The joke by Milan Kundera

Abstract

Children are not as good at thinking for themselves as adults are. Their entire lives have been spent taking commands from teachers, parents, and anyone older than them. Adults, however, already have learned how to think for themselves exactly because they went through all of this and learned that you can't believe every idiot who opens his mouth. If a person is robbed of this childhood then they will not be able to do this. That is why it is not that the hyper-politicized nature of a communist society keeps people from forming ‘real' convictions or generating ‘genuine' culture, it is that the upbringing of children who are automatically, be it by choice or by necessity, in the party teaches them to not create these things for themselves but to rather go along with what the current climate requires, which robs them of any moral foundation they could make for themselves in the future.

Most of my evidence will be pure speculation, but it seems that the characters who were unable to create and “real” convictions or “genuine” culture were the ones who were born into Communism and lived with it their whole lives. Taking a look at the final chapter of the novel, we see Ludvik commenting more than once how Pavel is renouncing all of the things that he so firmly believed 20 years ago when he put his hand up against.