Notes and Reflections on Books and Media

by Hannah Leitheiser

How to Brew Totalitarianism

2018-11-18

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958)

What are the ingredients for totalitarianism?

1: An ideology. Something that plots the path of a world-encompassing movement.

2: A lonely mob. A sufficient mass of people who are superfluous and unattached. Society always has a few, but you need enough so the trolls overpower the moderators.

Lonely people cling to deduction, which can be done without social belonging, and the mob will follow the logic of the ideology wherever it leads, however cruel, ridiculous, or unproductive the result. At a critical saturation, more and more will fall into the mob until no opposition remains.