Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Why Intellectuals Conform

Editor's Note

Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.

In a 1948 article in Commentary, art critic Harold Rosenberg famously referred to intellectuals as “the herd of independent minds.” Then as now, people who pride themselves on their intellect seemed eager to surrender it to prevailing orthodoxies. 

For more than a century, the orthodoxies to which well-educated herds have stampeded have often been totalitarian. The pause created by the Soviet Union’s collapse proved short-lived. As Ryszard Legutko observes, “the totalitarian temptation among intellectuals turned out to be so strong that it not only survived communism but, in recent decades, has shown a clear upward trend, both in terms of the number of those affected and the increase in repression against the opponents.”

Why do we see so few mavericks straying from the herd? Why are some intellectuals so reluctant to risk arriving at unapproved conclusions? And why does one find less diversity of opinion at major universities than among ordinary folk? Time and again, we find the well-educated not just willing to conform, but leading the conformists. Cancel culture, after all, was a university product. It is not construction workers or farmers who call anyone who disagrees a fascist.

One might have thought that educated people would reject simplistic models, or what is an education for? Some do, but many others denounce complexity itself as a tool of oppressors. What accounts for this difference? And how do those trained to detect complexities manage to forget what they have learned? Reflecting on postwar, Stalinist Poland, Czesław Miłosz posed these questions with special clarity. Then it was still possible for Poles to see Communism as both desirable and inevitable. America today resembles that period much more closely than it resembles the age of Brezhnev, with its “lip-service state.” “Intersectionality,” like the dialectical materialism of Miłosz’s day, now promises the triumph of good over evil. Neither allows for any middle ground. Silence is violence, we frequently hear; or, in Bolshevik parlance, he who is not with us is against us.

Miłosz, of course, was not the only thinker to reflect on intellectual surrender. Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, and Nadezhda Mandelstam, among others, examined it with great profundity. For that matter, so did Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other nineteenth-century Russian writers who witnessed the intelligentsia’s impassioned embrace of conformity. In The Possessed, Dostoevsky predicted in detail where this mindset would lead.

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We get the term “intelligentsia” from Russia, where it was coined about 1860. It meant something very different from its meaning in English today. The term designated not all educated people, but only a subset sharing certain characteristics. Not every society, and not every epoch, has featured an intelligentsia in the original Russian sense. In those that do, the herd assembles and punishes strays. Totalitarianism looms — as it does in the West today. 

Two criteria distinguished the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia from educated people generally. To be an intelligent (a member of the intelligentsia), one above all had to identify as an intelligent. That identity triumphed over, and often precluded, all others. It was not possible to consider oneself both a nobleman and an intelligent. One had to choose. The very fact that Tolstoy used his title of Count already made him ineligible, as he well knew. Neither could one consider oneself a Christian or a Jew who just happened to like reading. Jews, indeed, often joined the intelligentsia to shed their Jewishness. Especially dedicated intelligents even severed their ties with friends and family. It was routine to compare the intelligentsia to a monastic order. 

By the same token, one had to regard one’s profession as little more than a way to make a living. Professional integrity had to yield to intelligentsia demands. In The Possessed, one character wonders whether it is wise to hire an engineer who, as an intelligent, believes in universal destruction.

Intelligents had to profess a specific set of beliefs. One did not just happen to hold those beliefs; they defined who one was. To change any one of them was to alter one’s whole life. One risked ostracism and, still more painful, the feeling that one had betrayed one’s identity. Historians have often remarked on the oddity of this kind of identification. As historian Martin Malia observed, “No recognized system of social analysis, either those known to the intelligentsia itself or those elaborated by modern sociology, makes provision for a ‘class’ held together only by the bond of ‘consciousness, ‘critical thought,’ or moral passion.”

Intelligentsia beliefs varied from group to group and from decade to decade, but not very much. They ran the gamut from A to B. Prescribed opinions always included militant materialism and atheism (not agnosticism). Again, Tolstoy’s belief in God already excluded him. Intelligents also had to embrace some form of socialism or anarchism as well as a commitment to revolution. Such thinking soon made “terrorism” a highly prestigious occupation. Russia was the first country where a young man or woman, asked what they wanted to be, might answer “terrorist.” 

As Dostoevsky was the first to stress, whichever revolutionary ideology one chose, it always included a special role for the intelligentsia itself. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov develops the theory that society consists of two types of people. For the good of humanity, “extraordinary” men and women have the right — indeed, the obligation — to murder, while ordinary folk simply serve to reproduce their kind. Lenin’s idea that the working class on its own will never make a socialist revolution, but must be led by a group of dedicated intelligentsia revolutionaries, perfectly embodies this way of thinking.

No great writer could subscribe to such a rigidly prescribed set of beliefs, whether demanded by the intelligentsia or, after 1917, imposed by the regime. It was the pressure to write what Poland’s Communist rulers wanted that at last led Miłosz to emigrate. “My own decision [to emigrate],” he explains,

proceeded, not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach. A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature. 

Most not only learned to swallow those frogs but also, when told to switch to toads and lizards, assured themselves that they, too, were healthful. No matter how horrible the regime’s behavior might be, they were ready to repeat that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and that when you cut down trees the chips will fly. 

Today as well, especially in major universities, we see only a few American intellectuals prepared to defy orthodoxy. Within hours of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, well before any Israeli response, thirty-four Harvard student organizations signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible for the unfolding violence.” Not just responsible, but entirely responsible! One has to ask: is there anything they would not endorse?

Professors with such views train students, who spread them beyond academia and shape political programs. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” 

“History is repeating itself,” Legutko notes. “As in the past, today’s intellectual decency and respect for truth are with those who reject the Neo-New faith … not with those who attempt to enforce new ideology.” And there are precious few rejecters, at least who are willing to speak up. When friends assure me that soon a point will be reached where the pendulum must swing back toward common sense and decency, I wonder whether that is the appropriate metaphor. Perhaps a snowball rolling with increasing speed downhill would be more accurate.

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When I began to study Russian literature and history, I wanted to know why the evil of the Gulag and Auschwitz were possible. I was educated when Mao’s cultural revolution was taking place and it was fashionable to praise “the Chairman.” Then as now, I wanted to understand not only what makes some people favor such policies but also why so many more, who know better, go along with them. And why are intellectuals, who think of themselves as the enlightened, especially given to doing so? Do they really believe what they are saying? 

No sooner had I posed these questions then I recalled how pre-revolutionary Russian intelligents, who claimed to speak for all who suffer, justified throwing bombs laced with nails into cafes. I also recalled how Russian thinkers of the 1920s and the Polish intellectuals examined in The Captive Mind justified still greater brutality. How did my favorite writers explain such thinking? 

For the remainder of this paper, I would like to focus on three explanations: what Nadezhda Mandelstam described as the spell of “words” with a magical aura; what Solzhenitsyn described as the enchantment of “ideology”; and what Dostoevsky called the lure of “the uniform” and “ready-made ideas.” All three reasons, and especially the third, apply to America today.

These Russian writers agreed that while fear was always a factor, especially in the Soviet Union, it was not the whole story. On the contrary, fear often served as an alibi for conformism that would have been practiced anyway. For that matter, it rationalizes conformity even in Western countries today, where punishments are far less severe than in the USSR.

Magic Words 

Words can cast a spell, especially for those who make their living by them. As Nadezhda Mandelstam explained, even her husband, Osip, perhaps the greatest twentieth-century Russian poet, tried to convince himself of prevailing opinion, as did many others:

My brother Yevgeny Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror or bribery (though God knows there was enough of both), but by the word “Revolution,” which none of them could bear to give up. It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital punishment.”

“Revolution,” “socialism,” “the people,” and other magic words entranced the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, as “social justice” or “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” entrance intellectuals today. Typically, such words have no clear meaning; they figure as what one of my teachers used to call a grunt signifying approval. 

The Soviet period also featured numerous negative magic words, like “liberal” (preceded by “spineless”) and “cosmopolitan” (“rootless”). Nadezhda Mandelstam pointed out that the word “conscience” fell out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (as in “class consciousness”). Beginning with Stalin’s campaign against the Jews in the late 1940s, “Zionism” came to mean not belief in the state of Israel but an international Jewish conspiracy, as outlined in the (spurious) Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Is something similar happening to that word today? 

American magic words, positive and negative, proliferate. Can anything “progressive” be undesirable? Well-informed people must not only use recently coined approved words but also know the new meaning of old ones, which may be the opposite of their earlier meaning. “Diversity” now demands conformity of viewpoints. 

The list of negative words, which one must never even cite, let alone use, must by its very nature keep growing. Those who assiduously practice expunging newly unacceptable terms from their vocabulary soon realize that, before they have quite succeeded, the approved substitutions have themselves become suspect. Wordcrimes never end because it must always be possible for the better informed to convict others of verbal misdemeanors. 

Words are not condemned because they are offensive; they are deemed offensive because they have been condemned. 

Ideological Enchantment

Solzhenitsyn, Miłosz, Grossman, and others stressed the power of ideological systems to “bewitch” (Solzhenitsyn’s term) or “hypnotize” (Grossman’s) the mind. Because such systems are presumed infallible, they obviate the need for individual thought. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor attributes the inherent appeal of any system claiming absolute certainty to its power to banish the painful guilt and regret caused by uncertainty. “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience,” the Inquisitor explains, “but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” 

Those who choose freely are bound to make grievous mistakes. If only one could be certain, or, at least, be told by those claiming certainty what to do! “We are concerned here with questions more significant than mere force,” observes Miłosz in The Captive Mind. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction… .For the intellectual, the New Faith is a candle that he circles like a moth. In the end, he throws himself into the flame.” 

Solzhenitsyn wondered how Stalin’s torturers, who forced people to confess to crimes no one actually believed, managed to accept, or even take pride in, what they were doing? How did those who beat people to a pulp, deprived them of food and water, and kept them awake for a week — not to mention more imaginative means of destroying living flesh — justify these actions? 

To answer these questions, Solzhenitsyn explains, one must first reject the naïve descriptions of evil and evildoers in literature. In Dickens, Schiller, and Shakespeare, evildoers are depicted “in the blackest shades” and even seem “somewhat farcical and clumsy.” They are unbelievable because

they recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls of black. … But that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe he is doing good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law…it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications “were feeble — and his conscience devoured him.” Shakespeare’s evildoers “stopped short at a dozen corpses,” not millions like Lenin and Stalin. The reason is that the motivations of Shakespeare’s villains were personal, not the building of some earthly paradise. “They had no ideology.”: 

Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. … Thanks to ideology, the twentieth-century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explained that ideology suspends a person’s moral judgment. He learns to act not individually but “representatively,” so he can assure himself: it is not I who am performing these actions, it is the Party (or History or Progress) acting through me. With enough practice, the role one plays replaces the person one is. “After long acquaintance with his role,” Miłosz observes, “a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in party slogans.” 

When Klara, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, expresses dismay at the killing of so many innocent people, Golovanov replies: “[But] who is doing these things? Who is it who wants to do them? It is history. History does what it wants. … [W]hat matters most is the conviction that the process itself is necessary and inevitable.” This answer satisfies Klara. 

Such thinking provides what Bakhtin calls an “alibi” for anything one might do. But “there is no alibi,” Bakhtin insists. Indeed, the central fact of moral life is that each of us lives, always and everywhere, in a state of “non-alibi.” We must “sign” — take responsibility for — our actions. 

A key moment in Solzhenitsyn’s and Grossman’s novels occurs when conscience at last troubles a committed Bolshevik who has made himself into the Party’s perfect agent. He finds he can no longer view himself vicariously, as a mere representative of something else. In Grossman’s Life and Fate, dedicated Bolshevik Krymov begins to wonder how he could have signed on to the official condemnation of all those obviously innocent Party leaders condemned by Stalin as traitors. Why, Krymov asks himself, did I lack the strength to say that I did not believe Bukharin was a saboteur and assassin, but instead raised my hand and signed? “What am I trying to say?,” he asks himself. “That I am a man with two consciences? Or that I am two men, each with his own conscience?”

Donning the Uniform 

Even without magic words or ideologies, intellectuals are inclined to herd. They affirm what they do not really believe — or, more precisely, what they have not even seriously considered. Why? 

Solzhenitsyn describes how he once remarked to a fellow-prisoner, Boris Gammerov, that, of course, President Roosevelt’s public prayer was hypocritical. Gammerov angrily demanded to know why Solzhenitsyn did not admit the possibility that Roosevelt might actually believe in God. 

Solzhenitsyn was shocked. “To hear such words from someone born in 1923 [after the Revolution]? I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty…and right there it dawned on me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been planted in me from outside.” Planted from outside: Solzhenitsyn had thought he believed what he did not in fact believe. A person in this frame of mind readily does awful things under the impression that he is acting according to his sincere convictions. Solzhenitsyn came to realize that he had behaved reprehensively in just this way.

How does one come to accept beliefs “planted from outside,” beliefs one has not seriously considered? Dostoevsky witnessed young intelligents donning sets of radical ideas “like a uniform,” simply because their friends were doing so. In Crime and Punishment Razumikhin, frustrated that he cannot get people actually to examine seriously what they profess, explains that it is not erroneous ideas that bother him. “Not a bit! … Through error you come to the truth! … Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird.”

The pleasure of parroting the same words as one’s friends and colleagues: is that why professors so eagerly sign collective statements? On July 4, 2020, hundreds of Princeton faculty signed a letter to the university president and other administrators with a lengthy list of demands. One of them insisted that Princeton 

 constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty. … Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the [usual] set of rules and procedures. 

Did the Princeton faculty really want an unnamed committee using vague standards to oversee their research and publications? That is the question posed by classics professor Joshua Katz, who arrived at four reasons people might have signed the letter:

(1) They believe in every word. I suppose this is true for a few, including, presumably, those members of the faculty who were the initial drafters.

(2) They signed without reading it. I would not ordinarily believe this, but I am aware of a similar petition, not at Princeton, that people were asked to sign — and did so! — before knowing what they were putting their name to.

(3) They felt peer pressure to sign. This is entirely believable.

(4) They agree with some of the demands and felt it was good to act as “allies” and bring up the numbers even though they do not assent to everything themselves.

Why would one sign a document without reading it? Perhaps, like high school students imitating the cool kids, these professors just signed whatever the right people wrote? In that case, content wouldn’t matter. Of course, peer pressure — even if only anticipated — might also lead one to endorse positions blindly. The fourth group, which Katz supposes the most numerous, explicitly signs what it does not believe because of a higher-order belief, that one must follow one’s “allies.” One feels obliged to “bring up the numbers.” Again, the actual content is not important. 

Each of these reasons entails accepting opinions not because one has examined each one but as a package. In my own experience, package thinking is extremely common. That is why once one knows what someone thinks about one or two topics, one can usually predict what he thinks about many others. You buy the package because that is who one is.

Anna Karenina’s brother Stiva has adopted the entire panoply of liberal opinions held by his circle. “In spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him,” Tolstoy notes, “he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority [of his circle] and by his paper, and changed them only when the majority changed them — or more strictly speaking, they seemed to change of themselves within him.”

What does it mean to “firmly hold” beliefs one has not seriously examined? Stiva professes liberal positions on “all” subjects without actually considering the arguments for and against each one. His only choice is whether to join the liberals or some other group. Once that choice has been made, everything else automatically follows. Stiva “had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were ins style.” When liberal positions evolve, as they always do, Stiva evolves with them, always agreeing with however many changes. Such perfect coincidence would of course be extremely unlikely if he considered the pros and cons of each change. That is what Tolstoy means by saying that Stiva did not actually change his views, but “more strictly speaking, they seemed to change of themselves within him.” No agency is involved.

Instead of “he believes,” it might be better, in such cases, to say: “it believes to him.” 

A person who thinks this way would find it especially painful to differ on even a single position. More than ostracism, he fears betraying his very identity. 

Dostoevsky insisted that such thinking can readily lead to horror. It explains why otherwise decent people commit terrible crimes. As a former revolutionary, Dostoevsky realized it was only by chance that he had not done so. 

At the meeting of revolutionaries in The Possessed, one of the host’s relatives, who just happens to be present, hears the group advocate a revolution taking “a hundred million heads.” “I confess I am in favor of a more humane policy,” he concedes, “but as all are on the other side, I go along with the rest.” It is the most chilling line in the novel.

The novel’s revolutionary leader, Pyotr Stepanovich, explains how he can induce most intelligents to do absolutely anything. “I could make them go through fire; one has only to din into them that they are not advanced enough.” Such people, he continues, “are afraid to have an opinion of their own.” Instead of thinking for themselves, they eagerly adopt “ready-made ideas.” 

Colonel Vorotyntsev, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s novels about the origins of the Russian revolution, finds himself at a meeting of Kadets, the Russian liberal party. He listens as everyone voices the proper views they all already hold. For some reason they deem it “imperative…to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overpoweringly certain they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.” To Vorotyntsev’s surprise, he joins them in expressing opinions he knows he disbelieves! “What is it,” he asks himself, “that always forces us to adapt to the general tone?” Why, under the spell of shared opinion, had he “lied, prevaricated, betrayed his beliefs?” And why couldn’t he manage to say what he really thought? “Why was he so feeble?” 

Unless one understands how this pressure to conform works, Solzhenitsyn suggests, one will not understand why experience flatly contradicting professed views often fails to make the slightest difference. Vorotyntsev was no coward: as a mere colonel, he had dared to stand up to generals. And he had demonstrated the courage to risk his life in battle after battle. 

Apparently, there are two kinds of courage. “Courage in war and courage of thought are two different things,” Svetlana Alexievich observed. “I used to think they were the same.” In Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastic novel The Master and Margarita, which retells the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate, Pilate also wonders why he had been brave in battle but had not had the courage to defy the Sanhedrin and save the prisoner Jesus. The answer is that in battle, one acts along with others, but in challenging prevailing opinion one stands alone. In the first case, only one’s life is at stake; in the second, it is one’s very sense of self.

The heroine of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago locates “the root cause of all the evil” around her in “the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion.” Today as well, an independent thinker often finds himself among captive minds. Or rather, self-captive, because they have eagerly put on their own mind-forged manacles. What confines them, what prevents them from taking responsibility for their opinions, is their own cowardice. They dare not choose; they fail to think; they do not will to will.