Mass movements recruit isolated individuals, not brutal backward masses

Evidence

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 759

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of ‘mass man’ for the scaffolding toolkit — isolation and lack of normal social relationships, not brutality — plus the causal chain from atomization to violent nationalism.
• XREF: Grounds the distinction Arendt draws between ‘masses’ and ‘classes’; the atomized-individual mechanism carries forward into the Islamophobia readings on how modern bureaucratic societies enable mass exclusion. — connects to: Pseudo-activity is rehearsal for absorption into the collective mass; Mass repression atomizes a crowd into isolated individuals focused only on survival — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 36