There has probably been a type of pill circulating in Indonesia over recent years, leading thousands of people to renounce their own reason. The tablet, as I recall, is Murti-Bing.

I read about this pill in a story in The Captive Mind, a book published in the 1960s. The author was Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

In the book, Milosz examines an odd phenomenon: intellectuals, it turns out, can be att