Totalitarian domination requires reducing humans to interchangeable uniform reactions

Evidence

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only “freedom” would consist in “preserving the species.” Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formations are ruthlessly used become, as it were, the practical application of the ideological indoctrination—the testing ground in which the latter must prove itself—while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is supposed to furnish the “theoretical” verification of the ideology. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 980

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s definition of total domination: reducing plural, differentiated humans to an interchangeable bundle of reactions.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and Agamben’s homo sacer; the reduction of plurality to a species-level identity anticipates the biopolitical subject. — connects to: Totalitarian rule requires large populations to feed total domination; Total domination consumes population so heavily it needs excess human material; Totalitarian rule requires destroying all autonomous activity, not merely equalizing conditions (+8 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The core mechanism of totalitarian domination — manufacturing an unnatural human species through dual indoctrination and terror — is the chapter’s load-bearing concept and resists one-line summary.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 980

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian power aims to render human beings superfluous, not merely to rule them #expands (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1025
• Totalitarian rule requires an atomized and individualized mass, not mere social structurelessness #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 761