Czesław Miłosz

Intellectuals under an imposed ideology do not simply submit or resist. They develop an elaborate internal art of accommodation, and it costs them the thing they were protecting.

Ketman

Miłosz borrowed the term ketman from Persian practice, where it described concealing one's real convictions under a hostile orthodoxy.

Applied to Warsaw in the early 1950s it describes a whole class of people saying the required things with an inner asterisk: I do not believe this, I am performing it, the real me is somewhere behind my face.

His finding is that the asterisk does not hold. Performing a belief daily for years is not a neutral act. The performance colonizes the performer, the reservation shrinks, and eventually the person cannot locate the self that was supposedly being preserved. The technique intended as protection is the mechanism of capture.

Where it sits

This is the psychological interior of Havel's greengrocer, written twenty five years earlier. It is also the human version of cognitive dissonance in the psychology domain: having acted, we revise belief to match the act.

Serious objections

• It is a set of portraits rather than a study. The four writers Miłosz anatomizes are composites, and the reader has to take his reading of their interiors on trust.
• Written by an exile shortly after defecting, for a Western audience, in a propaganda context that the book itself does not stand outside.
• The pattern generalizes so readily that it can be used to dismiss anyone's stated beliefs as accommodation, which is the failure mode this project warns about.