Totalitarian consistency demands destruction of human dignity because dignity implies creative unpredictability

Evidence

It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1031

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The dense causal chain — consistency requires eliminating unpredictability, which requires denying others’ capacity as co-creators of a common world — is a paradigm-shifting insight about why totalitarianism targets dignity itself, not just dissent.
• XREF: Directly portable to Islamophobia readings: dignity as recognition of the Other as subject/cobuilder is the conceptual ground for analyzing dehumanization of Muslim populations. — connects to: Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 255; Permanent occupation requires discounting the occupied people’s full humanity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1855
• DEFINE: Defines human dignity functionally — as recognition of others as subjects and co-builders of a common world — which inverts the usual moral framing.