The fiction of totalitarian reality collapses if leaders are presumed fallible

Evidence

It is not the truthfulness of the Leader’s words but the infallibility of his actions which is the basis for the structure. Without it and in the heat of a discussion which presumes fallibility, the whole fictitious world of totalitarianism goes to pieces, overwhelmed at once by the factuality of the real world which only the movement steered in an infallibly right direction by the Leader was able to ward off. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 891

Categorization

• DEFINE: Central mechanism: the Leader’s presumed infallibility is the load-bearing fiction that keeps the whole totalitarian worldview intact against the factual real world.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that infallibility of action (not truth of words) is the load-bearing structure that walls off the real world is a dense, paradigm-level insight about how fictional worldviews are maintained.