Modern society’s chaos of opinions makes unshakable conviction fascinating regardless of correctness

Evidence

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong. Hitler, who knew the modern chaos of opinions from first-hand experience, discovered that the helpless seesawing between various opinions and “the conviction …that everything is balderdash” (p. 281) could best be avoided by adhering to one of the many current opinions with “unbending consistency.” The hair-raising arbitrariness of such fanaticism holds great fascination for society because for the duration of the social gathering it is freed from the chaos of opinions that it constantly generates. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2540

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘chaos of opinions’ and unshakable-consistency-as-fascination mechanism connects to how totalitarian propaganda exploits uncertainty, a theme that will recur in the Islamophobia readings about ideological rigidity.
• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that fascination is only a social phenomenon, not a basis for actual political success, invites checking against later accounts of charismatic leadership in totalitarian theory.