In response to: The Captive Mind Revisited
Possessed of the Dialectic
Editor's Note
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Theodore Dalrymple argues that it doesn’t matter: whether done through cowardice or through true belief, the actions are the same.
The degree to which the confessions of the accused in communist show trials were the product of psychological manipulation rather than of physical coercion was long a matter of debate in Western intellectual circles. It seemed astonishing that those who had devoted their entire lives, often since adolescence, to the communist cause, having braved danger and imprisonment to do so, should confess to having worked from the very first for British, German, or even Japanese intelligence. It was a puzzle: how could anyone avow such apparent absurdity?
Some intellectuals thought, absurdly, that the trials were equitable, just, and devoted to uncovering the truth; others that the communists possessed some special method other than straightforward torture for extracting confessions. In any case, the communists were different from other brutal regimes because they were supposedly motivated by high ideals.
The distinction between physical and psychological methods of coercion is largely false. As almost everyone knows, insomnia is a torture even when it is spontaneous; how much worse must it be when it is the result of physical deprivation of sleep, such as was employed in the production of those confessions.
Perhaps there is more of a puzzle about the minds of the torturers than about those of the tortured. What did they think they were doing, extracting confessions to what they must have known were figments of imagination? Did they believe that they were defending a noble cause? Were they afraid that, if they did not agree to torture, they would themselves be tortured? Were they sadists happy to live out their fantasies? Were they avid for the material advantages (in conditions of penury) that their employment gave them? Did some or all of these factors operate together? Such is the human mind that logical contradiction is not the same as psychological impossibility.
Complete cynicism and fundamental belief are not incompatible and indeed are much more likely to coexist where the good of the cause, as in Leninist ethics, is the sole criterion of moral action. How easy then is it to persuade oneself that in doing something that, without such an ethical theory, would be regarded as monstrous, one is acting decently and in accordance with duty. Indeed, the further one is prepared to go in violating normal morality, the better, more truly dedicated person one shows oneself to be.
In Costa-Gavras’s brilliant film, L’Aveu (The Confession), about the show trials in Czechoslovakia — in particular of Artur London, in 1952, based on the latter’s memoir — not only is the torture of London by humiliation, deprivation of sleep, and outright physical abuse graphically depicted, but also (very convincingly) the genuine outrage of his interrogators at his resistance to confessing what they know perfectly well to be false: as if his duty were not to tell the truth but to comply with the wishes of the Party, failure to do which made him guilty of all that he was charged with irrespective of the facts.
Unlike eleven of his thirteen co-defendants, London was not executed and was eventually allowed to move to France. Astonishingly, when he died in 1986, he was buried in the French Communist Party’s plot in the cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine; even more astonishingly, his wife, Lise, who had been a communist since her adolescence and died aged 96 in 2016, was also buried in the Communist Party’s plot. This suggests that she retained some element of faith in communist ideology to the last, despite the tyranny, the torture, the mass killings, the economic failure and the fall of the Berlin Wall (and no communist party had been more Stalinist than the French, unless it was the South African).
It is true that in time, as Professor Legutko implies, communist leaders lost the courage of their brutality. A less crudely enforced fear still pervaded communist countries (though not in North Korea or Albania, where the old methods persisted). But I am not sure that the leadership, even in the last years of communist rule, came to disbelieve wholly in the ideology upon which that rule was founded.
Taking Ceausescu as an example, I think that he was a true believer up to the moment that that he was shot. This is some kind of testimony to both the flexibility and the rigidity of the human mind. Ceausescu was a communist from his youth, when it was both rare and dangerous to be such in Romania. Born poor, and not very well educated, he suffered for his beliefs, spending years in prison. Such treatment only confirmed him in his convictions; and no one could contemplate the political conditions of pre-war and wartime Romania without thinking that radical change was necessary. The bad in politics is usually the best friend of the worse.
Before communist rule was imposed on Romania, the Communist Party was little more than a groupuscule. You had to be almost a fanatic to belong to it. When suddenly this groupuscule became all powerful, it quickly asserted itself and was responsible for thousands of deaths, complete terror, and economic dislocation. Ceausescu, who owed his reversal of fortune and extremely rapid social ascent to the Party, must have seen all this but persuaded himself that it served the interests of the humble such as he had been. Possessed of the dialectic, he was able to reconcile the appalling things seen and done with ultimate good, which was more real to him than day-to-day reality, just as, for many ecologists, the carbon dioxide content of the air is more real than the giant metal windmill on the horizon.
I surmise that he retained the belief that he developed in adolescence to the end of his days. His belief might have been absurd, but it was not insincere. If he lived in luxury by comparison with most Romanian citizens, it remained that of a poor man suddenly come into a fortune, and by the standards of rich people in the West was not remarkable. Even his privileges he would have seen as beneficial for the people, since they enabled him to work more efficiently for their good. No doubt he was protected from knowledge of the real state of affairs, with his motorcade view of the world, but such protection from it was not necessary for the preservation of his worldview: for once you have rejected the laws of identity and non-contradiction, as he had, everything becomes compatible with anything else. Yes, the people are going hungry, but that is a benefit conferred on them because they eat too much anyway.
I remember meeting a brilliant Russian intellectual in Moscow in 1990 who, while deploring the lamentable state into which the Soviet Union had fallen, attributed the latter to deviation from true Marxism-Leninism, rather as some Moslems are apt to explain the deplorable state of most Moslem countries to deviance from the Islam of the seventh century. In the queue to see the Lenin mummy-waxwork in the Kremlin mausoleum in the same year, I stood in front of an American from Brooklyn who told me that he considered the Soviet Union the hope of the world. In Italy in the same year, I bought a book by a psychotherapist advising Italians how to deal with the loss of their belief object, communism, though Italian communists had long claimed that the Soviet Union’s condition had nothing to do with communism as such. Perhaps all this should have alerted me to the recuperative capacity of Marxism and totalitarian modes of thought.
In a sense, the sincerity or otherwise of communist leaders and their apparatchiks hardly matters, since what they did, they did, irrespective of their motives. This must be true of everyone, however. The Romanian Revolution may have been intended as a coup d’état rather than as a revolution, but it turned out to have been a revolution all the same. Gorbachev may have been a true Marxist-Leninist attempting to reform the Soviet Union into greater efficiency, but he inadvertently did far more than that.
To deny curiosity or speculation about motives and character is to cease to be human, however, and when dealing with other human beings we cannot help but take into account their motives. An official or bureaucrat who is only carrying out orders is more likely to accept a bribe than a true believer. Most people are probably time-servers most of the time, whatever the walk of life to which they have been called: what communism did is give them extra motivation, both carrot and stick, for remaining such.
Professor Legutko is surely right in suggesting that totalitarian ways of thinking and acting require more explanation in free societies than in those that are founded on terror, and where terror was exercised until very recently, within living memory.
For quite a time, I have collected — in a casual way — books about the Soviet Union published in Britain, the U.S., and France during the 1920s and ’30s. Many of them were laudatory, revoltingly so, but many of them also were deeply condemnatory. Details of Soviet tyranny were available in the West from the very first, even photographs of massacres of priests and the Ukrainian famine. The problem was not a lack of information, but an iron will to disbelieve it.
It is a matter of history that the admiration for the Soviet Union among Western intellectuals declined, not increased, as it became less brutal (albeit that it remained a dictatorship). It was as if brutality had been some kind of evidence for the perfection of the end sought by Bolshevism. Only people with a true belief in an upright cause and with some semblance of a humanitarian theory (which Nazism never had) could behave in the way that the Soviets did.
It is worth speculating on the attractions of totalitarianism for Western intellectuals. Why does a class of persons who should value intellectual freedom more than any other class of persons and who on the whole have enjoyed it, and who moreover have often enjoyed material prosperity or at least the possibility of it, often hanker after a system that is precisely, and obviously, the opposite of the one would have supposed that they wished for?
In the first place, totalitarian regimes are intellectual in origin and continue to ascribe a great importance to intellectuals. Lenin was an intellectual and so, perhaps more surprisingly, was Stalin — a hundred times more so, at any rate, than any politician now practicing in the West. Of course, this ascribed importance had its dangers: the poet Mandelstam said that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world where poets were considered important enough to kill. No doubt Western intellectual supporters of totalitarianism thought that they would successfully rule the roost, and that they would play the role of Saturn rather than that of the devoured children. Professional intellectuals may sometimes speak of the dispersal of power but are usually, if surreptitiously, avid for its concentration — in their own hands, of course, for they consider themselves the most qualified to exercise it. Totalitarian regimes (even on a small scale, such as that offered by universities) offer them opportunities that genuinely pluralistic regimes cannot.
Second, totalitarian regimes usually rest upon a unifying explanation or philosophy of everything, which many philosophers seek and many intellectuals think they have found. Such temperaments are scientistic rather than scientific and are impatient of the irreducible variousness of the phenomena of the human world, reducing them to a simple unitary explanation and therefore providing a single solution to all of life’s little problems. It requires determination, but also a certain mental capacity, to reduce everything to a simple explanation. (Lenin’s writing has the style of a pneumatic drill, if such an instrument were able to write.) Once the totalitarian regime is established, dialectical skill is needed to navigate changes in official policy: that is to say, change without admission of change in the underlying ideology.
Totalitarianism offers intellectuals a providential role in society. They alone see through the fog of events and can penetrate to the deeper meaning that allows them to guide the way to the future. They bring enlightenment to the benighted with missionary zeal. They are therefore entitled, indeed have a duty, to dictate.
I had naively thought that the attractions of totalitarianism would decline with the implosion of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. I was entirely mistaken. After a brief interlude, it enabled a thousand totalitarian flowers to bloom, to adapt slightly Maoist terminology. Monomaniac pressure groups, whose members might once have been communist, emerged to impose their vision on the rest of society, with results familiar to Professor Legutko from his experience in communist Poland. They sometimes succeeded in imposing a kind of censorship, not only on institutions but on all public discourse.
One must not exaggerate: for there are as yet no camps for dissidents, no midnight knocks on the door, and outside the goldfish bowl in which intellectuals swim and take their being, the censorship and official lying affects the rest of the population much less. Nevertheless, there have been, and apparently still are, widespread tests of loyalty to ideological shibboleths in universities and other important institutions. No one should underestimate the importance of indoctrination and imposed ideological conformity in universities, for today’s students are tomorrow’s ruling class.
Professor Legutko once told me, when he became a member of the European Parliament, that the atmosphere in that august assembly was highly reminiscent of communist assemblies: the organized lying and cynicism was combined with the ideological conformity. We have not done with totalitarianism yet.