The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (2).. The “Matsadaqsh” Case: When the Mind Willingly Imprisons Itself

 In the previous article, we left off with Julien Benda, who believed that the gravest danger facing an intellectual was not repression but temptation: the temptation to replace the question “What is the truth?” with “What serves my group’s interests?” Yet Benda diagnosed the disease more than he explained its mechanism. 

How can an intelligent intellectual see the truth before his very eyes and then deny it? And how can a man who knows what is right defend an obvious wrong while remaining convinced that he is doing the right thing?

The answer came approximately two decades after Benda, from two men who had lived through the experience rather than merely theorized about it. The first was the British writer George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and witnessed firsthand how newspapers representing his own side propagated falsehoods. The second was the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, who served a totalitarian regime for years before breaking with it and writing his great confession.

Orwell: Blind Allegiance

In 1945, Orwell published his famous essay, Notes on Nationalism. By nationalism, he did not mean love of one's country, but something broader and more dangerous: the identification of an individual with a particular group—whether a political party, sect, social class, or ideology—to such an extent that he places it above good and evil, and above truth itself, recognizing no duty other than serving its interests.

Orwell identified three characteristics of this mentality:

First, obsession: A person possessed by this mentality neither thinks nor writes except in defense of his group.

Second, instability: The mind can transfer its allegiance from one cause to its very opposite with the same fervor, without experiencing the slightest pang of conscience.

Third, indifference to reality: The most dangerous of the three characteristics.

For such a mind, actions are judged not on their own merits but according to the identity of those who commit them. Thus, accepting funding from dubious sources, supporting a terrorist organization, falsifying history, or forging alliances with tyrannical regimes and groups—all acquire different moral values depending on the camp responsible for them.

Orwell then makes an exceptionally perceptive observation: a person driven by such allegiance does not merely justify his group's atrocities; he possesses an extraordinary ability not to hear about them in the first place. He may even go so far as to embellish, reinterpret, and recycle them without the slightest shame.

Orwell goes further still, arguing that even the past itself is rewritten by such a mind. Inconvenient facts are erased, dates are altered, and whatever cannot be denied is reinterpreted. A few years later, he transformed this idea into the “Ministry of Truth” in his novel 1984, where declaring that two plus two equals “five” becomes a test of loyalty.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Orwell's essay for our discussion is his distinction between patriotism and nationalism. For Orwell, patriotism is an attachment to a particular place, a way of life, and a long-standing, continuous history—something that one may, indeed must, always defend, while at the same time never seeking to impose it upon anyone else.

Tribal allegiance, by contrast, is a craving for domination in the name of the group. Herein lies the paradox: a person may inflict harm upon his own country and people while believing that he is defending them, simply because he has adopted his group's worldview. He can no longer see his country except through the image of his group alone.

Miłosz: The Miraculous Pill — “Murti-Bing”

In 1951, Miłosz severed his ties with the communist regime in Warsaw, for which he had been working as a diplomat, and sought asylum in France. Two years later, in 1953, he published his book The Captive Mind, writing not as a detached observer but as a witness from within.

Miłosz borrowed an idea from the novel Insatiability (1930) by the Polish writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: pills created by a philosopher named Murti-Bing. Once a person swallows these pills, he becomes calm and content; philosophical questions and existential anxieties fade away, and he accepts everything with ease—even happiness.

Freed from anxiety and doubt, he becomes satisfied and reassured, perceiving an unquestionable wisdom in everything unfolding around him. Strangely enough, no one is forced to swallow these pills. People take them voluntarily because they relieve them of the burden of thinking and the loneliness of being different.

For Miłosz, ideology is precisely such a pill: it offers the intellectual ready-made certainty, the warmth of belonging to a group, and the reassuring sense of standing “on the right side of history.”

 Here, Miłosz and Benda converge completely: the decisive force is temptation, not coercion.

Miłosz then introduces the concept of Ketman, borrowed from the French traveler Gobineau's description of an Eastern practice of outwardly displaying beliefs different from those held inwardly—a practice known in Islamic history as taqiyya (dissimulation).

The intellectual repeats his group's rhetoric while convincing himself that he retains his inner freedom. Over time, however, this concealment ceases to be merely a mask; it consumes the face beneath it. After years of repeating the same rhetoric, the intellectual ultimately comes either to believe it or to lose all sense of what he truly believes.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what happens to a considerable number of our ideologically driven intellectuals, entrenched behind their groups and ideas.

Three Doctors, One Disease

When we place these three thinkers side by side, the picture becomes complete.

Benda identifies what the intellectual has betrayed: truth and universal values. Orwell explains how the intellectual becomes blind: by judging actions according to who commits them rather than by their intrinsic nature. Miłosz, meanwhile, reveals why the intellectual willingly accepts this blindness: because captivity within the warmth of the group is comforting, while freedom is lonely.

Orwell's Test

Orwell implicitly places in our hands a simple yet unforgiving test: Would you have taken the same position if the very same act had been committed by your opponents?

When a group rushes to defend its members before even examining the facts, when every question is deemed an act of betrayal, and every demand for verification is treated as siding with the adversary, we are witnessing precisely what Orwell described: blind allegiance.

And when journalists repeat what their clique says, despite knowing deep down that the reality is far more complex, we are witnessing Miłosz's Ketman in its clearest form.

In truth, none of these three thinkers demanded that intellectuals abandon all affiliations. What they demanded was that allegiance remain subordinate to truth, rather than the other way around.

Miłosz himself paid the price for making this choice. The regime accused him of treason for abandoning it, while many fellow exiles regarded him with suspicion because he had once served that same regime. He consequently spent years isolated between two opposing camps, until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

This is precisely the price Benda warned that intellectuals seek to evade: the price of independence. Those unwilling to pay it end up paying a far greater price without even realizing it: they sacrifice their minds, their reputations, and their place in history.

Paris — 5:00 p.m., Cairo time