The poet Czesław Miłosz defected from Soviet-dominated Poland in 1951. Two years later he published The Captive Mind. He had been a “man of the left,” and accommodated himself to the communist regime in Poland that was imposed by Russian tanks. But over time he became demoralized by the need to practice what he calls “Ketman,” the practice of external conformity to reigning orthodoxies while harboring interior heterodoxies. I read The Captive Mind decades ago. But I took it up again this fall, because Miłosz describes a soft, insidious totalitarianism that is much more relevant to our current situation than the harsh gulags depicted by Solzhenitsyn. The main chapters of the book describe different rationales for complicity, some of which shed light on the feckless Baby Boomers in academia who go along with the Woke Revolution, punishing any who dare to dissent.
