Under these circumstances it is easily possible for the most powerful criminals to mislead the people so that they walk on behind them. Every authoritarian society shows the same pattern. Its ideology pretends to give values and a reliable hold to the people, while in fact a number of criminals exploit them. Indeed this is in accordance with the theories of those sociologists. But all of this handles about 'spiritual indifference' and that is totally different from real nihilism.
Nihilism has nothing to do with indifference as a passive attitude against reality.
On the contrary, nihilism is an intellectual attitude of life and it is far from passive. It means that one has developed the insight that all phenomena are of the same value. There exists nothing of greater value than something else. Because of the equality of values you can also say that there are no values at all. But then there is the risk of misunderstanding in this sense that one can believe it goes about the above-mentioned spiritual indifference.