The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.5

Totalitarianism: When an Idea Takes Over the State

This episode opens with a representative scene of a 1920s registration clerk filling out a form, drawing Hannah Arendt's distinction between an ordinary dictatorship, wanting obedience, and a totalitarian order, claiming to know who you are. You learn why a famous psychology experiment, Milgram's obedience studies, does not hold up: Gina Perry's re-examination of the tapes found participants resisting far more than popular accounts suggest. The episode instead relies on Christopher Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, ordinary Hamburg men offered a chance to opt out of a 1942 mass shooting at Józefów which most declined. It then connects this to Arendt's claim that totalitarian systems isolate individuals from other loyalties.