An ideology becomes totalitarian only when its total validity is taken seriously

Evidence

Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1028

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the threshold at which an ideology turns totalitarian: serious belief in its claim to total validity, triggering compulsive logical closure.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that insanity resides in the logicality of construction rather than merely the first premise is a dense, reusable analytical tool.
• XREF: Feeds directly into the reader’s hegemony-and-common-sense tract: the mechanism by which an ideology obtains unquestioned internal coherence. — connects to: Half-education becomes objective spirit enabling totalitarian delusion — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157; Under total mobilization even genocidal calculus becomes rational self-justification — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 237; The purported postcrisis consensus was ideologically incoherent and self-contradictory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 537 (+2 more)