Totalitarian ideology takes hold where individuals feel isolated, expendable, and lonely.

Evidence

These developments alert us to a deeper truth: just as capitalism cannot be eaten raw, people cannot live without the felt possibility of homecoming. Hannah Arendt explored this territory more than sixty years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she traced the path from a thwarted individuality to a totalizing ideology. It was the individual’s experience of insignificance, expendability, political isolation, and loneliness that stoked the fires of totalitarian terror. Such ideologies, Arendt observed, appear as “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” Years later, in his moving 1966 essay “Education after Auschwitz,” social theorist Theodor Adorno attributed the success of German fascism to the ways in which the quest for effective life had become an overwhelming burden for too many people: “One must accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected with the fact that the old established authorities… decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not yet ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal to the freedom that fell into their laps.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1641

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s isolation-to-totalitarianism path and Adorno’s self-determination argument connect to the reader’s existing knowledge of authoritarian dynamics and the trade-institutions work on how trust systems collapse. — connects to: Loneliness, rooted in uprootedness and superfluousness, grounds both totalitarian terror and ideology — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1079; Fragmented modern lives make people vulnerable to totalitarian demagoguery. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 261
• QUESTION: Adorno’s point that people ‘were not yet ready for self-determination’ invites comparison with Zuboff’s claim that populations are similarly unequipped to resist Big Other’s seductions.

Broader Connections

• Loneliness, rooted in uprootedness and superfluousness, grounds both totalitarian terror and ideology #expands (0.90) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1079
• Fragmented modern lives make people vulnerable to totalitarian demagoguery. #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 261