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(totalitarian community) Ketman & doublethink: what it costs to comply with tyranny

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https://aeon.co/ideas/ketman-and-doublet...th-tyranny

EXCERPT: [...] In 1953, he published The Captive Mind, a series of essays about the inner lives of intellectuals living under totalitarianism. In it, he took aim at the notion that tyranny crushes thought. Rather, he found that illiberal regimes could provoke their citizens to engage in the most elaborate mental acrobatics. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt had written that the ideal subjects of totalitarianism are people ‘for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and the distinction between true and false … no longer exist’. Miłosz found that the reverse was true. The subjects produced by totalitarianism were not mindless drones, but skillful dissemblers, as capable of self-justification and moral hair-splitting as the best-trained Jesuit. The name Miłosz gave to this new talent was ‘Ketman’. It is as difficult to define precisely as it is essential to understanding the nature of life under authoritarianism. Miłosz borrowed the term ketman from the history of Islamic theology....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/ketman-and-doublet...th-tyranny
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