We are living through a meaning crisis. In the UK, a comprehensive survey found that 80 percent of British people think their lives are meaningless. According to CDC data, 10 percent of U.S. students attempted suicide in 2021. As traditional sources of meaning—faith, family, and vocation—fade, nihilism is rising to take their place.

At the same time, we are witnessing a resurgence of radicalism. Over a third of Americans think transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Meanwhile, 42 percent of adults under the age of 30 polled by the Pew Research Group in 2022 had a “very” or “somewhat” positive view of socialism. These positions would have been unthinkable not long ago.

It’s certainly interesting that radical ideas are taking hold at a moment when Westerners are more demoralized than they have ever been. But is there a link between the psychological collapse of Western society and the rise of extreme ideologies?

The leading theorist of totalitarianism certainly thought so. Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, was catapulted into the intellectual spotlight with the 1951 publication of her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. There, she does her best to explain how and why ordinary people end up supporting extraordinary evil. If you’ve come across the phrase “the banality of evil” before, well, that’s Arendt.

What makes Arendt’s work so appealing is that it’s not just a historical study of Nazi and Soviet regimes. Rather, it’s an exploration of the psychological drives that make totalitarianism attractive. As Arendt says, “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

Since there is no shortage of political, economic, and social misery, totalitarian solutions have a sort of perennial appeal. But they don’t appeal to everyone. Instead, they resonate with people who are already cut off from humanity.

In Arendt’s words:

The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Arendt’s work provides the missing link between meaninglessness and radicalism. When people have lost their grip on reality, when they have been taken from their communities of faith and family, and when they have ceased to recognize that there is an important difference between truth and falsehood, they are easy prey for extremists.

In fact, many welcome the neat system of totalitarian thought. All totalizing ideologies divide the world into black and white, good and evil. In the case of the Nazis, the German “race” represented good, and the Jews represented evil. Similarly, the Soviets painted the bourgeoise as the enemy, scapegoating even the independent farmers as “reactionary elements.” By weaponizing hate, these dictatorships provided a sense of meaning to demoralized people.

As Arendt predicted, totalizing ideologies are here to stay. Significant portions of American youth now claim they want government to seize control of all businesses in the country and direct economic affairs by fiat—for that is the essence of socialism. Discrimination against white men, who have been scapegoated by the radical left, is commonplace. And as political, economic, and social ills mount, one of the world’s oldest hatreds—anti-Semitism—has been revived on college campuses.

Dark times may well be ahead. If we are to right the ship, it’s important to recognize that we are not simply dealing with some very bad political ideas. Rather, we’re seeing what happens when a culture turns against itself.

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