect, from a different vantage point, on the unspoken racial dimension within the constructed patriotic sense of American ‘togetherness’. She remarked how new immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were invited to share and at the same time to bond in their sense of not being Black:
But to make an American, you had to have all these people from these different classes, different countries, different languages feel close to one another. So what does an Italian peasant have to say to a German burgher, and what does an Irish peasant have to say to a Latvian? You know, really, they tended to balkanize. But what they could all do is not be black. So it is not coincidental that the second thing every immigrant learns when he gets off the boat is that word, “n-----.” In that way, he’s establishing oneness, solidarity, and union with the country. That is the marker. That’s the one.53
As a Black prisoner and self-taught Marxist during the 1960s, George Jackson rejected perceptions that the Russians or Chinese were more captive, in mind, than Americans. He came to admire the teachings of Mao, and to celebrate all that the Party had achieved for the Chinese population. Not only people of colour but also whites were brainwashed in the United States, he argued, to accept the illusion that the system was something quite other than a racialised police state. Jackson had been jailed in 1961 aged twenty, for stealing $70 at gunpoint from a gas station. He was given a sentence of one year to life, and due to various disputed prison incidents and infractions, remained incarcerated until he was killed during an attempted escape in 1971. After encounters with the police and the law as a ‘juvenile’, and time in a youth ‘correctional facility’, Jackson spent his decade of adult life undergoing the brutality of prison and regular stints of solitary confinement. The US penitentiary system provided for Jackson and many others that ‘total institution’ which Goffman had identified, a system that perpetuated a racist society. One must bear in mind that at present in the United States, over 2 million people are incarcerated and around 70,000 experience solitary confinement. African Americans make up around 13 per cent of the US population, yet they constitute over 35 per cent of the nation’s prison numbers, with even higher rates for those convicted for life sentences or on ‘death row’.54
Jackson’s prison letters, first published under the title Soledad Brother, in 1970, swiftly became a literary sensation and a source of much controversy, given their unflinchingly revolutionary stance. They offered a searing account of the fate of Black inmates, detailing how they were constantly surveyed (often at the end of the barrel of a gun) by the prison authorities. Jackson presented an unforgettable account of the constant menace and violence, the role of gangs, and of how white racist groups of prisoners were aided and abetted by guards. He wrote of how the latter might also encourage white prisoners to throw rubbish and faeces at Black prisoners and turn a blind eye to their knives. The letters described the constant threat of beatings or death, the grim routines, the forbidding, life-sapping physical environment that instantly confronted the new inmate – the horrible smells and noise, the cold, the withheld or contaminated food, in short the assault upon the mind and all the five senses. The whole apparatus of punishment was designed, he explained, to destroy ‘logical processes of the mind’, to ‘disorganize thoughts’ and intimidate totally.55 In spite of his incarceration in such a system, Jackson retained a capacity to resist and produced a singular, stark political analysis of what he considered to be mass American brainwashing.
Inside prison, Jackson took the chance to educate himself and develop his uncompromising political analysis. He became a member of the Black Panthers, and rewrote his will to leave royalties from his writings to their cause. In the sense that he had some means to read and write, and to send messages outside to friends and family from time to time, the system was not at the very limit of the ‘total institution’ that we have sketched. Jackson still had scope to use and retain his memory, to make use of his intellect, and to find some resources to pursue his own thinking, albeit in a custodial regime.56
He debated ideas, and read, for example, stories, essays and poems about the plight of African Americans by Richard Wright. He also drew upon the ideas of the left-wing psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, as well as Marx and Engels, Lenin and Mao. From his autodidact studies, he reached those stark conclusions, commensurate with his own penal experience. In Jackson’s view, the US state sought total control, and operated through permanent surveillance, repression and violence, which liberal critics had associated with Soviet and Maoist jurisdictions. He concluded that African Americans had no choice, once appropriately radicalised, except to rise and to fight.
In the 1960s and 70s on both sides of the Atlantic we can witness such sentiments and debates about the ‘totality’ of the liberal democratic system, not just custodial spaces within it. Some angry protesters and critics, white and Black, saw the armed ‘self-defence’ of minorities as essential; others believed that armed action against the state was the only way out of a collectively captive and brainwashed mentality. Their aim was to awaken the ‘masses’, the general populations of Western democracies. Their choices generated heated divisions among much larger bodies of students, workers and activists. Were these ‘revolutionaries’, enlightened and appropriately disenchanted, de-captivated, or, conversely, instances of people brainwashed, even maddened, by their own closed-mind ultra-left-wing thinking, into following a disastrous and useless violent oppositional political path?
Admirers saw them as free spirits; opponents viewed them at best as full of illusions, at worst as depraved criminals and/or mentally ill. Revolutionary cells, brigades and clandestine networks emerged in various countries within the Western world: for example, in Italy, the Red Brigades; in the United States, the Weather Underground; in Germany, the Baader–Meinhof Gang. These groups rejected what they saw as the fiction of liberal democracy and derided proud claims about the Free World, seeking to learn from the strategies of Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, and thereby to create ‘guerrilla actions’ in Western cities.
Ulrike Meinhof’s writings charted her own move towards this violent conclusion, the vital importance of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Her dread, already apparent in 1960, was that, as in the 1930s, people were victims of self-serving wishful thinking, assuming that the worst kind of conflict inside Germany about the future of democracy could somehow be avoided, that an ultra-reactionary politics, even fascism, would gradually soften of its own accord, without a direct and militant confrontation. She noted how past inaction had cost millions their lives, and claimed that the political tendencies of the Federal Republic of her own day ‘justify every kind of fear’. She treated optimism about benign amelioration as ‘the reserve of fools’, and insisted that all those who, like her, ‘feel the suspicion, the mistrust and the discomfort of the moment’ should ‘come together to prevent what happened in the past from happening again’. By 1967, she was writing scathingly about political repression and curbs placed on freedom to oppose the system; in the West, she said, it was not deemed a criminal act to drop napalm on women, children and the elderly, but protesting those acts was. The same could be said for terror tactics and torture when deployed by the state, and effectively opposing them. She thus celebrated how sections of the student movement and extra-parliamentary opposition were not ‘playing nice’ anymore, people were ‘no longer concealing their annoyances, or sweeping conflicts under the rug, or explaining [their] nausea as a consequence of a pill, or fighting melancholy with coffee, or stomach aches with mint tea, or depression with champagne, or vapid sobriety with schnapps’. The contradictions of society, she said, were now coming to the surface. ‘Fake harmony’, she added, with evident relief, has ‘gone down the tubes’.57
The small but determined organisations like the Baader–Meinhof believed that what was required was a violent set of shocks; exemplary actions were needed to awaken the people from their state of captivation. They hoped that their actions could focus public attention, kick-start a larger uprising, perhaps even a new age of revolution.
Jackson’s views about how the penal institution is the heir to slavery have been further analysed and developed, not least through the work of the academic, writer and political activist Angela Davis. Davis’s own personal story was caught up with that of Jackson and other prominent Black prisoners during that period. She also had suffered arrest, interrogation and trial. Although eventually found not guilty and released, she endured a sixteen-month sentence.58 Davis and others built on those earlier critiques, using the term ‘prison– industrial complex’ to describe the US archipelagos of custody and punishment and their psychosocial effects. She conveyed how this enormous network of institutions and practices had to be understood as the contemporary site of mass repression for Black people, a massive structure and permanent endeavour to sweep up the ‘troublesome’ population, the dispossessed, disadvantaged and poor.
As a colleague of Davis’s reflected, around 2000, in a conversation with her about the forms of critique, activism and protest she had undertaken, and which sought among other things prison abolition: ‘[t]he logic of the prison-industrial complex is closer to what you, George Jackson, and others were forecasting back then as mass containment, the effective elimination of large numbers of (poor, black) people from the realm of civil society’. Davis reflected on this remark, insisting that ‘penal abolitionism should not now be considered an unrealizable utopian dream, but rather the only possible way to halt the further transnational development of prison industries across the world’.59 The point was that to really see the condition of prisoners in custody, the fate of people broken and subjugated in that ‘complex’, was also to identify the true fault lines across an entire society.
In this chapter we have moved from East to West, and from the past much closer to the present. In a sense we have followed that passage with Miłosz, who moved from Poland to California. Miłosz may have penned The Captive Mind while in exile, but Poland was everywhere present and painful in his thinking, even if the lessons he told were intended to have wider geographical and political importance. He considered the diverse ways we might fall in love with a crazed ideology or devote our lives to opposing it; on the other hand, live somehow or other half-following rules, keeping our heads down, assenting to power, making trade-offs with ourselves and thereby, he suspected, seeking to drown out guilt for the past and corrupting the better sides of our natures.
Such ideas might well interest and trouble us now, in very different political contexts than his own. The Polish system that Miłosz had left sank quickly into conditions that corrupted and destroyed basic freedoms, threatened life, and compromised independent thinking and artistry. Communication in post-war Poland, so Miłosz said, was based on a shared understanding that each person was participating in a ‘constant mass play’.60 The difference there, rather than here in the West, he thought, was that making the wrong move, even into liberal opinion and democratic expression, might well kill you. For each ‘comrade’, maintaining the role play was crucial, and in this live drama, under the eye of the Party, false steps could be deadly.
As well as the horrors of Stalinism, Miłosz was also interested in unpicking the contradictions inherent in this notional divide between mass conformity in the East and individual freedom in the West. His book was not just a series of revelations of his fellow Poles’ abjection under communism, designed for Western liberal self-validation. He made clear in his writing that it was not only under that one political system – Stalinism – that people swallowed ‘truths’ or accepted ‘inevitabilities’ they knew to be inadequate, distorting and inimical to an authentic life. The Captive Mind shifted the ground from the Manichean visions that often prevailed, suggesting, as Judt put it, ‘there is more than one kind of captivity’.
By the 1980s, as the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe gradually weakened, several writers revisited and re-evaluated Miłosz’s book. Among those who had rejected the work initially, in the 1950s, only to revise their views later, was Susan Sontag. Speaking in 1982, in the context of the spectacular rise of Solidarity (a trade union and political movement in Poland, led by Lech Wałęsa, which confronted the sclerotic Soviet-backed government), she explained why she and her friends had previously had so little time for Miłosz’s book: ‘[w]e had identified the enemy as Fascism. We heard the demonic language of fascism. We believed in, or at least applied, a double standard to the angelic language of Communism.’61
But Miłosz was not interested solely in the brainwashing potential of closed milieus – although any state that determines entry and exit visas, any institution that can lock up the gates, to keep people in and observers out, or of course any compound, camp or cult with barbed-wire perimeters and watchtowers, has an advantage in doing so. He also wanted his Western readership to consider the scope for manipulation and the orchestration of opinion, as well as for mindlessness, conformity, compliance and captivity in liberal democracies. This was not to equate the societies, but to explore certain human propensities that might interact with pressures that came from outside. These ideas have been further developed by others in the West, seeking to undercut the language or simplistic paradigms of Cold War tub-thumpers who decried what was happening in the East and congratulated the West for being the true home of freedom, the acme of civilisation.
Even before his defection, in the years he lived on the East Coast in the late 1940s, Miłosz revealed in his private correspondence that he found US culture and society seriously perturbing. He had attended cocktail parties during his Washington stint as a cultural attaché for Poland and confessed he found the small talk insufferable, the scenes of unbothered enjoyment among well-to-do socialites somewhat surreal, and the level of cultural understanding, to say the least, patchy. The world was freer, and yet the air of smug assurance and sometimes stupidity were shocking, he felt. For Miłosz, this New World seemed replete with its own (admittedly very different) psychological manacles and blinkers.
In letters to friends, he voiced doubts about the reality of freedom in the United States, wondering, for instance, why the concept could not be expanded and sustained more positively. There, he admitted, people enjoyed a certain liberty from the state, a capacity to roam, to meet and indeed to consume so many things, at will, and yet he found so much highly questionable and distasteful; all that talk of being the land of liberty, and yet so little provision for meaningful, positive social aims, or collective entitlements, say, to healthcare or higher learning. These should be available for the entire society, not just the fortunate classes and elites.62
Miłosz’s recoil from the United States had an aesthetic as well as a political dimension. Reeling from the platitudes he heard in Poland where America was deemed by some ardent communists as merely ‘the land of Coca-Cola’, on the East Coast he found himself alienated by cinema audiences who displayed infantile reactions and poor taste, for example by bursting out laughing at tragic scenes. In one of his letters, he diagnosed ‘[t]he spiritual poverty of millions of this country’; it was a condition he found ‘horrifying’. ‘The only living people’, he declared airily, ‘are the blacks and the Indians.’ He was appalled that so many lives revolved around watching or listening to what he regarded as complete dross; popular culture and radio chat were evidently not for him. For a ‘normal person’, he insisted, ‘being subjected to a two-minute dose of [radio] would make them sick’.63
According to Miłosz, such media were offering ersatz entertainment, mass excitement, distraction and political cant. This was a period when the great powers all used radio as part of the Cold War propaganda struggle for hearts and minds. In the 1950s, the radio station Voice of America, funded by the US government, ramped up its production, or as critics saw it, sold America to the whole world. Meanwhile, CIA-funded stations such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were established to reach Eastern European states and the Soviet Union. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – albeit with its wider, patrician mission, and its arms-length distance from government – was broadcast overseas daily from London, in the name of facts, balance, cool analysis and notions of liberal democracy. Radio Moscow – under the more direct orchestration of its political masters – produced its own weekly diet of ideologically loaded content for listeners.64
Miłosz even went so far as to argue in his private communications, at least, that the art of brainwashing had reached a kind of perfection in the United States, precisely because it was less obviously and crudely conducted than in Stalin’s empire: ‘[t]he means by which public opinion was moulded in countries such as Poland were child’s play compared to the art-form the Americans had developed, and the methods used by [the US] security services’.65 Miłosz saw Soviet-style endeavours to hack people’s minds as rather antiquated compared to the Americans’ own ‘exceptionally subtle methods’.66 Freedom was to be wished for, he suggested, but rarely secured. At the very least, the outcomes of this much-vaunted freedom seemed to him dismal; if this was true ‘freedom’, more was the pity.
Miłosz perhaps half recognised that he might be thought a snob for his strictures on post-war US culture; but he could not resist railing against a society that was peopled, he said, by ‘unfortunate American puppets’: a population characterised by a ‘depressing inner stupor’ and a value system where the supreme good was often reduced ‘to money alone’.67
During the 1960s, as Miłosz looked on from his new academic position at Berkeley, growing numbers of Americans were inveighing against their society, voicing their demands for a decisive change of direction in government, or, more militantly, for an end to capitalism, the illusions of the free market, the unbridled nature of corporate power. They were outraged by official denials about the escalation of the Vietnam War and US neo-imperialism. So not everyone was successfully ‘brainwashed’, or stupefied, whatever Miłosz believed; there was an enormous public backlash. Critics who sought to call out the ‘brainwashing’ were plentiful, especially among the young; they demanded full exposure of the mendacious and often fantastical, as well as grossly ill-informed military policy, and the naive anthropological belief that the United States’ ‘offer’ to liberate all people would be received with unmitigated joy in Vietnam, or indeed by millions of peasants, factory workers, rural and urban dwellers in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
Outspoken American writers, scientists, doctors, entertainers, musicians and sporting stars also denounced US warfare in South East Asia, and the manner in which the government was in thrall, they felt, to misguided and pernicious assumptions. A rebellious generation of students reviled a mainstream political class that they complained sought to take the American public for dupes. Muhammad Ali, heavyweight champion of the world, made waves in his blunt rejection of the ‘white man’s war’ in Vietnam, and accordingly faced censure, the loss of his title from the World Boxing Association, and the threat of long-term imprisonment, in an endeavour to silence him. Prominent figures ranging from the expert on childhood and parenting Dr Benjamin Spock, to the writer Arthur Miller, to the singer and actor Eartha Kitt, also called out government lies, delusions, hypocrisies and spin.68
It would be inappropriate to liken the scale of persecution for dissidents and protestors under Stalin or Mao to the punishments meted out to critical intellectuals in the United States or other Western liberal democracies in the post-war decades, even if imprisonment or, in theory, execution for spying were possible there too. (In one case – that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – this punishment was carried out in the Cold War United States. They were found guilty of revealing atomic secrets to the Russians and were executed by the electric chair in the state of New York, in 1953.) All the same, we should not minimise the scale of surveillance, harassment and sometimes active oppression of the most militant and challenging left-wing and other radical political opponents of US policy in 1950s and 60s America, including some who were white, privileged and well established.
As the historian Gary Gerstle writes of the 1950s: ‘[w]ith a great shudder, American institutions were ridding themselves of alleged subversives, and a big chill enveloped American society, freezing most radical dissenters, Communist or not, in their tracks’.69 Serious, certainly revolutionary, dissent against the existing order was policed, albeit in different ways, in both of the two world systems, communism and capitalism. In this second American Red Scare (the first had followed the Russian Revolution in 1917) anyone who challenged capitalism from the communist position was open, in principle, to state investigation. The Left, in these years, Gerstle argues, was decimated as an organised force. Where membership of the Community Party in Poland was a passport for many to survive and find promotion, it was a passport to trouble and investigation in the United States; the climate of McCarthyism and the ministrations of J. Edgar Hoover and company at the FBI ensured as much.
Yet, even so, some spaces for spoken, written and artistic principled opposition remained in the post-war United States, unlike in China or the Soviet Union at that time. Even in the shrill and intolerant 1950s the work of a critical writer such as Arthur Miller was available to audiences and readers. He could script a play like The Crucible (ostensibly about the Salem witch trials but clearly speaking to the McCarthyite ‘hunt’ for communists) and see it performed, in 1953, the very same year that The Captive Mind was first published. Miłosz, by contrast, had to flee to write his polemical book. Miller’s thinly disguised denunciation of the hysterical, and sometimes career-ending, anti-communism bedevilling the United States was caustic, but it did not result in the author being sent to a labour camp.
However, the FBI’s now well-documented assaults on freedom were real and intimidating, and often decimated livelihoods. FBI files on US citizens and the capacious political use of the label ‘un-American’ were pervasive, and many careers, collaborations and personal relationships were ruined; people lost jobs, and often their health. Miller himself was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1956, to be quizzed on his communist leanings. He refused to name other suspected communists. Eventually the verdict arrived; Miller faced fines and the confiscation of his passport, for contempt of court, but then appealed and the judgement was reversed. His life was interfered with, although not – as was the case for others – destroyed.
It cannot be ignored, then, that much self-censorship and political care was required of US critics if they wished to prosper without attracting the attention of agencies within the state. Post-war, Southern congressmen were able to use HUAC to reinvigorate the claim that a combined Black and red conspiracy was imperilling the Southern way of life, and, moreover, that this threat to Southern security was equivalent to a mortal danger to national security. They took advantage of the re-emergence of the Soviet Union as the great US foe to tie anti-communism to race politics, and to bolster their own resistance to greater civil rights. Politicians such as John Rankin of Mississippi, always fearful that Black radicals, alien agitators, liberals and Jews would conspire, used HUAC to insist that all such groups required careful vigilance by the authorities. In linking race to communism, he was knocking on an open door at HUAC, where others were also highly alert to ‘dangerous’ links between the Communist Party, the civil rights movement and organisations such as the National Negro Congress. Indeed, the latter had been listed as ‘subversive’ by the US attorney general during the Truman presidency.70
The African-American population had to deal with entrenched racist structures, as well as ‘micro-aggressions’ (to borrow the useful term that a Black psychiatrist, Chester M. Pierce, provided during the 1970s).71 Even though various reforms were made in the 1960s, and policies turned into legislation that sought the end of formal educational segregation, racism endured at multiple levels, as it does now. Jackson’s representations of the custodial world and the racial dimensions of policing remain as relevant as they did at the time. His aim was to suggest the prison-house world also existed outside of the penitentiaries; he would select the word ‘brainwashing’ in some of his letters, to bring home to the reader the captive state of the American mind.
Miłosz’s book pointed directly East, but also obliquely West; or at least, it invited debate about how, in a polarised political world, people may project fantasies into certain objects (even caricatured versions of other nations), engage in denial, swallow pills or become caught up in Ketman-like psychological convolutions in order to make ends meet. Miłosz’s book remains a useful mirror that can be held up to explore captive minds in that Cold War past, and in the present.
In September 2018, a notorious anonymous article appeared under the title ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration’, published in The New York Times and penned (it was assumed) by a senior staffer who was unwilling to go on record. He was later revealed to be Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official. The article painted a picture of disarray, and of the constant manoeuvring and dissembling of the president’s staff. It illuminated the persistent doublespeak, if not doublethink, required of them at the White House; a workplace rife with cynicism, dexterity and bitter rivalry. It suggested how those more morally troubled members of the retinue felt they had to operate in code, finesse Trump’s messages, moderate policies, deflect the leader from one course or another, massaging his ego, even when aware, presumably, of the perversity, or even absurdity, of so many of his pronouncements, and the venal nature of his goals.
What was the alternative? To swallow the Murti-Bing pill? In fact, a third alternative existed: to resign or get fired, and then reflect painfully on how on earth they had got sucked into these politics or the orbit of such a man. Yet many of the officials went about their business professionally and apparently unruffled by it all, even if personally unconvinced of the cause. No doubt, alongside the so-called resisters and tortured souls within that administration (those using Ketman) were others who, with less anguish or ambivalence, did as required, believing, not just ‘believing’, helping as needed, including arranging (when necessary) uniformly cheering and smiling crowds behind the presidential speaker at political rallies. Many cheered passionately. But on some occasions, as has been widely reported, glum or doubtful, let alone protesting, figures in the line of the cameras were moved out of the way by Trump’s staffers. The aim was to ensure that the facial expressions of those gathered around him were suitably joyful, respectful and expectant, for the benefit of the TV audiences. (This is simply a glaring and crude example of the image-management practices that are commonplace, regardless of the party.)72
Miłosz anticipated the argument often made today by critical theorists: that far from requiring absolute inner conviction in a bureaucracy, or a citizenry, an ideology may operate effectively when we simply do as required, grumble privately, but in practice accept that there is no alternative.73 We may well find ourselves doing what we deem ‘necessary’, even as we comply. In other words, millions who may well deplore the operation of a system in theory turn a blind eye, and therefore provide tacit acceptance for dire policies.74
In his article in praise of The Captive Mind, Judt recalled how, although many certainly did dissent, the voting public in Britain and the United States had been strongly encouraged to support massively destructive foreign policies thanks (in good part) to political deceit under the direction of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. In the British case, a notorious example of how government policy could be based on a false prospectus to the public was the decision to invade Iraq. The policy, or at least the public presentation of the policy, partly hinged on a 2003 briefing document issued to journalists by the government: this detailed an account of Saddam Hussein’s likely possession of weapons of mass destruction with far greater certainty than the evidence supported. The document came to be known in popular parlance as the ‘dodgy dossier’.
The administrations in the United States and the UK, fumed Judt, created a ‘hysterical drive to war’. The leaderships of those administrations required their ministers, officials and ultimately the people at large to fall in line with their policies; as though these bellicose or messianic convictions rested on a balanced view of the evidence; as though their own judgement calls, resting on ‘faith’, or even delusion, were backed up by incontrovertible intelligence, and any prolonged debate was disloyal.
In their support came cheerleaders and apologists who defended this muscular approach of liberal interventionism as the best hope for the future. Some intellectuals, as well as politicians, Judt noted, equivocated, bit their tongues or buried their scruples; thus they ‘typically aligned themselves behind [the leadership] while doubtless maintaining private reservations’. When the mistake became clear, they ‘blamed it upon the administration’s incompetence … With Ketman-like qualifications they proudly asserted, in effect, “we were right to be wrong”, explaining away their acquiescence.’ We in the West, Judt lamented, appease ‘the market’ as we once sacrificed to the gods; he sought to pinpoint our Western versions of Ketman and Murti-Bing pills, our willingness to live in thrall to an ideology that requires in effect – even in the absence of totalitarian brainwashing – that we forgo the imagining of, let alone the endeavour, to realise viable major alternatives.
Neoliberalism has prevailed for decades throughout much of the world and has brought about privatisation, deregulation, lowered taxes, unfettered capitalism, globalisation, and so on. It has brooked little contradiction, whatever the cost in lives, livelihoods and human misery, and the calamitous impact on the climate and the environment. Judt remarked, with an eye to this ideology, the remarkable scale of ‘intellectuals’ voluntary servitude before the new panorthodoxy’, adding that ‘[o]ne hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself ”’.75
Recognition that life choices are not always morally clear cut, and that people often live in a murky territory, full of negotiated compromises, half recognitions, partial reckonings and self-deceptions, is part of what Miłosz requires us to face, along with the existential struggle to be authentic and in good faith. The West may have seen totalitarian communism as having ‘brainwashed’ populations, but ‘brainwashing’ may also mislead, a label that suggests something too one-way, too unilateral to capture the full array of experiences even in those tyrannical Stalinist years. In the real world, however constraining, we need to consider the complexity of the adjustments that occur in people, the different ways a society affects the individual, and how diversely we may opt to navigate, both publicly and privately, that social order.
To read Miłosz’s reflections upon what people in Poland after the war slipped into, fell for or were willing to bear, and what they felt obliged to perform, invites comparison with the way we may now play our cards. In writing this book, and revisiting that literature on totalitarian and capitalist modes of persuasion and influence, I have found myself thinking harder about the constant accommodations or rationalisations we make now so as to conform in practice, even if dissenting privately. For instance, I might say to myself, I’d rather not use Amazon ever, given what I know about how it operates, and what it represents in the world. I’m against offering my custom to Amazon in theory, but they’ve still had my money, at times. I accept the arguments, I read about all that is terribly wrong with this company – the outrageous low-tax arrangements, scale, crushing of rivals, work practices, use of surveillance and generation of obscene wealth for a few, above all for its ultimate owner, a business entrepreneur and tycoon, who then exercises great leverage in the media, and enjoys glitteringly publicised joy rides into space. And yet, when too busy, for convenience, I put the problem aside and participate, knowingly seduced, as it were, diluting or bracketing my belief for now, negotiating with my conscience.
I perhaps might half-heartedly justify this to myself by vowing that, if only I had world enough and time, I would never consort with this labour-exploiting corporation that pays such shockingly miniscule taxes. Here is a business from whose values, in principle, I prefer to dissent completely, by way of boycott. It is not that I have no choice, even with that enterprise’s gargantuan expansion, but that to counter such impulses, it just seems too wearying to give up this option entirely. Perhaps I can just shop here occasionally, I might say to myself, when I am especially pressed. Clearly, I’ve been ‘bought’. Little denials or disavowals may let me get on with my day, yet leave an uneasy feeling of complicity: the sense that something that ostensibly offers me more freedom, more choice, is somehow drawing me into a collusive process, half against my own wishes. The technology makes the transaction – both literal and psychological – extremely smooth. It only takes seconds. We may be forced to be captive, or we may opt to participate in the self-justifying ways that Miłosz also described.
Before coronavirus hit the news in 2020, many of us were already in theory fierce critics of the airline industry in the larger context of globalisation. We understood and feared the climate emergency, recognised the link between our Western way of life and the problem and accepted – in principle – that each of us should do what we can as individuals (albeit recognising effective action had to be international as well, and organised through the work of political states). We even felt agonised about it, and yet the majority did not take a strong, principled position. We flew all the same, as it were despite ourselves, preferring not to keep in mind our carbon footprints, or to imagine a little bit of recycling or compensatory tree-planting would do the trick. We felt the problem was too big, or too remote, and we were mostly willing to be complicit – even benefiting from low prices, thanks to the lack of proper taxation on aviation fuel. No doubt some people don’t feel conflicted. Others, however, including myself, clearly did, and do. But something then can get lost in translation. Not because, in some utilitarian calculation, we necessarily believe our own choice of flying (to a business meeting, or a holiday) would really be justified – truly indispensable – but because we have other, more messy, self-deceiving and/or selfish explanations, or internal compromises. Gradually, perhaps, when galvanised, we may swing around to a more consistent position; but in many cases, only long after the cognitive move was first made to see the reality of the emergency and the radical contradictions that exist between how we are living and what is required of us, individually and collectively.
What I have sought to examine in this part of the book is not so much, or at least not only, the way a subject complies, conforms or does things out of pure fear of authority, or in recognition of the state’s power, but how in more ordinary circumstances, at liberty, we may consent to psychological accords, perform ‘deals’ in an elaborate negotiation with external agencies and internal voices as well. We might be completely unconscious of the contradictions between our overt values and beliefs and our actual conduct, or we may be aware (or half aware, a little guiltily) of the way we have kept the contradictions apart, telling ourselves that this separation is temporary, a ‘solution’ for now, something I’ll think about later when I’m less stressed; make me virtuous, one might say, as of old, but not yet …
A Polish friend tells me that the original title of Miłosz’s book could be translated as the ‘enslaved’ or ‘compelled’ mind, even if ‘captive’ serves well enough. Miłosz was also talking about the servile mind, the compromised mind, the sceptical mind, the cynical mind, and more. A key lesson to draw from him, I think, is that people are not necessarily entirely brainwashed, even when they appear to be so; they still exercise certain preferences, and know about certain splits. This speaks to both a weakness and a strength: we conform but we can also rebel. We can go through the motions while knowing, at least in ourselves, that our utterances bear no relationship to our real inner beliefs.
Judt set out his final critique of neoliberal policies in an excoriating book, Ill Fares the Land, published posthumously. It asks these questions: ‘[w]hy do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed to lurch indefinitely between a dysfunctional “free market” and the much-advertised horrors of “socialism”?’76
The stories we reach for when thinking about brainwashing are instructive: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four gave us ‘doublethink’, ‘memory hole’, ‘thoughtcrime’, ‘Room 101’, ‘telescreen’ and ‘Big Brother’. The Captive Mind, far less well known, offered us instead fables about ‘Ketman’ and the ‘Murti-Bing pill’. We have the household word ‘Orwellian’, but not ‘Miłoszian’; and perhaps that is the term now most urgently required.