"Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 328).
The broken elites are drawn to the mob and are willing to enlist their fury to help tear down what they consider to be the degenerate remnants of the ancien regime. As the mob takes hold, they rip apart the institutions of hierarchy. They desecrate the temple as precursor to the dismembering the society.
The processes of catastrophe and collapse have a logic of their own, and those processes always risk the danger of ushering in totalitarian rule. The antidote to societal collapse leading to totalitarianism is to have in place an alternative, post-collapse program that supports civil society, mutual aid, human rights, and individual dignity and autonomy.
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