Totalitarian rulers subordinate state, nation, and even self-interest to the movement’s fictitious future

Evidence

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The point is rather that our bewilderment about the anti-utilitarian character of the totalitarian state structure springs from the mistaken notion that we are dealing with a normal state after all—a bureaucracy, a tyranny, a dictatorship—from our overlooking the emphatic assertions by totalitarian rulers that they consider the country where they happened to seize power only the temporary headquarters of the international movement on the road to world conquest, that they reckon victories and defeats in terms of centuries or millennia, and that the global interests always overrule the local interests of their own territory. … Not the Germans were the dawn of the master race, but the SS. The “Germanic world empire,” as Himmler said, or the “Aryan” world empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in any event still centuries off. For the “movement” it was more important to demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate a race by annihilating other “races” than to win a war with limited aims. What strikes the outside observer as a “piece of prodigious insanity” is nothing but the consequence of the absolute primacy of the movement not only over the state, but also over the nation, the people and the positions of power held by the rulers themselves. The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, with their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a single man, were never tried out before, is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough to discard all limited and local interests—economic, national, human, military—in favor of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite distant future. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 927

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism of subordinating local interests to an abstract future connects to Weberian bureaucratic rationality and to later readings on how exclusionary ideologies override utilitarian self-interest. — connects to: National Socialism functioned as a non-state ruling directly without legal mediation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1183; Postcolonial nations replicated totalitarian single-root thinking rather than relation to the Other — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 129
• SEED: The claim that the SS, not Germans, were the master race — and that racism is a fabricated category — could anchor an article on how totalitarian movements treat race as a construct to be engineered, not a given identity.