HANNAH ARENDT: The ideal subject of such a regime . . . is the person for whom the difference between fact and fiction, between true and false has simply stopped existing, the one who no longer trusts what they saw with their own eyes over what they have been told.

Wisdom from Hannah Arendt here.
Total domination runs on two engines
Terror - isolates people, preventing them from organising together
Ideology - a ubiquitous explanation that is unfalsifiable.
The ideal subject for the regime is not a fanatic, but a person who can no longer… pic.twitter.com/uMXj8diheB

— Edie Wyatt (@msediewyatt) June 28, 2026

Wisdom from Hannah Arendt here.

Ordinary tyranny wants your obedience. It silences you, it frightens you, but it leaves your inner world more or less intact. You may think what you like so long as you keep quiet.

Total Domination wants more than that it wants the inside. It runs on two engines: Terror, which isolates every person until no one will act with anyone else, and an Ideology, a single idea that claims to explain all of history past and future with airtight logic so that no fact can ever contradict it.

And here is the most important sentence I can give you. The ideal subject of such a regime is not the fanatic, not the true believer who burns with conviction. It is the person for whom the difference between fact and fiction, between true and false has simply stopped existing, the one who no longer trusts what they saw with their own eyes over what they have been told.

Once enough people reach that state, anything becomes possible because there is no longer any solid ground from which to say that is a lie. You do not have to make people believe the lie, you only have to wear them down until they no longer believe anything at all. Exhaustion, not conviction, is the goal.

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt's Definitive Work on Antisemitism, Imperialism, and the Rise of Authoritarian Power, 1951.

Hannah Arendt books.