The Captive Mind
by Czesław Miłosz
How smart people talk themselves into serving tyranny.
you want to understand how ideology captures even the people who can see through it
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Miłosz was a Polish poet who worked within the communist system after WWII before eventually defecting to the West. This 1953 essay collection examines how four Polish intellectuals rationalized their collaboration with Stalinism — the mental gymnastics, the self-deceptions, the genuine beliefs mixed with strategic performances. The most precise analysis ever written of how a totalitarian system captures the minds of its most gifted citizens. Still the essential dispatch from inside the psychology of intellectual complicity. Relevant to every era in which people choose power over truth.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Poland • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- Written by a Polish author
- Themes
- Authoritarian Playbook
