Three Diagnoses of Totalitarianism: Kelley, Arendt, and Desmet in Conversation: A Comparative Analysis

Introduction: Three Thinkers, One Problem

Dr. Robert W. Malone – The question of how ordinary societies produce extraordinary evil; how democratic nations slide toward authoritarian domination, how ordinary people become perpetrators or willing followers, has occupied some of the most important minds of the past century.

Three thinkers in particular have approached this question from angles that intersect in revealing ways: Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist who examined the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945-46 and published 22 Cells in Nuremberg in 1947; Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political philosopher who analyzed the structural conditions of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and its human face in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); and Mattias Desmet, the Belgian clinical psychologist who argued in The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022) that a psychological process he calls “mass formation” underlies totalitarian systems and remains active in the contemporary world.

All three grapple with fundamentally the same puzzle: how does it happen? Their answers are genuinely complementary in some respects, productively in tension in others, and sharply divergent in a few. Placing them in dialogue reveals the full complexity of the problem each was trying to solve, and illuminates the strengths and blind spots of each approach.

Part One: Deep Convergences

1. The Ordinariness of Perpetrators

Perhaps the most striking convergence across all three thinkers is their shared insistence that the architects and executors of totalitarian evil were not, in any psychologically meaningful sense, extraordinary people. This was in each case a deliberate and controversial position, taken against the grain of popular intuition.

Kelley, working from direct clinical examination, concluded after months of daily interviews and systematic psychological testing that the 22 Nuremberg defendants were not insane and not psychologically unique. Their intelligence scores clustered in a normal to above-average range. Their personality structures, while containing elements of narcissism, aggression, and ethical emptiness, did not represent clinical pathologies that set them apart from the general population.

Kelley was blunt about this: men with comparable personality profiles could be found, he wrote, behind desks in boardrooms, in political offices, and on street corners in any American city. For an in-depth review of his almost impossible-to-find book, please read my previous essay.

Arendt reached a parallel conclusion through a philosophical and historical route. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she wrote that the characteristic of the mass man, that is, the ordinary man, the human raw material of totalitarian movements, was not brutality or backwardness, but isolation and the absence of normal social relationships.

The men who committed mass crimes were not demonic figures but socially rootless, functionally purposeless individuals who had found in the movement a meaning and belonging unavailable to them elsewhere. Then, attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, she encountered the specific human face of this argument and introduced her most controversial and enduring concept: the “banality of evil.”

Eichmann, the logistical coordinator of the transportation of millions of Jews to death camps, was not, in Arendt’s assessment, a monster or an ideological fanatic. He was a shallow, career-oriented joiner; a man whose defining characteristic was a near-total inability to think from any perspective other than the one required by his institutional role. His evil was real, colossal in its consequences, and yet “banal” in the sense of being untraceable to the kind of radical, demonic intent that would make it comprehensible as the product of a particular kind of person. The horror was precisely that no particular kind of person was required.

Desmet echoes this position directly. Totalitarianism, he argues, is not about monstrous people but about normal people who have succumbed to a “morbid, dehumanizing way of thinking.” The leaders of mass formation are not, in his model, conspirators with a plan; they are themselves captive to the ideological fiction that the mass has generated, as hypnotized in their way as the followers they lead.

This is a point at which Desmet explicitly draws on Arendt, extending her observation about Eichmann’s thoughtlessness into a general theory of how the abolition of critical individual consciousness operates across a society in the grip of mass formation.

The convergence here is not merely superficial agreement. All three thinkers understand that the “ordinary perpetrator” finding is not a consoling one. It does not diminish the evil; it amplifies the danger. If atrocity required extraordinary people, societies could protect themselves by identifying and marginalizing the dangerous few. If it requires only ordinary people placed in particular conditions, the protective challenge becomes vastly more difficult — and vastly more urgent.

2. The Social Preconditions: Isolation, Atomization, Anxiety

A second major convergence concerns the social conditions that make populations vulnerable to totalitarian capture. All three thinkers identify the breakdown of genuine social bonds; the replacement of authentic community with isolation, alienation, and what Arendt called “atomization”, as central to this vulnerability.

Arendt argued that totalitarian movements are founded upon “atomized, isolated individuals”, not necessarily the poor or the lower classes, but the “neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”

Intelligent people rarely motivated by self-interest, whose defining condition is a fundamental disconnection from any stable community of meaning. Near the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that loneliness is a precondition for totalitarian domination, with socially isolated people being more likely to be attracted to totalitarian ideology and movements.

In her formulation, the lonely individual becomes psychologically dependent on the “ice-cold reasoning” of a coherent ideological system; a narrative that explains everything and provides a sense of belonging, precisely because isolated people have lost the kind of grounded social reality that would otherwise function as a check on such narratives.

Desmet’s four conditions for mass formation closely parallel Arendt’s analysis: generalized loneliness and social isolation; lack of meaning in life; widespread free-floating anxiety; and widespread free-floating frustration and aggression. The increase of free-floating anxiety. That anxiety, which seems to arise without a concrete object of concern, is, in Desmet’s model, the critical triggering condition.

When a leader or narrative arrives that can identify a concrete object for that diffuse anxiety and offer a strategy to confront it, the isolated, anxious population experiences a profound and seductive relief: their anxiety has an object, their aggression has a target, and their isolation dissolves in the solidarity of a group of people that is fighting together against that target.

The movement, in Desmet’s telling, functions as a cure for the unbearable condition of purposeless modern loneliness, which is precisely why its members cling to it so fiercely and resist any information that might undermine it.

Kelley approached this from a different angle, but the underlying observation is compatible. His neuroscientific framing, the argument that Hitler kept the German population in a sustained state of emotional arousal that made rational evaluation structurally impossible, is a mechanistic account of how the kind of atomized, anxious population Arendt described gets captured and held.

Kelley did not theorize the preconditions of that susceptibility as thoroughly as Arendt did, but his clinical observations of the actual psychological dynamic in the Nuremberg defendants, the frantic search for meaning, the dependency on the movement as a source of identity, the extreme distress at its collapse, are consistent with both Arendt’s and Desmet’s structural analyses.

3. The Suppression of Independent Thinking

All three thinkers identify the destruction of individual critical thought, the capacity to think from one’s own perspective, to evaluate evidence independently, to refuse the narrative, as both a goal and a product of totalitarian systems.

For Arendt, this was the specific pathology she observed in Eichmann: not stupidity, but a “curious, quite authentic inability to think” from any perspective that was not supplied by his institutional role and its ideology. Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes actively undermine the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and that the failure to engage critically with our own ideas draws us into totalitarianism.

She wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.” The goal of totalitarian propaganda, she argued, was not persuasion but organization, the creation of a mass (group) whose members had ceased to evaluate and had committed to inhabit the ideological world as if it were reality.

Desmet frames this very similarly. Mass formation, in his model, generates a kind of collective hypnosis in which the mass’s focused attention on its object of anxiety makes it functionally incapable of processing information that contradicts the narrative.

The suppression of dissenting voices is not (primarily) a product of external coercion in his account; it is driven by the group’s own psychological investment in its narrative, which dissent threatens to dissolve. Those who speak out do not merely threaten the leadership; they threaten the mechanism by which millions of people manage their anxiety, and so the masses turn on them with a ferocity that has an almost self-protective quality.

Kelley, who studied this at the level of individual psychology rather than social dynamics, observed the same phenomenon from the inside of the cells. His Nuremberg defendants, stripped of their roles and confronted with evidence of what those roles had meant, exhibited varying degrees of inability to integrate that evidence with their self-conception.

The mechanism he described as “thinking with the thalamus”- emotional, identity-driven cognition that simply cannot process threatening information (related to the idea of cognitive dissonance)- is an individual-level correlate of the collective cognitive suppression that Arendt and Desmet describe at the social level.

4. The Warning Function: Writing to Prevent Recurrence

A fourth and perhaps under-appreciated convergence is that all three works were written, at least in part, as warnings. None of the three was merely describing a historical phenomenon that had been safely concluded. All three were arguing, with varying degrees of urgency, that the conditions they described were permanent features of modern social life that required active vigilance.

Kelley’s final chapter is the most explicit and the most prescient about this. In 1947, he named the phenomenon he warned against as actively present in America. It was his dire warnings that probably made the American public turn away from his book. After the war, they did not want to believe that what happened in Germany could have happened and might happen here just as easily. That America is not immune to totalitarian impulses.

Arendt ended The Origins of Totalitarianism with an observation that its subject was not a thing of the past; that “the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totalitarian organization” rested on a “basic experience” of modern life that makes totalitarianism not only possible but likely to recur.

Arendt added a final chapter to the second edition titled “Ideology and Terror,” in which she wrote that “it may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form – though not necessarily their cruelest – only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past,” suggesting that totalitarianism is an expression of the basic modern experience that continues to make it likely.

Desmet’s entire project is framed as a contemporary warning, arguing that the conditions for mass formation are not only present in today’s society but have been intensifying through the mechanisms of modern technological alienation.

SF Source Malone News Feb 2026