Totalitarian lies work through graded cynicism rather than mass gullibility alone

Evidence

Without the organizational division of the movement into elite formations, membership, and sympathizers, the lies of the Leader would not work. The graduation of cynicism expressed in a hierarchy of contempt is at least as necessary in the face of constant refutation as plain gullibility. The point is that the sympathizers in front organizations despise their fellow-citizens’ complete lack of initiation, the party members despise the fellow-travelers’ gullibility and lack of radicalism, the elite formations despise for similar reasons the party membership, and within the elite formations a similar hierarchy of contempt accompanies every new foundation and development. The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 884

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The totalitarian lie is not aimed at believers at all but operates on a gradient so that gullibility and cynicism mutually reinforce; the system becomes foolproof by eliminating the reality-checking function that normally undoes liars.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia module’s theme of how constructed narratives resist falsification; parallels how ideological claims immunize themselves against counter-evidence. — connects to: Fake news harming democracy is about indistinguishability, not volume. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 46; Award-winning journalism can propagate totalitarian fantasy for years without correction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2539; Cynicism is a requirement of late-capitalist subjectivity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1611
• SEED: Essay angle: the mechanics of ‘foolproof’ ideological systems as they replicate in contemporary propaganda, from post-truth politics to disinformation campaigns.