Destroying individuality destroys spontaneity, the capacity to begin something new.

Evidence

After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the juridical person, the destruction of the individuality is almost always successful. Conceivably some laws of mass psychology may be found to explain why millions of human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas chambers, although these laws would explain nothing else but the destruction of individuality. It is more significant that those individually condemned to death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them, that there were scarcely any serious revolts, and that even in the moment of liberation there were very few spontaneous massacres of SS men. For to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1021

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt defines individuality precisely as spontaneity — the power to begin something new beyond mere reaction to environment — which is the third layer destroyed in the camps after the moral and juridical person.
• XREF: This three-stage destruction (moral person, juridical person, individuality) is a scaffold for reading the denial of personhood/selfhood in Islamophobia work — the same logic of de-individualizing a target group before exclusion.