Totalitarian movements attract ordinary people by embedding revolution within a substitute normal world

Evidence

There is no doubt that the totalitarian movements attack the status quo more radically than did any of the earlier revolutionary parties. They can afford this radicalism, apparently so unsuited to mass organizations, because their organization offers a temporary substitute for ordinary, nonpolitical life, which totalitarianism actually seeks to abolish. The whole world of nonpolitical social relationships, from which the “professional revolutionary” had to cut himself off or had to accept as they were, exists in the form of less militant groups in the movement; within this hierarchically organized world the fighters for world conquest and world revolution are never exposed to the shock inevitably generated by the discrepancy between “revolutionary” beliefs and the “normal” world. The reason why the movements in their prepower, revolutionary stage can attract so many ordinary philistines is that their members live in a fool’s paradise of normalcy; the party members are surrounded by the normal world of sympathizers and the elite formations by the normal world of ordinary members. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 858

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s concept: totalitarian organization as a ‘temporary substitute for ordinary nonpolitical life’ — nested layers of normalcy that insulate militants from the shock of revolutionary beliefs.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and the cultivation of ‘common sense’ inside movements — the scaffolding of belief inside organizational life.