Radical evil arises where all people become equally superfluous

Evidence

There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers arc all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1034

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘superfluousness’ as the mechanism linking totalitarian destruction to the status of its victims and perpetrators alike.
• XREF: Superfluousness as the master category connects directly to the necropolitics and race-thinking strands of this module. — connects to: Camp totalitarianism is an all-or-nothing form of radical evil.; Absolute evil exceeds the categories of punishable and forgivable crime; Absolute evil reveals evil’s radical essence by exceeding comprehensible motives (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1034

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian power aims to render human beings superfluous, not merely to rule them #expands (0.90) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1025
• Absolute evil reveals evil’s radical essence by exceeding comprehensible motives #expands (0.82)
• Totalitarianism spreads complicity through the whole population to erase hierarchies #expands (0.78)