The absoluteness of movements dissolves individual conscience and ends-means distinctions

Evidence

It is this absoluteness of movements which more than anything else separates them from party structures and their partiality, and serves to justify their claim to overrule all objections of individual conscience. The particular reality of the individual person appears against the background of a spurious reality of the general and universal, shrinks into a negligible quantity or is submerged in the stream of dynamic movement of the universal itself. In this stream the difference between ends and means evaporates together with the personality, and the result is the monstrous immorality of ideological politics. All that matters is embodied in the moving movement itself; every idea, every value has vanished into a welter of superstitious pseudoscientific immanence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 631

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the movement/party distinction — a core Arendt concept separating totalitarian movements from ordinary party structures.
• XREF: This mechanism — where the movement’s own motion becomes the only value, erasing individuality — is the scaffolding for later readings on how ideology subsumes persons. — connects to: After the Philosophy of Spirit, subjectivity sheds its human shape entirely
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a movement’s absoluteness makes ends and means evaporate together, producing ‘monstrous immorality,’ is dense enough to sit with: it explains totalitarian ethics without reference to individual evil.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 631