When a bunch of human beings say religious or political leaders lose the most common thing with humans namely, common sense, it is a sign of the processes of starting “something new.” The new is not the political isolation, but the loneliness of socially uprooted, “superfluous” human beings, their loss of common sense, the sense of community and communication. Common sense is described as a sense of reality. It is important to note that the distinction between the two contexts is relative. Discussion of how common sense is valid understanding of human reality is conditioned by plurality and communication. Lived experience forms the basis of all forms of understanding. An individual’s world consists of all things that he is aware of and that matter to him, that make up his experiences, his activities, the ‘web of relationships’ he participates, and so on. All our activities take place in the specifically human world, which likewise is the source of all our experiences. We mostly speak of ‘common world’–to stress the fact that it is shared with our fellow men–or just ‘world’ for this complex totality into which we are born. We explain this commonness as members of the same species having the same context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning. It is the common capability to judge between good and evil.

Each individual has a personality of his own, reflecting his temperament, personal history, background, et cetera. Expressing different opinions, communicating experiences and telling stories only makes sense when there are such differences between individuals. Differences enrich in all kinds of ways the totality of experience available in society. Having many perspectives available adds to the sense of reality–which H. Arendt considers the hallmark of common sense. Speech allows the sharing of experiences and the building of the common world. Stories are a rich and engaging medium for communicating experiences and meaning. The men who have lost common sense can easily slip into a situation of one’s imposition of one own will. Due to the lack of rapport or legal communication between the people and the tyrant, all action in a tyranny manifests a mutual fear: the tyrant’s fear of the people, on one side, and the people’s fear of the tyrant, or their “despair over the impossibility” of joining together to act at all, on the other. These lonely leaders consider themselves right and the rest others wrong.

Such men in authority will decide the 2+2=5. It evidently lacks common sense, but it will be imposed. There is total atomisation. The radical atomization of the whole of society differs from the political isolation, the political “desert” is created. It eliminates not only free action, but also the element of action, that is, of initiation, of beginning anything at all, from every human activity. Individual spontaneity in thinking, in any aspiration, or in any creative undertaking that sustains and renews the human world is obliterated in totalitarianism. As a form of government, tyranny stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the people, the condition in which political life and political freedom – “public happiness.” There will be people who support the totalitarian system. The entire plurality of human beings were to become one. The loneliness of socially uprooted, “superfluous” human beings loss of common sense, the sense of community and communication. This attracts them to logical explanations of all that has happened, is happening, and ever will happen. When “the iron band of terror” destroys human plurality, so totally dominating human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a mere mass of identical, interchangeable specimens. Terror and logicality welded together equip totalitarian regimes.

It is in this situation Hitler and Stalin discovered the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power of the concentration camp. In concentration camps, the combination of the practice of terror with the principle of logicality, which is the nature of totalitarianism, “resolves” the conflict in constitutional governments between legality and justice by ridding human beings of individual consciences and making them embodiments of the laws governing the motion of nature and history. Human beings are inconsequential to “the undeniable automatism” of natural and historical processes, or at most an impediment to their freedom. On the other hand, “the iron band of terror” destroys human plurality, so totally dominating human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a mere mass of identical, interchangeable specimens of the animal-species man.