Totalitarian leaders maintain total private-life secrecy to prevent humanizing identification.

Evidence

The way the totalitarian movements have kept the private lives of their leaders (Hitler and Stalin) absolutely secret contrasts with the publicity value which all democracies find in parading the private lives of Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers, etc., in public. Totalitarian methods do not allow for an identification based on the conviction: Even the highest of us is only human. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2671

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the dehumanization/deification of leaders studied in colonial and postcolonial theory — the leader as supra-human embodiment of the mass will, foreshadowing how political theology configures sovereign power. — connects to: Totalitarian bureaucracy extends control into the private soul that older bureaucracies left intact; Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467; Totalitarian domination requires reducing humans to interchangeable uniform reactions — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 980 (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2671

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian rule replaces external coercion with domination from within each person #complicates (0.75)
• Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust. #complicates (0.72) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467
• Totalitarian domination requires reducing humans to interchangeable uniform reactions #complicates (0.70) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 980