Ideological logic coerces the mind as violently as outside power does

Evidence

As soon as logic as a movement of thought—and not as a necessary control of thinking—is applied to an idea, this idea is transformed into a premise. Ideological world explanations performed this operation long before it became so eminently fruitful for totalitarian reasoning. The purely negative coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradictions, became “productive” so that a whole line of thought could be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) nor by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschauung, is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the strait jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1065

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing claim — that self-imposed logical constraint equals external coercion, and that the freedom to think is what ideology annihilates — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation of ideological self-coercion.
• DEFINE: Defines the key distinction between logic as a control on thinking versus logic as a movement that replaces thought, and names why ideology cannot be interrupted by experience.
• XREF: Builds directly into the Scaffolding Theory toolkit: this is the mechanism by which a discourse like Orientalism becomes self-sealing against experience. Also resonates with the reader’s noise/silence materials on how overwhelming external or internal systems shut down independent thought. — connects to: Derrida’s geopolitics of cruelty ignores the psychic change it entails — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4250; Modern thought replaced inclusive liberal logic with a coerced either-or.; Coercive behavior modification on prisoners constitutes a form of state power over mind — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1017 (+1 more)