Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of radicals is to read accounts of former believers. In that classic collection of essays by disillusioned communists—The God That Failed—six major writers evoke what passionate belief feels like and analyze the kinds of thinking that sustain it. In the opening selection, Arthur Koestler describes the heady moment when “the new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past” when one still lived among “those who don’t know.” One has at last achieved complete serenity and assurance, except for the “occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living.”
The most important lesson Koestler learned was what might be called “preemptive refutation,” a series of techniques guaranteed to handle any counter-evidence. When, as a novice reporter for a communist paper, he pointed out that every word of a major story was false, the editor explained that Koestler still had the “mechanistic” outlook instead of the proper dialectical one revealing what was “objectively” happening. Once you have assimilated dialectics, Koestler explains, “you were no longer disturbed by facts,” which fell automatically into place. The only remaining difficulty was adjusting to a rapid shift in the party line. Then you had to search your memory to convince yourself that you had always accepted the new truth. It’s just what Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” The whole process reminded Koestler of the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland “in which the hoops moved around the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player missed his turn and the Queen shouted ‘Off with his head,’ the order was executed in earnest.”
Dostoevsky, the only nineteenth-century thinker to foresee what we have come to call totalitarianism, drew on his own experience as a former revolutionary to represent the radical mindset from within. He asked himself: what would Russian intellectuals do if they ever gained power? And he realized that, although his generation was not as bloodthirsty as the radicals to follow, they, and he himself, could be drawn into committing horrible crimes in the sincere conviction that they were pursuing justice. The relative moderates, who above all want to dissociate themselves from the conservatives, can always be shamed into going along with anything. It is a mistake to think that the decent people we know would never endorse, let alone commit, vile deeds. “And therein lies the real horror,” Dostoevsky explains. In Russia, and eventually everywhere,
the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing . . . the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain! . . . The possibility of considering oneself—and sometimes being, in fact—an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy—that is our whole affliction today!
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