|  Those who want a chilling glimpse into what life under Sauron would have
been like may want to read a book that was being written at the same time
Tolkien was working on The Lord of the Rings. Authored by Hannah Arendt, a
Jewish intellectual who fled Hitler's Germany, and entitled The Origins of
Totalitarianism, it takes a grim and unblinking look at the twentieth
century's two great horrors, Communism and Nazism.
In her book, Arendt made a bold claim. When the ancient Greeks listed all
possible forms of government, she said, they failed to include one that has
appeared only in modern times. The totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler, she
told readers, is more than an exaggerated form of "despotism, tyranny and
dictatorship." At the heart of totalitarianism is a reliance on "suprahuman
forces" such as the "law of History" (Communism) or the "law of Nature"
(Nazism). With such an ideology anything can be justified—even the
extermination of millions of innocent people. That ideology then becomes the
rationale for ruling over every thought and action. The parallel with what
Tolkien wrote is obvious, particularly when what Arendt said is paraphrased
to read:
 One Ideology to rule them all,
One Ideology to find them,
One Ideology to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
Much like Tolkien, Arendt believed that the foundation for totalitarian rule
rested on terror—the possibility that anyone could be branded an enemy of
the State and crushed—noting: "If lawfulness is the essence of
non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then
terror is the essence of totalitarian domination." Terror exists, she
explained, to allow "the force of nature or of history to race freely
through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action." Terror, she
goes on, exists to bind all of humanity into "One Man of gigantic
dimensions." Think of people so paralyzed by some great danger that they are
unable to think or act independently and you get her point. She further
explains:
Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential
freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in
eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the one
essential prerequisite of all freedom, which is simply the capacity of
motion which cannot exist without space.
 To get a taste of that difference, think of the Shire as it is at the start
of the story, a place where people have the room to act and think much as
they please. Contrast that to the Shire after only a short time under
Saruman—a place dominated by rules and those who enforce them with the
threat of confinement in lockholes—a place without space.
What does Arendt tell us is the greatest enemy of a totalitarian state?
Oddly enough, it centers on the most ordinary of events, the birth of a
child. "From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and
die can be only regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces." No
matter how complete the rule, no matter how cowed into silence a people has
become, each child offers the potential that, with that new birth will come
someone who refuses to bow before the terror.
Her belief that humanity's hope lies in each "new birth" enabled Arndt to
close perhaps the most depressing book ever written on a note of hope, as
she quoted from the Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who wrote during the
last years of a collapsing Roman empire.
 But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily
contains a new beginning: this beginning is the promise, the only "message"
which the end can ever produce. Beginning before it becomes a historical
event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with
man's freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—"that a beginning be made
man was created" said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new
birth; it is indeed every man.
It is important to realize that the person whose birth she is describing is
not simply someone who does not believe in the One Ideology. Mere
unbelievers, she said, pose no threat. The totalitarian state needs only a
few who actually believe (or pretend to believe) its ideology. For the rest,
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but
to destroy the capacity to form any." It is enough that the great majority
merely endure evil. They need not embrace it.
 Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond and Galadriel are Sauron's greatest foes precisely
because they hold strong convictions about good and evil. The essential
difference between the four fear-filled Hobbits who fled the Shire at the
beginning of the story and the same four who boldly return at the end is the
growth in their convictions. That is why they do not hesitate to challenge
the legitimacy of Saruman's rules and those hired to enforce them. That is
why they fight and are willing to die if necessary. Someone who is not
willing to die for freedom is already a slave.
For Arendt, the critical factor that prepares modern societies for
totalitarian rule is loneliness or, as she puts it elsewhere, the
"atomization" of society. Loneliness, she stresses, is different from
solitude. In solitude we talk with ourselves, in loneliness we lose the
ability to talk with anyone about what really matters. But our ability to
talk with ourselves and remain sensible, she emphasizes, is dependent on our
relationship to others. It is in talking to others, that we learn to talk
 wisely with ourselves. When a totalitarian state destroys genuine
communication between people, individuals are left with no "self" with whom
they can talk.
To see that in concrete terms, think of the dark nights Sam experiences on
the plains of Mordor and how, in solitude, he faced the fact that his
journey across that blasted landscape would be one way, ending with his
death. That alone would be enough to drive some to madness and still more to
despair. Only a sense of himself and his place in the world, nurtured over
many years by his fellow Hobbits, enabled him to go on, giving his life on a
mission that, as far as he knew, would provide him with no benefit.
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