Anonymity rooted in self-stripping becomes a substitute for community belonging

Evidence

What makes them comrades is the common experience of being—through danger, fear, constant surprise, utter lack of habits, constant preparedness to change their identities—symbols of life itself, symbols, for instance, of happenings all over India, immediately sharing the life of it all as “it runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind,” and therefore no longer “alone, one person, in the middle of it all,” trapped, as it were, by the limitations of one’s own individuality or nationality. Playing the Great-Game, a man may feel as though he lives the only life worth while because he has been stripped of everything which may still be considered to be accessory. Life itself seems to be left, in a fantastically intensified purity, when man has cut himself off from all ordinary social ties, family, regular occupation, a definite goal, ambitions, and the guarded place in a community to which he belongs by birth. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 559

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This prefigures Arendt’s account of how the uprooted and superfluous become available for totalitarian movements — a mechanism carried later into the Islamophobia field’s study of uprootedness.