In forcing membership from individuals through collective guilt, Dostoevsky reveals the psychological mechanism Arendt later identifies because when loyalty rests on fear and complicity rather than principles, it becomes the pure, thoughtless obedience that totalitarian power requires.
In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt posited that “total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content from which changes of mind might naturally arise”(424). For example, In Stalin’s USSR, one’s status as an “enemy” was arbitrary – loyalty could change overnight. Yesterday’s comrade could be today’s traitor yet those faithful were expected to remain loyal to the regime, regardless of what it demanded. Arendt highlighted that totalitarian regimes strip loyalty of any specific meaning leaving no real cause or principle left to be loyal to. When loyalty is no longer attached to anything tangible, it becomes pure, abstract obedience – essentially, loyalty for loyalty’s sake. Furthermore without concrete content, one loses the ability to question as there’s simply nothing left to question. Totalitarian regimes destroy the emotional content that gives people the ability to reason, judge, or change their opinions and instead drives pure, blind, thoughtless submission to the regime itself. Thus, loyalty becomes a tool of domination when detached from judgment and conscience.
In conversation with Nikolai Stavrogin, Pyotr explains how socialism has spread in Russia first by establishing elaborate hierarchies, which attract people’s attention, and second through sentimentality. However, Stavrogin responds stating “there’s one thing better still: get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth on the pretense of his being an informer, and with this shed blood you’ll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They’ll become your slaves, they won’t dare rebel or call you to accounts.”(386). Stavrogin is describing a lethal tactic for creating absolute loyalty. Claiming that someone is an informant makes betrayal seem imminent. Thus, individuals are pushed to commit a violent act together creating an environment of shared culpability in which each person is morally and legally compromised. This mutual secret becomes “the knot that ties them together,” as the fear of exposure prevents dissent, produces submission, and makes them “slaves” to whoever controls the secret.
Just as Arendt described, this loyalty is rooted in fear and complicity rather than ideology. Stavrogin’s morally destructive tactic causes members to stop asking whether “the cause,” if one can even call it that, is right because survival depends on silence. This is an incredibly effective way to create a devoted following as their self interest in protecting themselves strengthens the power of whoever’s in charge.
Dostoevsky thus dramatizes the manufacture of the very kind of empty, fearful loyalty Hannah Arendt later names as the foundation of totalitarian obedience.
Leave a Reply