Blocked escape into role-change drives rootless individuals toward violent immersion in destructive forces

Evidence

This inability to escape into the wide world, this feeling of being caught again and again in the trappings of society—so different from the conditions which had formed the imperialist character—added a constant strain and the yearning for violence to the older passion for anonymity and losing oneself. Without the possibility of a radical change of role and character, such as the identification with the Arab national movement or the rites of an Indian village, the self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of destruction seemed to be a salvation from the automatic identification with pre-established functions in society and their utter banality, and at the same time to help destroy the functioning itself. These people felt attracted to the pronounced activism of totalitarian movements, to their curious and only seemingly contradictory insistence on both the primacy of sheer action and the overwhelming force of sheer necessity. This mixture corresponded precisely to the war experience of the “front generation,” to the experience of constant activity within the framework of overwhelming fatality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 786

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how the ‘identification with the Arab national movement’ as a role-change escape relates to Orientalism’s own fascination with the Arab Other — is this the same colonizing fantasy Arendt later documents more explicitly?
• XREF: connects to: Destructiveness rises with both damage salience and coordination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 726