Consistent lying is chief function of totalitarian organizational structure

Evidence

The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societies’ organizational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization does not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying. … The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which totalitarian movements construct a fictitious world through graded lying, scaled by rank.
• XREF: The gullibility-and-cynicism by-rank mixture connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ideological fictions are maintained across a hierarchy of believers.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that hierarchy is calibrated as a graded mixture of gullibility and cynicism toward one central unchanging ideological fiction is dense and reusable: it explains how movements sustain fictions across members of widely varying belief.