The old tyrants had wanted power over men.

These regimes wanted something else.

They wanted to make men superfluous.

The camps, she wrote, were ghastly laboratories built to test the hypothesis that everything is possible.

Places where the juridical person was stripped away first, then the moral person,

then the last flickers of individual identity,

until what remained was a uniform bundle of biological reactions.

She theorized this rule as resting on two interlocking mechanisms,

terror, which was the physical essence of the thing,

and ideology, which slipped inside the head and did the rest.

Ordinary laws, she wrote, had always worked like fences,

protecting a stable common world. Totalitarianism

leveled those fences and put in their place what she called laws of movement, race war, class

struggle, endless processes through which the forces of nature or history could race freely through mankind.

Terror stabilized men so that those forces could move.

Ideology, meanwhile, freed thought from the rough texture of lived experience,

offering a logically deduced substitute for reality.

Quoting Martin Luther, she noted that the lonely man always deduces one thing from the other

and thinks everything to the worst.

That loneliness was the soil, not solitude, which was the healthy quiet of the inner dialogue, but a deeper thing,

the experience of not belonging to the world at all. The uprooted modern masses cut loose from

neighborhood and trade and shared reality were primed for the airtight logic of ideology.

...