Liquidation of Freedom by Defeating Common Sense and Enacting Laws of Movement

If organizing is a condition for human plurality and political freedom to actualize, it is also a condition for liquidating freedom. Totalitarianism demonstrated that the principle of technological experimentation— revealing our abilities to produce reality by making any hypothesis work—applies to the realm of human relations, though never as controlled processes. It is social experimentation based on

[T]he conviction that everything is possible and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism. The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. (BPF, p. 87)

Arendt describes totalitarianism as conditioning for logicality by destroying conditions for plurality. When common sense is defeated, logical thinking becomes its substitute, as it is common to us all and reliably independent of the world or experience.

Totalitarianism transformed the “idea” of ideologies—which had treated hypotheses as historical “ideas” to explain whole courses of events—into premises from which everything else can be deduced in logical consistency and to be enacted by acting in accordance with the law of a moving History or Nature, independent of reality and experience.

Terror accelerated the process by providing career or death independently of actions and by reinforcing conditions of loneliness, which existentially means a simultaneous loss of self and world, without the company either of myself or others to confirm my identity.

Arendt describes the concentration camps as laboratories in the act of verifying the totalitarian belief that everything is possible. She argues that the question “Why did you support?” instead of “Why did you obey?” and “Why didn’t you resist?” exposes as unfit for adults Eichmann’s claim that his virtue of obedience was abused, as well as it reveals the extent of liquidized freedom beyond the possibilities of resistance in the camps, where interns were not only expelled from the world and humanity—in “holes of oblivion,” organized to dissolve the reality of their existence— but also, they were expelled from the living, reduced to “a bundle of reactions,” as ‘living dead’ proving that “the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man” (OT, p. 441).