Totalitarian movements replicate the structure and psychology of secret societies in public

Evidence

The totalitarian movements have been called “secret societies established in broad daylight.” Indeed, little as we know of the sociological structure and the more recent history of secret societies, the structure of the movements, unprecedented if compared with parties and factions, reminds one of nothing so much as of certain outstanding traits of secret societies.” Secret societies also form hierarchies according to degrees of “initiation,” regulate the life of their members according to a secret and fictitious assumption which makes everything look as though it were something else, adopt a strategy of consistent lying to deceive the noninitiated external masses, demand unquestioning obedience from their members who are held together by allegiance to a frequently unknown and always mysterious leader, who himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a small group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the half-initiated who form a “buffer area” against the hostile profane world. … That the secret of totalitarian movements is exposed in broad daylight does not necessarily change the nature of the experience. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 870

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s field vocabulary on exclusion (‘whoever is not expressly included is excluded’) and could feed into Islamophobia readings on how in-group/out-group distinctions are manufactured. — connects to: Occultism structurally mirrors the totalitarian society that produces it — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 260
• DEEPTHINKING: The whole edifice — a secret exposed in broad daylight retaining its binding power — is a dense, genre-defining move worth circling back to.