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.
[...] The joke by Milan Kundera 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. [...]
[...] He loved folklore more than he did the Communist party, and when the latter started deforming the former he began to hate it. The ability to discern for oneself what is right and wrong, what is to be cherished and detested, is a fundamental necessity of adulthood. Those who are robbed of it cannot be full adults for they do not think for themselves. That is why, in a way, Helena, Pavel, Marketa, and Ms. Broz are much more demented than Ludvik and Jaroslav will ever be. References Kundera, Milan. The Joke. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Print. [...]
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