Aleksandr Zinoviev on Convictions and Intellectual Maturity

The Russian author Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinoviev (Александр Александрович Зиновьев) was famous in the seventies and eighties for his irreverent analysis of the Soviet system and the Soviet citizens. What he did not seem to fully realise himself, not even after he was exiled to the West in 1978, was that much of his descriptions of shortcomings of the Soviet system equally well could be applied to describe a capitalist system or in fact any human system.

We humans work according to very similar mechanisms whether we are part of a Soviet state, a Soviet communist party, a Western conservative party, a military organisation, a big corporation, a religious organisation or, sometimes, a family at a Saturday picnic in the city park.

One of my favourite passages in Zinoviev's writing is the short chapter about convictions in his Homo Sovieticus. Here it is in Charles Janson's translation:

Philosophical Convictions and Behavioural Stereotypes

And here’s yet another mystery for you: what I’m saying here doesn’t express my convictions. And, what is more, it’s only an apparent mystery: I haven’t got any convictions. I’ve only got a more or less stable reaction to everything I bump up against: a behavioural stereotype. Convictions are something Western man has, not Soviet man. Instead of having convictions the latter has a “stereotype of behaviour”. This doesn’t presuppose any convictions, and so it’s compatible with every sort of conviction. When you confuse convictions with behavioural stereotypes without convictions, you get many misunderstandings, and strange ideas arise among Westerners about Soviet behaviour. If somebody else were to say what I am saying, I would start arguing with him. If you want to get at the truth, the first thing to do is to get into an argument with yourself. But I say this not from conviction, but in order to be witty, because I am not concerned with the truth either.

If a man has convictions it is a sign that he is not intellectually mature. Convictions are only a compensation for not being able to understand a given phenomenon quickly and accurately in its concrete manifestation. They are a priory guides to how one should behave in a concrete situation without understanding its concreteness. A man with convictions is rigid, dogmatic, tedious and, as a rule, stupid. But more often convictions have no effect on people's behaviour. They merely beautify vanity, relieve unclear consciences and cover up stupidity.

And for those of you who want to attempt making friends at parties by quoting the central argument in Russian, here it is: Человек с убеждениями негибок, догматичен, зануден и, как правило, глуп. Make sure you stress the last word, глуп, pronounced "glupp". It means "stupid".