Imperialism’s elite nihilism replaced the superstition of progress with the superstition of doom.

Evidence

In the imperialistic epoch a philosophy of power became the philosophy of the elite, who quickly discovered and were quite ready to admit that the thirst for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the essential cause of their nihilism (especially conspicuous in France at the turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the superstition of progress with the equally vulgar superstition of doom, and preached automatic annihilation with the same enthusiasm that the fanatics of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Powers the reader’s scaffolding: the progress-to-doom substitution is a mechanism relevant to how totalitarian and exclusionary worldviews later emerge.