Totalitarian elites treat ideology as content-free organizational function

Evidence

It is this freedom from the content of their own ideologies which characterizes the highest rank of the totalitarian hierarchy. These men consider everything and everybody in terms of organization, and this includes the Leader who to them is neither an inspired talisman nor the one who is infallibly right, but the simple consequence of this type of organization; he is needed, not as a person, but as a function, and as such he is indispensable to the movement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 890

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key distinction: the Leader in totalitarianism is a function of the organization, not a person — a structural, not charismatic, account of authority.
• XREF: connects to: Totalitarian collective language is as vacuous as private stylistic caprice — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 237