The Captive Mind and Self-selection

Many yet defy capture and remain lively observers and critics of our neo-Gilded Age.

I was not planning on writing anything today, but I stumbled upon this very nice essay by the indefatigable Jeffrey Tucker over at the Brownstone Institute: “Why Did So Many Intellectuals Refuse to Speak Out?”

Why didn’t the “intellectuals” speak out en masse against the CDC’s assertion of extra-constitutional authority through the course of its manufactured pandemic?  Why haven’t intellectuals spoken up to demand evidence of the performance of the mRNA therapies (the “vaccines”), and why did they sit idly by as jurisdictions like New York City, the state of Victoria (Australia) or the whole of Canada imposed a kind of COVID apartheid on “the unvaccinated”? 

Where were the intellectuals when a pliant Canadian parliament granted “emergency powers” to Justin Trudeau’s government to lock up protesters and freeze their financial assets?  Justin was just getting warmed up.  On Quebecois television he complained that “there are people who are fiercely against vaccination … who don’t believe in science. They’re often misogynistic, often racist, too.  It’s a small group that muscles in.  And we have to make a choice, in terms of leaders, in terms of the country: Do we tolerate these people?”

We can at least credit Bill Maher for illuminating this stuff, but we all know that the self-anointed thought-leaders in government, in the media, in academia, everywhere have not encouraged active debate.  Instead, the FBI harasses the parents of school-age children for posing inconvenient questions, and the intellectuals either say nothing or applaud.  The government locks up most of a thousand protestors for more than two years in “pre-trial detention” for (admittedly sometimes rambunctious) protesting on January 6.  Again, the intellectuals say nothing or, worse, applaud because something about “Our Democracy™.”

Jeff Tucker goes on to advance the entirely reasonable explanation that the “intellectuals” tend not to speak up, because their options outside of their comfortable, high-status sinecures may be much less comfortable and feature no status within the establishment.

All these people hold on to their jobs for dear life. Their biggest fear is getting fired. Not even a tenured professor is safe. A passive-aggressive dean can always pile on a burdensome teaching load or move you to a smaller office. There are ways that colleagues and the dean can come after you.

The result?:

This sets up a terrible reality. The people who are responsible for shaping the public mind end up as the most craven class of obsequious simps on the planet earth. We want these people to be brave and independent — we need them to be — but in practice they are the complete opposite.

Indeed, “Think about people who in the last years have been tellers of truth”:

Very often, they were retired. They were independent. They had a solid source of income from family or were wise investors. They wrote for an independent newsletter or Substack. They don’t have bosses or career tracts. It’s only these people who are in a position to say what’s true.

This last point says something about the self-selection of the “intellectuals” into the business of “telling the truth.” The lazy alternative has proven to be allowing oneself to become subsumed by the credentialed “class of obsequious simps.” 

We may find some elaboration on self-selection in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951).  The (likely younger) intellectual might prove to be happy to cocoon himself within a (possibly corrupt) establishment in that:

There is a moment in the career of almost every fault-finding man of words when a deferential or conciliatory gesture from those in power may win him over to their side.  At a certain stage, most men of words are ready to become timeservers and courtiers.  Jesus Himself might not have preached a new Gospel had the dominant Pharisees taken him into the fold, called Him Rabbi, and listened to Him with deference.  A bishopric conferred on Luther at the right moment might have cooled his ardor for a Reformation.  The young Karl Marx could perhaps have been won over to Prussiandom by the bestowal of a title and an important government job…

But, there is a point of no return in that “once the man of words formulates a philosophy and a program, he is likely to stand by them and be immune to blandishments and enticements.”

Choose your metaphor: Cutting a “Faustian” deal with the Devil at the “Crossroads”; choosing “the road not taken” versus the well-worn path of credentialism and careerism. But, last week I found myself looking up the many-tabbed, inked-up pages of my copy of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind (1951).  One thing to get out of that book is that not everyone has to make a difficult choice. The ranks of the intellectuals may be populated with some number of cranks who truly believe in the latest iteration of the same old authoritarianism. There may have always been such frustrated true believers, who then, through no doing of their own, stumble on the opportunity to sign on to the authoritarian program. They eagerly sign on.

The principal question in The Captive Mind was: How could it be that such talented writers in his circle of friends and associates could prove to be enthusiastic proponents of the post-war, authoritarian regime in Poland?  How could they throw away their art and conform to the officially sanctioned and imposed strictures of “social realism”?

One reason is that conforming to the demands of the regime would allow one to enjoy financial security and status.  Much like Tucker’s intellectuals who have refused to speak out, these intellectuals perceived their only way forward was to express themselves in officially sanctioned ways, even if that meant diminishing their own work.  But, unlike Tucker’s intellectuals, there were those intellectuals who proved to be genuinely enthusiastic proponents of the new orthodoxy.  They were happy to see a new orthodoxy imposed from on-high. Being opportunistic was easy.

These intellectuals were much like those who populate Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Utopia (1937).  Those people anticipated the success of the Stalinist state in Russia, and, most of them were so committed to the dream of achieving Heaven on Earth by means of centralized control that they were able to allow themselves to excuse the obvious and the spectacular predations of the Stalinist state against its own people.  For example, even after it became common knowledge that slave labor and artificially induced famine claimed the lives of millions in Stalin’s Russia, intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw remained committed to the dream.  “I have advised the nations to adopt Communism,” he wrote, “and have carefully explained how they can do it without cutting one another's throats. But if they prefer to do it by cutting one another's throats, I am no less a Communist. Communism will be good even for Yahoos.” (Letter to Kingsley Martin, 1942)  Some small number of others like Eugene Lyons discovered that they could no longer live the lie.  They ultimately gave up on the dream and started to call it out for what it was.

One thing Milosz could not have known at the time he had composed The Captive Mind was that some of the people in his circle would, like Eugene Lyons, ultimately prove to be unable to live with the lie.  At least one of the artists he had profiled in his book ultimately committed suicide.  And what did Milosz do?  He managed to escape to the United States.

There is no more escaping to the United States now.  Not that the United States hasn’t had, and does not now have, its own orthodoxies.  But the orthodoxies of today do have more the appearance and actuality of official imposition and sponsorship.  Might it not even be worse in the countries of the British Commonwealth—like Canada? 

I keep finding myself citing a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979).  The “better half” of society, Kundera claimed, celebrated the official Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.  The old regime was being swept away.  A politically correct regime was taking over.

One can imagine that demands for change had built up even before the Second World War.  Liberation by Red Armies opened the way toward politically correct reform.  That liberation precluded other types of rather more liberal reform.

Kundera stood with the better half as a very young man.  But, how is it that he became intolerant of the new regime and the ideological demands that it imposed on art?  In an important exercise of self-selection, a middle-aged Kundera exiled himself to France in 1975.  But, where could a Kundera, young or old, escape to now in our current, dangerous, authoritarian moment?