Totalitarian belief vanishes with the movement that sustained it.

Evidence

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 849

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Shows belief is organizationally, not ideologically, sustained — grounds the difference from religious conviction relevant to ‘common sense’ critique.

Related

• Totalitarian propaganda organizes masses through existing ideas, not new doctrine (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian movements stay in power by perpetual motion and near-total historical discontinuity (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian propaganda wins because ideology becomes lived reality, not opinion. (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian propaganda constructs a consistent fictional world that shelters uprooted masses from reality (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian movements require permanent motion and cannot survive stabilization. (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian ideology requires perpetually new categories of victims to survive (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian rule dissolves factual reality itself (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian propaganda achieves infallibility only when the movement seizes power. (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian ideology transforms stabilizing law into law as motion (similarity 0.80)
• Total terror emerges only after opposition is already defeated (similarity 0.80)
• Stalin’s death triggered an authentic but incomplete detotalitarization process (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian movements are propelled by direction rather than structure (similarity 0.80)
• An ideology becomes totalitarian only when its total validity is taken seriously (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian propaganda seeks organization, not persuasion or novel doctrine. (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian rule substitutes insight into the law of movement for principles of action (similarity 0.79)