Totalitarian elites are trained to be unable to distinguish fact from falsehood.

Evidence

This mentality of the elite is no mere mass phenomenon, no mere consequence of social rootlessness, economic disaster, and political anarchy; it needs careful preparation and cultivation and forms a more important, though less easily recognizable, part of the curriculum of totalitarian leadership schools, the Nazi Ordensburgeti for the SS troops, and the Bolshevik training centers for Comintern agents, than race indoctrination or the techniques of civil war. Without the elite and its artificially induced inability to understand facts as facts, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the movement could never move in the direction of realizing its fiction. The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 887

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the totalitarian elite’s core trait: a cultivated incapacity to compare claims against reality, distinct from mass delusion — a concept that will carry into later Islamophobia readings about how ruling ideology structures perception.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and ‘common sense’ — both theories of how ideological frames structure what count as facts.