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

A Comparative Analysis

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

A Comparative Analysis

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Introduction: Three Thinkers, One Problem

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.

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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.

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Part Two: Productive Tensions and Divergences

1. The Question of Agency: Who Drives the Process?

One of the more significant tensions between the three thinkers concerns where agency is located in the totalitarian process. For Kelley, examining specific powerful individuals with clinical instruments: the question of character, of what kind of person chooses to do what, remains central. Goering was not simply the product of social conditions; he was a specific man with a specific personality structure who made specific choices, and understanding those choices requires understanding that personality. Kelley did not deny the role of social conditions, but his method kept individual agency as an important component in the atrocities committed by governmental forces and in the rise of totalitarianism.

Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism is primarily structural; she is more interested in the conditions that make totalitarianism possible than in the psychology of particular actors. Her Eichmann analysis pushed this tendency to its logical limit: by emphasizing the role of “thoughtlessness” over ideological conviction or personal malice, she located the driver of evil in the absence of critical thinking rather than in the presence of a personality characteristic, such as cruelty or ambition. This was both her most original insight and the source of her most serious controversy, critics argued, with some documentary justification, that she had understated Eichmann’s actual ideological commitment and anti-Semitism in order to illustrate her theoretical point.

Desmet is, in some ways, the most radical in displacing individual agency from his account. In his model, the leader of mass formation is not a mastermind exploiting a psychological vulnerability for personal power; he is himself captured by the ideological narrative, a product of the same mass psychological process he ostensibly leads. This produces an account in which totalitarianism emerges almost automatically from social preconditions, with leaders who are more symptom than cause. Critics have noted that this framing can function to distribute and thereby dilute moral responsibility. If leaders are captive to ideology rather than exploiting it, the nature of their culpability becomes harder to specify.

Kelley’s Nuremberg portraits offer a useful corrective here. Goering, as Kelley describes him, was not a man swept along by ideological currents he did not understand. He was fully conscious of what the Nazi movement was doing and chose to participate in it for reasons that were substantially self-interested. His cynicism about Nazi ideology was clear from his conversations with Kelley; what he lacked was not a fanatical commitment to the ideology but a functioning conscience. Desmet’s model does not account well for this kind of actor; the shrewd, self-aware opportunist who exploits mass formation rather than inhabiting it.

2. The Nature of Evil: Banal or Radical?

The three thinkers also diverge interestingly on the nature of the evil that totalitarian systems produce. This divergence maps onto one of the most debated tensions in Arendt’s own work: between the “radical evil” she attributed to Nazi crimes in The Origins of Totalitarianism and the “banality of evil” she introduced after the Eichmann trial.

In Origins, Arendt described Nazi evil as something genuinely new and absolute, a project not merely of mass killing but of rendering categories of human beings metaphysically superfluous, of attempting to eliminate human plurality itself. This was radical evil in a philosophical sense: evil that cannot be traced to human motives that are comprehensible within ordinary moral frameworks. After Eichmann, she pivoted to argue that this unprecedented evil was, at the individual level, produced by the most ordinary and even banal of psychological mechanisms: the failure to think.

Kelley’s position is, characteristically, more empirical and more individual. He found in his defendants a range of moral characters, from Frank’s guilt-ridden collapse to Goering’s unrepentant cynicism to Rosenberg’s genuine ideological delusion. He did not find radical evil in Arendt’s sense (the attempt to destroy human plurality as such), nor did he find the banal thoughtlessness she observed in Eichmann. What he found was a spectrum of ordinary human failings: ambition, resentment, cowardice, cruelty, intellectual dishonesty, operating without the check of conscience in a system that rewarded and normalized their expression.

Desmet, drawing on the banality-of-evil tradition, emphasizes the mechanistic and impersonal character of totalitarian evil. Leaders are captive to ideology; followers are captive to mass formation; the destruction unfolds as if by its own logic, with individuals serving as instruments rather than agents. This is coherent as a sociological model, but it sits uneasily with the clinical reality that Kelley documented: some of the men in those 22 cells had made very deliberate and knowing choices, and the language of captivity does not describe them well.

3. The Relationship Between Modernity and Totalitarianism

All three thinkers connect totalitarianism to the conditions of modern life, but they do so in quite different ways and with quite different implications.

Arendt’s account in Origins identified specific historical processes, the collapse of the European nation-state system, the atomizing effects of industrial capitalism and imperialism, and the destruction of class structures that had previously given individuals a place in a shared social world as the structural preconditions. Her account is historically specific: totalitarianism of the Nazi/Stalinist type was not a general human possibility but a specific outcome of specific historical conditions in a specific part of the 20th-century world.

Kelley’s analysis was more immediately psychological and less historically specific. His argument that the Nazi personality types could be found in contemporary America was based on psychological universalism: human character does not change rapidly, and the personality structures that produced Nazism are recurrently available. His concerns about American racial politics were specific to his moment, but his fundamental point was about permanent human susceptibilities rather than historically unique conditions.

Desmet is the most ambitious and the most controversial in his account of modernity. He argues that the philosophical and cultural legacy of the Enlightenment, specifically its mechanistic materialist worldview, has created the conditions for mass formation by severing human beings from sources of meaning previously available through religious tradition, organic community, and connection to nature. The alienation, anomie, and free-floating anxiety that feed mass formation are, in his account, structural products of modernity as such, not of specific historical moments but of the general trajectory of Western civilization since the 17th century.

The different scales of these analyses produce different practical implications. If totalitarianism was a specific 20th-century historical phenomenon (Arendt’s early position), its recurrence requires specific historical conditions to reproduce. If it reflects permanent features of human psychology (Kelley), it is always potentially available but requires specific triggers. If it is a structural product of modernity’s relationship to meaning (Desmet), it becomes progressively more likely as modernity deepens, which is arguably the most alarming of the three accounts.

4. The Role of the Dissenting Individual

All three thinkers address the question of what, if anything, can resist the totalitarian dynamic, and their answers reveal important differences.

For Kelley, the answer was primarily civic and educational: informed, emotionally mature citizens capable of critical thought, engaged in democratic participation, refusing to vote for politicians who exploit racial and ethnic anxieties. His is fundamentally a liberal democratic prescription, grounded in the institutions of the republic.

Arendt’s answer was more philosophical and demanding. The capacity to resist totalitarianism required the cultivation of genuine thinking, not information processing, but the Socratic willingness to question one’s own presuppositions and to imagine the world from perspectives other than one’s own. This was not a mass capacity but an individual one, and her account of its rarity (only about 10 percent of any population, Arendt estimated, actually exercises independent moral judgment under totalitarian conditions) was not encouraging. What she valued was political action, the appearance of a distinct individual voice in the public sphere, the human capacity to “begin something new,” to interrupt the apparently inevitable momentum of ideological processes by the sheer fact of individual initiative.

Desmet’s prescription is the most counterintuitive and the most contested: he argues that the primary antidote to mass formation is simply the continued act of speaking out, refusing silence in the face of the dominant narrative, regardless of the specific form that speaking out takes. Even a small minority of vocal dissenters, in his model, can break the spell of mass formation by demonstrating that the narrative is not unanimous, thereby re-opening the possibility of individual thought. His four conditions for mass formation can be countered not primarily through institutional reform but through the restoration of genuine human connection and meaning. A diagnosis that points toward community, art, spirituality, and authentic relationships as the ultimate defenses.

These prescriptions are not incompatible, but they emphasize different levels of the problem. Kelley’s civic prescriptions address the institutional conditions for democratic resistance. Arendt’s philosophical prescriptions address the individual cognitive capacity required for genuine judgment. Desmet’s relational prescriptions address the psychological preconditions that make populations susceptible in the first place. A complete picture might require all three, because none are necessarily incorrect.

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Part Three: Critical Assessment and Unresolved Questions

Where Kelley’s Account Is Indispensable

The enduring value of Kelley’s contribution is his empirical grounding; his account is built on direct clinical observation of actual people, tested against behavioral evidence, and honest about its limits. In a discourse that can tend toward abstraction, Kelley’s portraits of specific individuals provide a corrective. These case histories demonstrate that the “ordinary perpetrator” finding does not require erasing individual differences in psychology, motivation, or moral culpability. Goering and Hess were both ordinary in the relevant sense (not clinically abnormal) and dramatically different from each other in their personalities, their ideological commitments, their degrees of self-awareness, and the nature of their culpability. Any adequate theory of totalitarianism has to account for both the cynical opportunist who exploits mass psychology and the true believer who is captured by it.

Where Arendt Remains Indispensable

Arendt’s contribution is irreplaceable at the structural and historical level. Her identification of loneliness and atomization as the fundamental preconditions of totalitarian susceptibility has been confirmed by subsequent historical and psychological research and provides the essential context for both Kelley’s clinical findings and Desmet’s psychological model.

Her concept of the banality of evil, however contested in its application to Eichmann specifically, identified something genuinely important: that the most terrible outcomes can be produced by the most undramatic psychological mechanisms, and that the appropriate response to this is not resignation but the cultivation of the capacity for genuine thought and judgment. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann was meant to describe not the nature of the deeds, but the character and the motives of the doer, specifically his “curious, quite authentic inability to think.” This remains one of the most productive intellectual frameworks available for understanding how institutional systems can produce evil without requiring evil individuals.

Where Desmet Adds Value

Desmet’s contribution is most valuable as a bridge between the structural analysis Arendt provided and the individual psychology Kelley documented. His “mass formation” framework describes how the specific sequence of social isolation, loss of meaning, free-floating anxiety, and the emergence of a narrative that gives that anxiety an object and a strategy. This provides a mechanism for connecting macro-level social conditions to micro-level psychological states in a way neither Arendt nor Kelley fully articulates.

Conclusion: A Three-Part Lens

Read together, Kelley, Arendt, and Desmet offer a remarkably comprehensive multi-level analysis of how ordinary societies produce totalitarian outcomes. Kelley provides the clinical ground level: the psychological portrait of the actual individuals who drive and execute authoritarian systems, with all their ordinariness and all their specific moral failures. Arendt provides the structural and historical level: the identification of the social and political conditions, atomization, loneliness, the collapse of class and communal structures, the manufacture of enemies, and the destruction of the public sphere, which makes populations available for totalitarian capture. Desmet provides the psychological mechanism that bridges the individual and the social: the specific sequence through which a lonely, anxious, purposeless population comes to embrace an authoritarian narrative and defend it against correction.

What emerges from this triangulation is a picture that is simultaneously more coherent and more troubling than any single account alone. The preconditions are real and demonstrably present in modern societies. The psychological dynamics are real and have historical precedent across many contexts and cultures. The individual capacity for conscience, judgment, and independent thought is real but fragile, and cannot be assumed. The institutions and habits that sustain democratic resistance require constant cultivation and can be eroded in ways that appear gradual until they are not.

Kelley wrote in 1947 that the lesson of Nuremberg was not about Germany specifically but about the permanent human capacity to do what Germany had done, and about the imperative of creating the conditions, individual and social, under which that capacity would be less likely to be exercised.

Nearly eight decades later, that lesson has lost none of its urgency. The three thinkers examined here, despite their significant differences of method, emphasis, and conclusion, are united in the conviction that the answer to totalitarianism is not the identification of a particular kind of monster, but the cultivation of a particular kind of citizen and a particular kind of society. The question is whether cultivating a better citizen and a better society is possible.

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Primary works discussed:

• Douglas M. Kelley: 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (1947)

• Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)*

• Mattias Desmet: The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022)

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