“We rationalize and hope the regime is not so terrible, we try to use reason, we fact-check, we attempt to shame, we decry our own liberty, always failing to understand that totalitarianism proceeds upon none of these bases.”

One of the most common comments readers make about Arendt’s work is that they “DNF” (did not finish) it, as if they are unused to reading researched histories. There is no doubt that this is a dense work, thick with primary documents (all footnoted). More, those looking for quick takeaways about totalitarian regimes, especially in our current climate, are disappointed that Arendt hasn’t offered the complexity of the issue in bullet points. But of course, the complex and nuanced and even contradictory history of the world isn’t built that way.

And while readers could, if they choose, look at the last 3 or 4 chapters alone, her third and final part of the book on totalitarian regimes, I suspect they would be disappointed there, too, as it builds pretty deliberately on the first 350 odd pages. In other words, we can’t really understand the completely morality- and human-annihilating conception of totalitarian power without understanding first the fundamental move from aristocratic rule to a concept of the nation-state and the Rights of Man. The groundwork for where we are lies in the conditions of where we place the foundations of law, of the notion of nation and land (and consequently then of statelessness), of the superfluity of wealth, of the self-defeating demands of capitalism and empire, of the shift of power from state to money, of the ideologies of race-thinking, of the inevitability of movements articulated by Marx and Darwin both.

And it’s why, as Arendt laments through much of the book, we are so impotent to resist (and even fall subject to) totalitarian regimes: because we in some way believe that the power they wield is about transaction, their morality and purpose built on utility. We rationalize and hope the regime is not so terrible, we try to use reason, we fact-check, we attempt to shame, we decry our own liberty, always failing to understand that totalitarianism proceeds upon none of these bases. And while it uses terror as a strategy for domination, more vital still is that it preys upon our isolation and loneliness, our fears, and substitutes for them ideologies that brook no contradiction to our loyalty to them.

And ah, those ideologies: simplifications of reality, places with neither nuance nor complexity, neither logic nor coherence, which nevertheless power the inevitable engine for extinction.

Arendt is thick, she offers the first documented history of her subject, but she also frequently waxes darkly poetic and prophetic in these pages, demonstrating how vulnerable we were then (her 1950s) and are now.

Knowing that her work is difficult, I have put together a series of videos and a comprehensive reading guide to this entire work for those interested:   Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism Guide