Totalitarian coercion works through a fear of self-contradiction, not the ideology itself.

Evidence

The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu’s principle of action is not the ideology itself—racism or dialectical materialism—but its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves. To the extent that the Bolshevik purge succeeds in making its victims confess to crimes they never committed, it relies chiefly on this basic fear and argues as follows: We are all agreed on the premise that history is a struggle of classes and on the role of the Party in its conduct. You know therefore that, historically speaking, the Party is always right (in the words of Trotsky: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.”). At this historical moment, that is in accordance with the law of history, certain crimes are due to be committed which the Party, knowing the law of history, must punish. For these crimes, the Party needs criminals; it may be that the Party, though knowing the crimes, does not quite know the criminals; more important than to be sure about the criminals is to punish the crimes, because without such punishment, History will not be advanced but may even be hindered in its course. You, therefore, either have committed the crimes or have been called by the Party to play the role of the criminal—in either case, you have objectively become an enemy of the Party. If you don’t confess, you cease to help History through the Party, and have become a real enemy.—The coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C which it logically engenders. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1071

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s own ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ banality-of-evil idea and to Milgram’s obedience experiments; also to Kafka’s trial-logic of a guilty-until-proven-innocent universe. — connects to: Soviet totalitarianism functioned through interpretive ambiguity, not just coercion — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 101
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense mechanism worth sitting with: coercion sourced in the psychology of self-contradiction rather than in external force — no one-line summary does it justice.
• SEED: Angle: how modern bureaucratic platforms use the same ‘logicality’ coercion — the algorithm is ‘always right’ and you must confess compliance by clicking through.