The ideology’s logical process devours the very people it was meant to serve

Evidence

What distinguished these new totalitarian ideologists from their predecessors was that it was no longer primarily the “idea” of the ideology—the struggle of classes and the exploitation of the workers or the struggle of races and the care for Germanic peoples—which appealed to them, but the logical process which could be developed from it. … It is in the nature of ideological politics—and is not simply a betrayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power—that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the “idea” (the struggle of classes as the law of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the logic with which the “idea” is carried out. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1070

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Pre-figures the biopolitical insight that exclusionary programs consume their own nominal beneficiaries; relevant to how national-populist logics eventually target their own constituencies.

Related

• Ideological politics destroys the very constituency the ideology claims to serve (similarity 0.91)
• Totalitarian terror weaponizes ideology by enforcing its extreme logical consequences (similarity 0.82)
• Ideological logic makes the camps coherent rather than senseless (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian ideology requires perpetually new categories of victims to survive (similarity 0.79)
• An ideology becomes totalitarian only when its total validity is taken seriously (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian loyalty requires stripping movement ideology of all concrete content (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian ideology coerces through the fear of abandoning a first premise (similarity 0.78)
• Ideologies apply the logic of an idea to history as an unfolding process. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Ideological commitment requires willed moral blindness to human suffering #complicates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 408