Totalitarianism’s crimes were so improbable that specialists failed to grasp them

Evidence

The most compelling reason of all is that in most of these cases, journalists, scholars, and Western governments had a difficult time reckoning the full weight of totalitarianism’s monstrous achievements because the actual facts were so “improbable” that it was difficult even for specialists to grasp their truth. “The Stalin epoch,” writes Conquest, “is replete with what appear as improbabilities to minds unfitted to deal with the phenomena.” This failure of comprehension has immediate significance for us as we learn to reckon with surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1133

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines an epistemic barrier — improbability as a cognitive obstacle to recognizing new forms of power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that the sheer improbability of facts functions as a cognitive shield — that new forms of domination are hard to recognize because their concrete manifestations strain belief — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting lens that the author then explicitly maps onto surveillance capitalism.
• XREF: connects to: Totalitarian perpetrators relied on the public’s incredulity to shield their crimes; Historical observers failed to foresee totalitarianism’s rise before 1914 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1257

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian perpetrators relied on the public’s incredulity to shield their crimes #complicates (0.85)
• Historical observers failed to foresee totalitarianism’s rise before 1914 #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1257