HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
33
In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totali–
tarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its
strange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the
conviction that everything is possible, and not just permitted, morally
or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism. The totalitarian sys–
tems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis
and that
in
the course of consistently guided action, the particular
hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. The
assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it
pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then "ob–
jectively'' true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to
be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent
action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved. Or, to put the
same matter the way Heidegger put it: The axiom from which the
deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics
and logic supposed, a self-evident truth; it does not have to tally
at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment
the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed
to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and
self-evident.
The frightening arbitrariness with which we are confronted
whenever we decide to embark upon this type of action, which is
the exact counterpart of consistent logical processes, is even more
obvious in the political than in the natural realm. But it is more dif–
ficult to convince people that
this
holds true for past history. The
historian, by gazing backward into the historical process, has been
so
accustomed to discovering an "objective" meaning independent
of the aims and awareness of the actors, that he is liable to overlook
what actually happened,
in
his
attempt to discern some objective
trend. He will, for example, overlook the particular characteristics
of Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship in favor of the industrialization of
the Soviet empire or of the nationalistic aims of traditional Russian
foreign policy.
Within the natural sciences things are not essentially different,
but they appear more convincing because they are so far removed
from the competence of the layman and his healthy stubborn com–
mon sense, which refuses to see what it cannot understand. Here,
too, thinking in terms of processes, on the one hand, and the con-
