What he refers to as the “stupidity” of the American masses, who are satisfied by the purely material advantages of this new civilization, is exceptionally irritating to the Eastern intellectual. Raised in a country where there was a definite distinction between the “intelligentsia” and the “people,” he looks, above all, for ideas created by the “intelligentsia,” the traditional fermenting element in revolutionary changes. When he meets with a society in which the “intelligentsia,” as it was known in Central or Eastern Europe, does not exist, he has great difficulty in translating his observations into conceptual terms. The ideas he finds are clearly obsolete and far outdistanced by economic and technical developments. The purely pragmatic and empirical resolution of problems and the inability to swallow even a small dose of abstraction introduce unknowns into his calculations. If one regards these characteristics as signs of “backwardness” in comparison with Europe, then one must acknowledge that the “stupidity” which produced a technology immeasurably superior to that of Europe is not entirely a source of weakness. —Czeslaw Milosz in “The Captive Mind”
(1953)
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