being already possessed of personhood and identity, s/he has legitimate standing both as an individual and as a member of the larger human community. But that is precisely what the totalitarian leader does not want: and so, he challenges the legitimate standing of people by engaging in terrorizing acts. In doing so, the totalitarian accomplishes two things: he creates an “uprootedness” in man13 and through this means creates an sense of superflousness, a condition for which the totalitarian strives, because “total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity.”14 It is a condition, as we noted, was originally accomplished in the concentration camp, where men were reduced to a specimen of the animal-species man.”15
The result is men feel and experience loneliness, which is contrary to the “basic requirements of the human condition and one of the fundamental experiences of human life.”16 Common sense truths, which men possess inherently in order to live in a common world, are themselves questioned because they no longer provide the context that reveals anything meaningful. The everyday experiences of loneliness, which is a social phenomenon, is a mass that destroys the space between men, the space created through speech among men in the political arena:
Even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he let’s go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic are obliterated. Terrorized, man exists isolated and alone, and the totalitarian effect upon him consists in his thinking everything to the worst, “in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions."17
Man is alienated; and without the help of others, s/he cannot achieve balance.
It is from this understanding that Arendt argued totalitarianism was a new way of thinking and governing that related directly to how we viewed ideologies and experienced terror. Ideologies were, for Arendt, literally what the name signified:
It is the logic of the idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process that is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of event as though it followed the same “law” as the logical expression of the idea.18
In this sense, the logic of the idea follows closely Michael Oakeshott’s theory of rationalism where the individual is free from all authority “save the authority of reason” and the “superiority of an ideology over a tradition of thought lies in its appearance of being self-contained.”19 Ideologies are thus harmless, until they are taken seriously. At that time, “they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensively and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted.”20
Why is this important? The totalitarian mind, harboring contempt for reality and facts, constructs new structural arguments on the basis of supersense, on logical imaginings that exist beyond reason and which are accepted on the basis of trust. Because there is effectively no logical foundation for such a position – again, they are simply presented without justification – this allows totalitarians to deny even the commonsense arguments for the sake of complete consistency and legitimacy of arguments they put forward. And it is only by destroying all opportunities for spontaneous thought or action that might challenge these positions – again, those very things that a person possesses naturally from the time of his/her birth – can totalitarians revolutionize and transform society, not to mention subsequently alter humanity.21
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