Understanding the Totalitarian Beast
A review of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism is one of those books it’s considered essential to read, and was made all the more so by the conditions of pandemic lockdowns when totalitarianism raised its ugly head again. Unfortunately, I had to give up part way through. Hannah Arendt is one of those writers who is extremely erudite and well-educated, but struggles to write clearly and simply. Her sentences stretch out into long paragraphs with many subordinate clauses, to the point where you have to go back and read again from the beginning to remind yourself of what is being said. As a writer I can say that in my experience there is no excuse for this except inability, lack of experience or the lack of a good substantive editor. This kind of discursive approach to prose was more common in English during the 19th and even 18th centuries, but has fallen out of favour since then as writing has evolved, and especially since attention spans have been truncated.
Another book that fell into this category for me was Marshall MacLuhan’s seminal work Understanding Media, which, ironically given its title, does little to help us understand his groundbreaking concepts of media. To be fair to Arendt, she is building an incredibly fine-grained thesis, so its myriad layers of information can simply seem overwhelming at times.
Arendt does a long, long run-up to the point at issue—the rollout of totalitarianism during World War II in Germany and across Europe—by first writing a deep disquisition about the history of European Jewry. This is certainly interesting and important work, but will alienate many readers who aren’t specifically seeking this kind of history. What I did find interesting was the historical context regarding the often-cited, often caricatured trope of the Jewish banker. It turns out that for many centuries Jews in Europe were denied citizenship in their respective countries of adoption. They were, however, allowed into certain professions—as bankers, merchants, artists, writers, philosophers and entertainers. The monarchies of Europe came to rely heavily on Jewish banking houses to finance their wars, and this in fact is a major reason for the establishment of the House of Rothschild, whose influence persists to the present. [1] A considerable part of her thesis is devoted to the origins and nature of antisemitism, especially from a European perspective. Thus, the “Jewish banker” emerges from Arendt’s research not as an antisemitic, but an historical phenomenon.
Still, Arendt’s book deserves its place of prominence in the early formulation of the concept of totalitarianism, and became ever more relevant since the first Covid lockdowns in 2020. In her thesis, Arendt differentiates between dictatorships and totalitarian states; the former she sees as being fairly common throughout history, whereas the latter she sees as a more modern invention. She explains in detail their fundamental differences and reminds us that they are not, therefore, interchangeable terms. As she explains, in her typically convoluted prose:
One of the most glaring differences between the old-fashioned rule by bureaucracy and the up-to-date totalitarian brand is that Russia’s and Austria’s pre-war rulers were content with an idle radiance of power and, satisfied to control its outward destinies, left the whole inner life of the soul intact. Totalitarian bureaucracy, with a more complete understanding of the meaning of absolute power, intruded upon the private individual and his inner life with equal brutality. The result of this radical efficiency has been that the inner spontaneity of people under its rule was killed along with their social and political activities, so that the merely political sterility under the older bureaucracies was followed by total sterility under totalitarian rule. …It is this absoluteness of movements which more than anything else separates them from party structures and their partiality, and serves to justify their claim to overrule all objections of individual conscience. [2] —Hannah Arendt
What Arendt is describing here was best pictured by Orwell’s totalitarian world in his novel 1984. The scenes with Winston and O’Brien reinforce her point that, while the dictatorship is content to exert outward dominance over its population, the totalitarian state wants to fully control peoples’ interior landscape—their psyche. O’Brien tortures Winston until he not only admits that 2 plus 2 equals 5, he wants dearly to come to that conclusion, against all evidence. A real-life parallel to this Orwellian mind control would be the domestic postwar activities of the CIA, with programs such as MK Ultra designed to explore ways of manipulating individuals by messing with their brain chemistry. Incredibly, as early as 1950 Arendt was aware of the growing power of the American intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA under Allen Dulles:
…the rise of an ‘invisible government’ by secret services, whose reach into domestic affairs, the cultural, educational, and economic sectors of our life, has only recently been revealed, is too ominous a sign to be passed under silence. There is no reason to doubt Mr. Allan (sic) W. Dulles’ statement that Intelligence in this country has enjoyed since 1947 “a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world”… [3] —Hannah Arendt
This reminds me of David Talbot’s great book, The Devil’s Chessboard, which gives us the play-by-play of Machiavellian politics orchestrated by Dulles & Co. from the CIA’s inception in 1947 until Dulles’ death. With the release of the Twitter Files and the revelations it contained of CIA and FBI censorship during the pandemic, it becomes apparent that Arendt’s early warning went unheeded. In fact, these agencies have only grown in power, to the point where—in concert with multinational corporations—they ARE the government. It seems incredible that nearly 75 years after Arendt wrote her prefatory remarks to The Origins of Totalitarianism, we should be in an even more dangerous situation than the world emerging from the ashes of World War II:
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. [4] —Hannah Arendt
Sound familiar? Arendt, long before Mattias Desmet—who cites her frequently—put her finger on the reasons why a society could so quickly be transitioned into a lockdown state where people rat out their neighbours for non-compliance with draconian diktats: “Totalitarian governments are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” [5] Desmet’s concept of “mass formation,” well attested to in literature by McKay, Le Bon, Ellul and others, relies on the prerequisite social condition of “atomization,” where people have become disconnected from society, even from their neighbours. The groundwork was already well in place prior to 2020, according to Desmet, with polls showing an exponential growth of loneliness in society, up to 30% saying they had no significant relationship in their lives. Other polls showed that 60% felt they had “bullshit jobs,” meaning their work gave them no sense of meaning in life.
Thus, you end up with a society of disconnected people, hungry for something that will unite them, no matter how false and self-destructive. This makes them easy prey for mass formation leaders, who like the Nazis did, can then recruit them into their mass cult as a substitute for a sense of personal meaning and connection in their lives. The new connection can become so powerful it will cause even family members to betray one another. As Desmet explains:
It is precisely those moments of human-to-human encounters that nourish the social bond from within. Without those moments, the social fabric shrivels, and it is only a matter of time before society disintegrates into a loose collection of atomized individuals. … What accelerates mass formation is not so much the frustration and aggression that are effectively vented, but the potential of unvented aggression present in the population—aggression that is still looking for an object. [6] —Mattias Desmet
Once again Arendt’s distinction between dictatorships and totalitarian states becomes key to understanding how such a society could be made to sacrifice all its hard-won freedoms for a falsely defined “greater good”:
A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. [7] —Hannah Arendt
Desmet expands on Arendt’s careful and important distinction between dictatorships and totalitarian states. It’s a long quotation but an important one:
While dictatorships are essentially based on instilling a fear that the dictator (or the dictatorial regime) is able to unilaterally impose a social contract—the totalitarian state is grounded in the social-psychological process of mass formation. We have to take this process into account in order to understand the astounding psychological characteristics of a totalitarian population: the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favour of the collective, radical intolerance of dissident voices, a paranoid informant mentality that allows government to penetrate the very heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with religion), the loss of all diversity and creativity (making totalitarianism the enemy of art and culture), and the intrinsic self-destructiveness (which ensures that totalitarian systems invariably annihilate themselves in the end). [8] —Mattias Desmet
Note especially that last statement. Despite what seems an almost total lack of progress during the greater part of a century since that conflict, there is hope! Both Desmet and Arendt agree that, in her words, “Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction,” [9] a conclusion shared by historian Arnold Toynbee. While Arendt believes that totalitarianism, “just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments… monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism” remain with us “regardless of temporary defeats,” [10] she somehow manages to conclude on a hopeful note:
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning… This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man. [11] —Hannah Arendt
[1] “Empire of Shadows: True Story of the Richest Family in History,” YouTube, November 18, 2023:
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), pp. 245, 249, emphasis mine.
[3] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), Preface to Part Two, p. xx.
[4] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), Preface to the First Edition (1950), p. vii, emphasis mine.
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), p. 323.
[6] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, trans. Els Vanbrabant (London/White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), pp. 80, 96, emphasis in original.
[7] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), p. 6, emphasis mine.
[8] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, trans. Els Vanbrabant (London/White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), pp. 90, 91, emphasis mine.
[9] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), p. 478.
[10] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), p. 478.
[11] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books (HarperCollins), Boston/New York, 1966 (modern reprint), pp. 478–79.