"Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 323).
The above quote sounds remarkably like it's describing life in an ultra-Orthodox community.
"Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 324).
That is why the ultra-Orthodox cannot afford to base their ideology on an allegiance to Talmud or Torah, lest the individual member claim his own interpretation. Membership in an ultra-Orthodox community has to be about nothing, about allegiance to the community and the dictates of the leadership and nothing more.
The tolerance for deviation from loyalty to the leadership is a measure of individual autonomy.
"The fact that the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behavior – that, on the contrary, one could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before – naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one was doing, that Himmler's ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed: 'My honor is my loyalty.'" (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 324).
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