Arendt, the characteristic feature of totalitarianism, exist not primarily to silence the opposition (this was liquidated in the early stages) or even to cow the population through terror (for knowledge of what precisely goes on in the camps is hidden from the people), but as experiments in total domination-experiments whose very “success” is more frightening than any previous tyranny the world has had to endure. The concentration camps which are, for Dr. Their goals are based neither on specific, narrow interests nor even on the utopianism of earlier ideologies, religious or socialist, which sought to extend in the future the sway of certain already given values.

Totalitarians are “inhuman” in that they are motivated toward total domination of the globe, toward total destructiveness of human individuality everywhere. Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily penetrating book makes plain that totalitarianism, whether Nazi or Stalinist, cannot be understood so long as we continue to use the traditional categories of common sense: it cannot be explained by the mere desire for power, for national expansion, for class revenge-for any motives that are simply human, though evil. Indeed, it is to science fiction, rather than to the more humane Utopias of the past, that we must look for the extremities of the totalitarian’s belief that, while nothing may be in itself meaningful, everything may be possible. He charily confides some of these suspicions to a friend of his-and then we learn that his fantasies are in fact true: his “friend” reports to the hidden controllers that the hero “is getting on to us.” Thereupon, the controllers contrive one night to make the hero’s city disappear when he wakes in the midst of nothingness, he realizes that his paranoia was all too realistic. If he meets a girl, this is because it has been arranged by the secret world-controllers who are playing with him. If he walks into a drug store and orders an ice-cream soda, neither the drug store nor the soda existed prior to his need of them.

A science-fiction tale of some years back tells of a young man who gets the idea that the world he lives in is arranged especially for him.

Hannah arendt 1951