Exposition on Kundera and Slave Morality

In Kundera’s The Joke, the main character finds himself serving time in a political prisoner camp. He betrayed the party ideology and is sentenced to two years of hard labor.

One day, he and the other prisoners craft some hijinks to escape willingly from the camp. This is discovered by the camp authorities and so him and the other prisoners were punished dearly.

What does this say of prison? It is the opposite of Plato’s cave in essence: a place where you are punished explicitly for escaping, not enlightened. Though in both cases the escapee is seeking freedom from rule, prison is exceptional for its case of retribution upon leaving.

What makes the two cases distinct is that in the case of the cave, the encaptured are escaping the chains of society and ideology. They are seeing past the place which they are trapped in, their invisible chains. The world, for the prisoner of the cave, transforms from one of good and evil to one of truth and falsehood.

On the other hand, Kundera’s political prisoners are distinct in that they are trying to escape into society. The very conditions which condemned their free thinking, sending them to a political prison, they wish to return to. In this thinking, rather than leaving the cave, they would prefer to go deeper in, to the depths from which they came.

This dichotomy makes Plato’s famous allegory seem naive and idealistic. Could it really be that simple to escape the chains of ideological programming? Wouldn’t they program you in effort to oblige your return upon the slightest air of freedom?

That is the purpose of the law, of course. Though Kundera’s prisoners view society as preferable to the prison camp, the law under which society operates would fulfill their obligation.

But what is this need? Why shouldn’t Plato’s cave be satisfactory? I would like for it to be this simple to escape the throes of the masses, after all.

I believe this is answered by natural instincts as laid out by Nietzsche. This apparent parallax in Kundera’s work is that of slave morality’s revenge on the master.

A key theme in Kundera’s work is that of the persona: the mask which we wear for the outside world, for society, in conformity with ideology. Those who conceal their true selves in The Joke are simultaneously the ones who condemned the main character and his labor camp colleagues. They are the one’s enraptured in dogmatic ideology—the herd.

This phenomenon is seen as early as childhood for some. It is often the blockheads who harshly scrutinize, bully, and antagonize the enlightened (nerds). A pure, naturalistic formation of slave morality and strict dogmatism.

This carries on through adolescence and early adulthood, usually waning with maturity. But Kundera presents a very interesting composition of the dangers of ideology here. What is witnessed first hand by those in the prison camp transcends the first and most basic form of ideology: they don’t know it, but they are doing it.

Nay, instead we see those in control continually live and rule behind their mask. You suspect they all have deep seated feelings of sorrow or ambivalence toward the party, but they too would be subject to the harsh rule should they ever remove their camouflage.

This presents the curious case of divisiveness which ideology maintains. Rather than serving as a force of unification or as a means by which individuals can choose their side, it becomes the cave which burrows deeper.