Totalitarian propaganda organizes masses through existing ideas, not new doctrine

Evidence

The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organization—the “accumulation of power without the possession of the means of violence.” For this purpose, originality in ideological content can only be considered an unnecessary obstacle. It is no accident that the two totalitarian movements of our time, so frightfully “new” in methods of rule and ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, have never invented an ideology which was not already popular. Not the passing successes of demagogy win the masses, but the visible reality and power of a “living organization.” … Their art consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience. With such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and strictness of the organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies—the power of the Jews after their helpless slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 845

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core mechanism that distinguishes totalitarian propaganda from ordinary persuasion: organization rather than argument, and generalization of a chosen fiction into a self-contained world.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit on representation and the construction of the ‘Other’ — this is the mechanism by which a fabricated world-scheme displaces verifiable experience, a precursor to later analyses of how Islamophobic conspiracism constructs reality.