Conflicting overlapping authorities forced citizens to intuit whom to obey

Evidence

The inhabitant of Hitler’s Third Reich lived not only under the simultaneous and often conflicting authorities of competing powers, such as the civil services, the party, the SA, and the SS; he could never be sure and was never explicitly told whose authority he was supposed to place above all others. He had to develop a kind of sixth sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 908

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the psychosocial mechanism of totalitarian rule: deliberate confusion produces a citizenry that cannot rely on law — a dynamic to carry into analysis of how exclusion operates through ambiguity. — connects to: Legal rules become binding only when supporters hold enforcement power — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 471
• SEED: Potential essay angle: ‘sixth sense’ citizenship — how regimes weaponize bureaucratic confusion to make subjects depend on unspoken cues rather than written law.