The engagement of supersense is thus well thought out and purposeful. As Arendt notes:
It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity
.
For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow men or our fellow nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world.22
In other words, using what is itself a logical twist or trick, totalitarians engage “supersense” to deny reason and common sense in order to legitimate their actions:
It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule that, far from being “lawless,” it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimization, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government was before, and that far from wielding its power in the interests of one man, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody’s vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assume to be the law of History or the law of Nature.23
By placing the emphasis of suprahuman “forces,” the totalitarians cause the focus to be on processes instead of the moral legitimacy of individual claims and challenges. In other words, totalitarians take the –ism seriously, take reification seriously; and as a result, all laws became “laws of movement – the expression of motion itself,”24 a position put forward by Robert Orr.25 And as long as they keep the emphasis on processes, and keep those processes and arguments moving, the environment will not stabilize to a point where men could reorient themselves and present a challenge to their claims. This is why it is understandable that more contemporary theorists like Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman make the claim that the new dictators
are “spin dictators.” What those authors are
witnessing is the more sophisticated techniques such as social media eliminate the need for concentration or internment camps. It is all about movement, spin and spinning spin.
The full expression of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism was thus captured in her argument concerning terror. “Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous action.”26 Terror is the technique of totalitarianism; and, again, in an ironic twist, terror moves as process against all other processes to ‘stabilize’ men, to deny them spontaneity. In short, the freedom of men, which previously was ensured by laws and the space created through discourse, becomes replaced in totalitarianism by a ‘band of iron’ which destroys space and creates ‘One Man of gigantic dimensions.’27 Using ideologies in such a way, totalitarian regimes create a process of constant change by treating the course of events as though “it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical expression of the ‘idea’.”28
Technically, this is accomplished by making the first thesis of the argument its premise:
Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two
It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity.
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