Totalitarian politics outmatched imperial adventurism because it lacked ulterior motives

Evidence

Somehow it was not the fault of the bom adventurers, of those who by their very nature dwelt outside society and outside all political bodies, that they found in imperialism a political game that was endless by definition; they were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy. The joke on these players of the Great Game was that their employers knew what they wanted and used their passion for anonymity for ordinary spying. But this triumph of the profit-hungry investors was temporary, and they were duly cheated when a few decades later they met the players of the game of totalitarianism, a game played without ulterior motives like profit and therefore played with such murderous efficiency that it devoured even those who financed it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 561

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage defines the structural difference between imperialist secret politics (played for profit, hence vulnerable) and totalitarian politics (played without ulterior motives, hence murderously efficient).
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding toolkit on how modern bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion — totalitarian motives foreclose the profit calculus that made earlier imperial regimes containable.
• SEED: Angle: the paradox that disinterestedness (freedom from ulterior motive) makes political violence more, not less, murderous — a counterpoint to ideals of disinterested public service.