Hannah Arendt, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest theorist of totalitarianism, gave clear warning of the importance of conspiracy theories in antidemocratic politics. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes: Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics….The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once
...more
