Manufactured unreality makes extermination look like a normal measure.
Evidence
It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure. Everything that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more than a cruel game or an absurd dream. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 998
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s mechanism of ‘manufactured unreality’ — a reality that has all sensual data but lacks consequence and responsibility — is a densely dense engine explaining how ordinary people could massacre without registering it; this is arguably one of her most transferable ideas.
Related
- Manufactured unreality, not barbed wire, makes extermination appear normal (similarity 0.91)
- Systematic cold destruction replaced spontaneous bestiality when the SS ran the camps (similarity 0.82)
- Explanatory doctrines denying Jewish responsibility prefigured extermination practice (similarity 0.79)
- Totalitarian violence reduced prisoners to objects even in their own self-perception (similarity 0.78)
- Camps serve as laboratories verifying totalitarianism’s core belief that everything is possible (similarity 0.78)