Modern thought replaced inclusive liberal logic with a coerced either-or.

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ideological logic coerces the mind as violently as outside power does — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1065

Broader Connections

• Ideological logic coerces the mind as violently as outside power does #expands (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1065