Totalitarian regimes own reality by manufacturing a malignant normality people must inhabit.

Evidence

Arendt wrote fiercely about what she called the “sensus communis” against the background of the loss of common sense inflicted by twentieth-century totalitarianism. The “horrible originality” of totalitarianism “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment,” she wrote. Totalitarianism is our common touchstone of a regime using terror, propaganda, conspiracy theory, and organized violence to control and reshape not only political behavior but also how people think and what they think, sublimating or even erasing what they used to know. It epitomizes a regime that claims to own reality and creates its own malignant normality, which ordinary people are obliged to live within. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 291

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School texts’ analysis of fascist reality-construction and how regimes condition perception. — connects to: Totalitarian rule dissolves factual reality itself — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 893; Totalitarianism introduces unprecedented concepts of power and reality; Totalitarian propaganda constructs a consistent fictional world that shelters uprooted masses from reality (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian rule dissolves factual reality itself #expands (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 893
• Totalitarianism introduces unprecedented concepts of power and reality #expands (0.80)
• Totalitarian propaganda constructs a consistent fictional world that shelters uprooted masses from reality #expands (0.78)
• The elite’s trained unreality is what lets a totalitarian movement realize its fiction #corroborates (0.75)