After World War II, many European thinkers who had suffered under these oppressive regimes decided that the source of totalitarianism lay in “totalizing” metanarratives. By “totalizing” they meant a worldview that focuses on a single dimension of human experience, elevating it to a false absolute and subordinating everything else to its categories. When a one-dimensional, totalizing worldview gains political power, those who disagree will be marginalized, oppressed, left out, silenced, dominated, co-opted, controlled, and coerced. They will be stigmatized as different, perceived as “the
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