Romantic cynicism let intellectuals hold contradictory ideologies simultaneously

Evidence

This inherent cynicism of romantic personality-worship has made possible certain modern attitudes among intellectuals. They were fairly well represented by Mussolini, one of the last heirs of this movement, when he described himself as at the same time “aristocrat and democrat, revolutionary and reactionary, proletarian and antiproletarian, pacifist and antipacifist.” The ruthless individualism of romanticism never meant anything more serious than that “everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology.” What was new in Mussolini’s experiment was the “attempt to carry it out with all possible energy.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 451

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core mechanism: romantic individualism as freedom to create one’s own ideology, with Mussolini as its culminating example.
• XREF: The ‘theory of immodesty/ideological shape-shifting’ mechanism echoes how race-thinking can be put to any political use — connects to Islamophobia’s ideological flexibility. — connects to: Speculation was historically regarded as both a civilizing influence and a wild force simultaneously — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 622