Totalitarian power is dematerialized organizational force, not material possession

Evidence

Power, as conceived by totalitarianism, lies exclusively in the force produced through organization. … Whatever connection power had in the minds of Western man with earthly possessions, with wealth, treasures, and riches, has been dissolved into a kind of dematerialized mechanism whose every move generates power as friction or galvanic currents generate electricity. The totalitarian division of states into Have and Have-not countries is more than a demagogic device; those who make it are actually convinced that the power of material possessions is negligible and only stands in the way of the development of organizational power. … To a man who believed in organizational omnipotence against all mere material factors, military or economic, and who, moreover, calculated the eventual victory of his enterprise in centuries, defeat was not military catastrophe or threatened starvation of the population, but only the destruction of the elite formations which were supposed to carry the conspiracy for world rule through a line of generations to its eventual end. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 937

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core definition of totalitarian power: power as force generated purely through organization/cadres, explicitly dissolving the Western equation of power with material wealth.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reading purpose’s Scaffolding on how organizational/bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion — the SS cadres as pure organizational power echoes later work on how institutions make dehumanization possible.
• SHARE: The Hitler quote about sixty thousand men becoming ‘a single type’ with ‘the same facial expression’ is a vivid datum for someone interested in totalitarian psychology.
• ADDENDUM: The dematerialized ‘organizational omnipotence’ and the SS as an enduring conspiracy class connects to the sacrifice article’s theme of elites sacrificing all material and human wealth for an ideological end.