Total domination functionally requires permanent instability rather than material strength.

Evidence

Instability is indeed a functional requisite of total domination, which is based on an ideological fiction and presupposes that a movement, as distinguished from a party, has seized power. The hallmark of this system is that substantial power, the material strength and well-being of the country, is constantly sacrificed to the power of organization, just as all factual truths are sacrificed to the demands of ideological consistency. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1961

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a core theoretical distinction: totalitarianism (movement-based, ideologically fictional, organized around instability) vs. the party-based state. Central scaffolding vocabulary for the reader’s toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s claims elsewhere that totalitarian movements are organized around motion rather than goals, and to the fiction-vs-fact framing of ideology the reader will meet in the Islamophobia readings on hegemony and myth. — connects to: Stable domination requires legitimating ideology plus fragmentation of the ruled. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 588