In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the moment he realized that he did not really believe what he had always professed. It happened during a conversation with another zek, or prisoner, named Boris Gammerov, a “yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face.” After exchanging biographies they passed to politics. Gammerov “began to question me” in a peculiarly intense way new to Solzhenitsyn, who had always lived in a world where educated people agreed on fundamental issues. Recalling “one of the prayers of the late President Roosevelt,” he “expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it: ‘Well, that’s hypocrisy, of course.’ ” To Solzhenitsyn’s surprise, Gammerov furiously countered: “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?” Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that someone born and educated under Soviet rule could utter such words. He suddenly became aware that he was less than certain about what he had said — and about the system of thought that his remark presumed. I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clear, pure feeling does live within us . . . and right then it dawned on me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted within me from the outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: “Do you believe in God? “Of course,” he answered tranquilly. “Implanted in me from the outside”: evidently there is more than one way to have convictions. They can be accepted and professed, quite sincerely, only because one has never doubted them. They can seem like an intrinsic part of oneself, even when they are not. They can be nothing more than the impact of an external influence, a contagion, a surrender to conformity. But authentic convictions, by contrast, derive from lived experience. One must have seriously examined, tested, and revised them, and be prepared to do so again. Beliefs “implanted from outside” are accepted passively, while authentic ones demand effort. If ideas are simply learned, the way one memorizes the kings of England, they remain inert. Their truth seems beyond question only because one has not questioned it. Authentic beliefs exhibit what Mikhail Bakhtin called “ones-ownness”; they are “inwardly persuasive” because we have worked on them. Having gone through a complex process of examination and assimilation, they have acquired our own unique tonalities, which are themselves always changing in response to outer and inner experience. “One’s own word,” Bakhtin observed, remains “unfinalized.” “Its creativity and productiveness,” he writes, “consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions.” Inwardly persuasive words often conflict with other inwardly persuasive words. They enter into dialogue with each other, they “struggle” and undergo change. Out of these inner dialogues we construct a self. Our point of view on the world develops “in just such an intense struggle within us . . . among various verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions, and values.” So long as one lives, these dialogues continue. Inwardly persuasive discourse is therefore “not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean.” Yet sometimes inwardly persuasive discourse begins to lose its persuasiveness. It begins to feel more than half “someone else’s,” or, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “implanted from the outside.” Once one becomes conscious of a belief as “implanted,” one acquires a kind of double vision. With effort, one can still see the world in the old way, but can never wholly banish the way one really sees it. Communism posed questions about belief especially starkly, but the most profound Soviet thinkers consciously developed insights from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other great pre-revolutionary Russian writers. One could almost say that the central question of Russian literature for the past two centuries has been: what does it mean to believe something? That question leads to several others. How can it be that one believes what one does not really believe? What process leads us to accept inauthentic beliefs? In his autobiography Child of the Revolution, Wolfgang Leonhard — with whom I studied Soviet history as an undergraduate at Yale — described how, as a young German refugee growing up in the USSR, he was delighted to be admitted to the Komsomol even though his mother, friends, and teachers had not long before been arrested. “Somehow I dissociated these things, and even my personal impressions and experiences, from my fundamental political conviction. It was almost as if there were two separate levels — one of everyday experiences, which I found myself criticizing; the other of the great Party line, which at this time, despite my hesitations, I still regarded as correct, from the standpoint of general principle.” What exactly does Leonhard mean by “dissociating” these two realities? When (or if) one at last “associates” them again, what happens to one’s consciousness, to one’s self? Does contemporary America raise similar questions? One can hardly live in a university environment — or in some other professions, such as journalism — without being aware that one cannot say all one thinks, that students express political opinions that they know their teachers, neighbors, and parents expect, and that self-censorship is routine — not only of ideas but also of words, idioms, even grammatical forms that are hard to avoid without constant vigilance. I often wonder whether my colleagues really believe what they profess. If so, are their views accepted because they were “implanted from outside”? 
Writing about the nature of dialogue in the 1930s, Bakhtin clearly had in mind the emphatically
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence