Totalitarian members share a conviction that politics is fundamentally a game of cheating
Evidence
The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the “first commandment” of the movement: “The Fuehrer is always right,” is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 881
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The belief that politics is inherently deceptive as a founding conviction of membership parallels how conspiracy-minded publics treat all official statements.