Why Intellectuals Align Themselves with Authoritarians
Intellectuals who are steeped in history should know better than to back dictators. One writer broke down why so many intellectuals choose to do it.
Throughout history, dictators have risen to power by promising stability to a country’s suffering people. It’s no coincidence that Hitler’s resurgence after his prison release came during the Great Depression. Stalin’s role in the Bolshevik Revolution, which promised to work on behalf of Russia’s peasants, wasn’t coincidental either.
But as those figures began exercising power, the country’s intellectuals should’ve seen through their rulers’ rhetoric. Hitler perpetrated his country’s greatest shame and led Germany to ruin. Stalin starved large swaths of the Soviet countryside to feed his cities. Some intellectuals named these atrocities at the time, but many chose to go along with their dictators instead.
One of the great Soviet dissidents, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote The Captive Mind to answer why so many intellectuals twisted their ideas to fit their new regimes. The Captive Mind is a deep exploration of the appeal that ideologues have for intellectuals, and its value begins with the book’s epigraph. It’s attributed to “an old jew of Galicia” and captures the comfort with uncertainty that honest intellectuals must maintain to remain, well, honest:
“When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”
A Cure for Concern
Milosz begins by introducing a novel that appeared in Warsaw in 1932. It tells the story of a Mongolian philosopher who brings a miraculous pill to Europe. The people who took those pills “became serene and happy” and the “problems he had struggled with until then suddenly appeared to be superficial and unimportant.” These pills eliminated metaphysical struggles:
“A man who swallowed Murti-Bing pills became impervious to any metaphysical concerns. The excess into which art falls when people vainly seek in form the wherewithal to appease their spiritual hunger were but outmoded stupidities for him. He no longer considered the approach of the Sino-Mongolian army as a tragedy for his own civilization. He lived in the midst of his compatriots like a healthy individual surrounded by madmen.”
One of the jobs of intellectuals is to grapple with uncertainty and make sense of a complicated world. A dictator’s ideology answers all of the questions that writers and artists struggle to answer. Intellectuals will bite at the chance to feel like they’ve solved the hardest existential questions about life and even practical questions about how society should be run.
Milosz notes that regardless of intellectualism, “there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”
Genuine belief in the dictator’s worldview isn’t the only way to satisfy the internal longing for harmony, either. Lip service is enough to bring peace to an intellectual navigating the dictator’s dangerous fantasy.
Suppressing Real Opinions
Milosz spent an early chapter describing findings from a book about Central Asian religious practices. One of those practices is Ketman, which is paying lip service to beliefs that one doesn’t really believe.
Often in a dictatorship, it’s enough to remain silent on political issues. Criticizing the leader places the speaker in danger. Often, that danger extends to family members, as it does in North Korea, where family members of defectors are sent to camps or killed if one family member escapes the country. Milosz quotes the author of the book on Central Asian religion to describe the instances when silence is no longer an option:
“‘Nevertheless,’ says Gobineau, ‘there are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit.’”
When silence is seen as taking a side, then everyone with a voice has a choice to make. They can remain silent and defend the dictator’s opposition or support the dictator regardless of how they really feel. Many support the dictator to avoid danger to their friends or family.
However, there are deeper reasons that an intellectual may become a legitimate convert. Milosz quotes Gobineau to explain what Ketman practitioners get out of lying to themselves:
“Thus one acquires the multiple satisfactions and merits of having placed oneself and one’s relatives under cover, of not having exposed a venerable faith to the horrible contact of the infidel, and finally of having, in cheating the [infidel] and confirming him in his error imposed on him the shame and spiritual misery that he deserves.”
Intellectuals can use the dictator’s ideology as a club to beat old opponents. Instead of working out a complicated argument, an intellectual can align with the dominant ideology to win any argument. Power is a shortcut through the work an honest intellectual should do during normal times. Given the chance to get more influence for less work, many people would side with the dear leader, too.
The Analyses Get More Detailed
The Captive Mind is a great breakdown of how intellectuals are cultivated by authoritarians. Milosz goes on to evaluate specific types of intellectuals to see how they make the journey to ideologies that rise to power but refute everything the intellectual believed in the “before times.”
In an age of influencers who are subject to their audiences’ whims, The Captive Mind is as relevant as its English publication in 1953.