Exhausted traditional truths make patently absurd doctrines more acceptable to elites

Evidence

What the spokesmen of humanism and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 793

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does this mechanism — evaporated values making absurdity more acceptable than ‘pious banalities’ — recur in contemporary reception of radical ideology? Worth investigating.
• XREF: This mechanism of ideological exhaustion enabling absurd propositions has direct parallels to how Frankfurt-school and post-Marxist theory describe fascism’s appeal in the Islamophobia reading list. — connects to: Bizarre fringe beliefs can grow into devastating orthodoxies — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 1136
• DEEPTHINKING: A counterintuitive causal mechanism — the very failure to take lies seriously is what lets them take root — that resists one-sentence summary.