Czesław Miłosz, "The Captive Mind"

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Czeslaw Milosz, "The Captive Mind" (1953, translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko)

 

 

저자가 서두에 인용한 글:

 

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. --- An old Jew of Galicia.

 

책 뒷표지의 글:

 

Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often buguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

 

"A central text in the modern efforts to understand totalitarianim." --- The New York Times Book Review

 

"A faultlessly perceptive analysis of the moral and historical dilemma we all face.... As timely today as when it was first written." --- Jerzy Kosinski

 

본문에서:

 

Of course, all human behavior contains a significant amount of acting. A man reacts to his environment and is molded by it even in his gestures. Nevertheless, what we find in the people's democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation. Comscious acting, if one practices it long enough, develops those traits which one uses most in one's role.... After long acquaintance with his role, 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. To identify one's self with the role one is obliged to play brings relief and permits a relaxation of one's vigilance. (p. 55)

 

But collaboration is an empty word as applied to a concentration camp. (p. 119)

 

Many great authors, among them Swift, Stendhal, Tolstoi, wrote out of political passion. One might even say that political conviction, an imprtant social message a writer wants to communicate to his readers, adds strength to his work. (p. 130)

 

But it matters little whether religious drives result from "human nature"[*] or from centuries of conditioning; they exist.... In its own fashion, the Party too is a church, Its dictatorship over the earth and its transformation of the human species depend on the success with which it can channel irrational human drives and use them to its own ends, No, logical arguments are not enough. (p. 207)

 

[ "Also characteristic was his[St. Thomas Aquinas's] teaching that the human soul is a unique subsistent form, substantially united with matter to constitute human nature." ---  in "Thomism," Britannica ]

 

The Party rightly and logically condemned the foremost Marxist literary scholar of the twentieth century, the Hungarian professor Lukacs. Deep, hidden reasons lay behind the emthusiasm his works aroused in the Marxists of the people's democracies.... The enemy, in potential form, will always be there; the only friend will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 per cent. If he accepts only 99 per cent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for from the remaining 1 per cent a new church can arise. (p. 214)