The elite’s trained unreality is what lets a totalitarian movement realize its fiction
Evidence
Without the elite and its artificially induced inability to understand facts as facts, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the movement could never move in the direction of realizing its fiction. The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 887
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The causal mechanism — trained fact-blindness enabling fiction-realization — scaffolds later readings on how discourse constructs rather than describes the Other.
Related
- Totalitarian elites are trained to be unable to distinguish fact from falsehood. (similarity 0.91)
- Totalitarian elites are trained to dissolve facts entirely into declarations of purpose (similarity 0.84)
- Elite intellectuals were drawn to totalitarian movements, not only mob elements. (similarity 0.81)
- Consistent lying is chief function of totalitarian organizational structure (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian lies work through graded cynicism rather than mass gullibility alone (similarity 0.79)
- Totalitarian elites obey vague orders meant to convey intent, not explicit commands (similarity 0.78)
- Elite avant-garde rejection of liberal hypocrisy enabled attraction to totalitarian movements (similarity 0.78)
- The fiction of totalitarian reality collapses if leaders are presumed fallible (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Totalitarian elites’ moral cynicism rests on belief in omnipotence
#complicates(0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 892 - Elite avant-garde rejection of liberal hypocrisy enabled attraction to totalitarian movements
#complicates(0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 796