Masses embrace ideology’s consistency because homelessness has destroyed common sense

Evidence

In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 825

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the crucial mechanism: common sense only operates within communal relationships; atomization is what disables it, which is what opens masses to ideology.
• QUESTION: Arendt links common sense to ‘communal relationships’ — worth tracing how the Islamophobia readings use (or drop) this social-grounding account of common sense.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s notion of common sense and hegemony — the discredited common sense of the atomized masses is the condition for ideology’s grip.