Totalitarianism illustrated the human capacity to begin, that power to think and to act in ways that are new, contingent, and unpredictable… But the paradox of totalitarian novelty was that it represented an assault on that very ability to act and think as a unique individual. This new phenomenon seemed to Arendt to demonstrate the self-destructive implications of what she called \u201cmodern man\u2019s deep-rooted suspicion of everything he did not make himself.\u201d Believing that \u201ceverything is possible\u201d totalitarian movements demand unlimited power, but what this turns out to mean is not at all the building of utopia (which would itself set limits to power and possibility) but unparalleled destruction. <\/p>\n
\u201cExperiments\u201d in total domination in the concentration camps that are the \u201claboratories\u201d of the new regimes gradually make clear that the price of total power is the eradication of human plurality. The characteristics that make us more than members of an animal species \u2013 our unique individuality and our capacity for spontaneous thought and action \u2013 make us unpredictable and therefore get in the way of attempts to harness us for collective motion. Only one can be omnipotent, and the path to this goal, discovered separately by Hitler and by Stalin, lies through terror on the one hand and ideology on the other. <\/p>\n
\u201cTotal terror\u201d as practiced in the camps is, Arendt claims, \u201cthe essence of totalitarian government.\u201d It does not simply kill people but \ufb01rst eradicates their individuality and capacity for action. Any remnant of spontaneity would stand in the way of complete domination. \u201cTotal power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned re\ufb02exes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity. Precisely because man\u2019s resources are so great, he can be fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.\u201d <\/p>\n
Unlike the violence and coercion used by ordinary tyrants it does not have a utilitarian purpose such as repressing opposition, and it reaches its climax only after genuine opposition has already been repressed; its only function is to further the project of total domination by crushing out all human individuality. \u201cCommon sense protests desperately that the masses are submissive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore super\ufb02uous; if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: The apparatus seems super\ufb02uous to you only because it serves to make men super\ufb02uous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ideology complements terror by eliminating the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves, binding them into the uni\ufb01ed movement of destruction. Ideologies \u2013 pseudo-scienti\ufb01c theories purporting to give insight into history \u2013 give their believers \u201cthe total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future.\u201d By making reality as experienced seem insigni\ufb01cant compared with what must happen, they free ideological thought from the constraints of common sense and reality. But in Arendt\u2019s view the most dangerous opportunity they offer (seized by both Hitler and Stalin) is their stress on logical consistency. <\/p>\n
Both leaders prided themselves on the merciless reasoning with which they pursued the implications of race- or class-struggle to the murder of the last \u201cobjective enemy.\u201d In their hands the ideologies were emptied of all content except for the automatic process of deduction that one group or another should die. Ideological logicality replaced free thought, inducing people to strip themselves of individuality until they were part of a single impersonal movement of total domination. For totalitarian ideologies do not support the status quo: they chart an endless struggle that is inexorable in its destructiveness. Total power turns out, then, to mean inevitable destruction. The job of the totalitarian regime is simply to speed up the execution of death sentences pronounced by the law of nature or of history. <\/p>\n
Arendt points to the stress laid by both leaders on historical necessity: on acting out the economic laws of Marxist class-struggle or the biological laws of struggle for racial supremacy. Seeking to distinguish totalitarianism from the innumerable tyrannies that had preceded it, she laid particular emphasis upon this. The hallmark of tyranny had always been lawlessness: legitimate government was limited by laws, whereas tyranny meant the breach of those boundaries so that the tyrant could rage at his will across the country. But (as experienced by its adherents) totalitarianism was not lawless in that way, though its laws were not civil laws protecting rights, but the supposed \u201claws\u201d of Nature or of History. According to those inexorable laws, human existence consists of the life or death struggle between collectivities \u2013 races or classes \u2013 whose motion is the real meaning of history. <\/p>\n
For totalitarianism, \u201call laws have become laws of movement.\u201d Neither stable institutions nor individual initiative can be allowed to get in the way of this frantic dynamism. \u201cTotal terror . . . is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of history or nature,\u201d and indeed to smooth its path, \u201cto make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.\u201d Human beings (even the rulers themselves) must serve these forces, \u201ceither riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels,\u201d and individuality is an inconvenience to be eliminated by \u201cthe iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of man the One who unfailingly will act as though he himselfwere part of the course of history or nature.\u201d<\/p>\n