Total terror makes fear useless as a guide to behavior

Evidence

Under conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy or support of the regime; for total terror not only selects its victims according to objective standards; it chooses its executioners with as complete a disregard as possible for the candidate’s conviction and sympathies. The consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was Himmler’s great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was to be eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1056

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to biopolitics: rule by objective ‘natural’ criteria rather than conduct-based judgment; also to the SS photo-selection as race-thinking made bureaucratic procedure. — connects to: Sustained terror normalizes precaution until fear becomes habit — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1583
• SEED: Potential essay: totalitarian education aims to destroy the capacity to form convictions, not to instill them — a mechanism worth contrasting with modern institutional trainings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1056

Broader Connections

• Sustained terror normalizes precaution until fear becomes habit #qualifies (0.75) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1583