Totalitarian loyalty requires stripping movement ideology of all concrete content

Evidence

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The totalitarian movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid of the party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development. No matter how radically they might have been phrased, every definite political goal which does not simply assert or circumscribe the claim to world rule, every political program which deals with issues more specific than “ideological questions of importance for centuries” is an obstruction to totalitarianism. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 772

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how totalitarian loyalty is structurally produced: fidelity emptied of concrete content. This is a core toolkit concept to carry into the Islamophobia readings.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s wider argument on ideology and thought suppression; also parallels Milgram/obedience literature and the notion of loyalty-as-empty-form common to extremist movements. — connects to: Under total mobilization even genocidal calculus becomes rational self-justification — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 237; Total loyalty requires completely isolating a person from all other social ties — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1137
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that loyalty itself is only attainable by evacuating its content is a paradigm-shifting inversion of ordinary political loyalty — worth sitting with.