Some ideas never disappear, or arise in new situations. Do any of the quotes below apply to the period of time in which you are reading these quotes? If so, the book was written by Hanna Arandt in the 1950's.

Her discussion was written about totalitarianism in terms of Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Lenin. That is, national socialism, from which the term Nazi is the shortened form in German, (Nationalsozialist, a supporter of the National Socialist German Worker's Party) and communist socialism as in the USSR - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Союз Советских Социалистических Республик).

For class, we were assigned to read the book, and I marked what I considered important parts in 1976 (I think).
I extracted some of my underlined parts about 1996 to apply to bureaucracies including the field of business where I was teaching as a professor in business. Now, in 2019, I am revisiting these ideas to see how they might apply since then, now, and into the future.

What do you think? Wherever you read the word "totalitarian" think "government", "military", "business", "academia", "public sector", or your favorite organization, large or small, to which you think these ideas might apply. How well do they fit?

Here is what I wrote about 1996 while a professor in business.

In a history class during the 1975-1976 academic year at the United States Military Academy at West Point, our reading requirements included Hannah Arendt's book Totalitarianism (1968 printing). Having studied the historical background of totalitarian regimes for many years, the book made quite an impression on me. After serving in the Army, government, and a number of companies, I realized that many of the principles so well articulated by Hannah Arendt in her book were just as applicable to bureaucracies, whether governmental, business, or otherwise. Popular cartoon strips such as Dilbert portray many of the same situations from today's business environment. The following are some quotes, almost all of which I had highlighted more than 20 years ago. If you find the quotes interesting and enlightening, you must really find a copy of the book and read it from front to back.

Here are selected quotes from the Hanna Arendt's book that I had underlined (in orange, a popular color at the time) during that history class in 1976. I typed these from the book in 1996.

• Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. (p. 21)



• The practical goal of the movement is to organize as many people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in motion; a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist. (p. 24)
• Marx's great attempt to rewrite world history in terms of class struggles fascinated even those who did not believe in the correctness of his thesis. (p. 31)
• Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. (p. 37)
• Only the MOB and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. (p. 39)
• ...the propaganda is explained at home as a "temporary tactical maneuver.". (p. 41)
• Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of "psychological warfare"; but terror is more. (p. 42)
• Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government. (p. 42)
• The obsession of totalitarian movements with "scientific" proofs ceases once they are in power. (p. 43)
• The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. (p. 47)
• In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies. (p. 48)
• What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. (p. 49)
• Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency. (p. 50)
• Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. (p. 50)
• Once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a "living organization", they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure. (p. 60).
• It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. (p. 61)
• Organization and propaganda (rather than terror and propaganda) are two sides of the same coin. (p. 62)
• Just as the sympathizers constitute a protective wall around the members of the movement and represent the outside world to them, so the ordinary membership surrounds the militant groups and represents the normal outside world to them. (p. 65)
• Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. (p. 80)
• The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. (p. 83)
• It is not the truthfulness of the Leader's words but the infallibility of his actions which is the basis for the structure. (p. 85)
• The multiplication of offices was extremely useful for the constant shifting of power. (p. 99)
• Among all these departments there exists no legally rooted hierarchy of power or authority; the only certainty is that eventually one of them will be chosen to embody "the will of the leadership". (p. 101)
• The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be. (p. 101)
• Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p. 101)
• A continuous competition between offices, whose functions not only overlap but which are charged with identical tasks, give opposition or sabotage almost no change to become effective. (p. 102)
• ...isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure. (p. 105)
• The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence; it is not merely a tremendously burdensome and unproductive increase of administration, but actually hinders productivity because conflicting orders constantly delay real work until the order of the Leader has decided the matter. (p. 107)
• Constant removal, demotion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent the development of experience. (p. 107)
• This they try to overcome through a permanent and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of rule, by consistently developing a method of always doing the opposite of what they say. (p. 113)
• Provocation, moreover, is clearly necessary only on the assumption that suspicion is not sufficient for arrest and punishment. (p. 121)
• Totalitarianism's central assumption that everything is possible thus leads through consistent elimination of all factual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has been committed. (p. 125)
• Not only is the organization not beyond the pale of the law, but, rather, it is the embodiment of the law, and its respectability is above suspicion. (p. 127)
• Mutual suspicion, therefore, permeates all social relationships in totalitarian countries and creates an all-pervasive atmosphere even outside the special purview of the secret police. (p. 128)
• This consistent arbitrariness negates human freedom more efficiently than any tyranny ever could. (p. 131)
• The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. (p. 135)
• When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. (p. 149)
• What makes conviction and opinion of any sort so ridiculous and dangerous under totalitarian conditions is that totalitarian regimes take the greatest pride in having no need of them, or of any human help of any kind. (p. 155)
• Common sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless against this ideological supersense, since totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world of no-sense. (p. 156)
• The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. (p. 166)
• Ideologies are known for their scientific character: they combine the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy. (p. 166)
• Any ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. (p. 167)
• Isolation may be the beginning of terror. (p. 172)
• What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. (p. 172)
• As Epictetus sees it the lonely man (eremos) finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed. The solitary man, on the contrary, is alone and therefore "can be together with himself" since men have the capacity of "talking with themselves". (p. 174)
• But this "truth" is empty or rather no truth at all, because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth). (p. 175)
• What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. (p. 176)