In her three part treatise, Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt outlines why and how cohorts of otherwise rational people descend into totalitarian rule. She was writing in 1951, as a European Jew in the aftermath of the Second World War. For better or for worse, however, her words feel as though they could have been written last week.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
I recently used the above two quotes to illustrate the motive behind the propaganda technique 'Flooding the Zone'. In this technique, the propagandist obscures the truth not through censorship but through non-stop noise. That they flood the airwaves is of far greater importance than what they flood it with. A tidal wave of signal - be it lies, truths, support, or backlash - disorientates a population. Starved for certainty, and nostalgic for when things made sense, people are primed to put their blind trust in a conservative strongman.
As Arendt notes, "before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it."
As for what antidotes Arendt offers us, to remedy this familiar situation we find ourselves in... thinking. She sees thinking as the opposite of evil, and forgiveness as fundamental to reversing the sins of history. And, above all, be radical. Arendt makes this clear in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , "Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think."