Organization can destroy substance but underestimates stable communities

Evidence

Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy. Confident that power of organization can destroy power of substance, as the violence of a well-organized gang might rob a rich man of ill-guarded wealth, they constantly underestimate the substantial power of stable communities and overestimate the driving force of a movement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 892

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Uncompromising world-rejecting ideals must be domesticated into organized systems to survive — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 179; The manner of demolition, not just the demolition, destroyed a community’s will to resist — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3728; Reliance on litigation atrophied the community group’s own organizing