The same existential fear can drive either violence or rescue
Evidence
Even if some Holocaust perpetrators and rescuers may have shared a given level of cognitive rigidity and simplicity, they may have differed in their attitudes toward cultural worldviews distinct from their own and/or in the value they placed on human life. While some individuals might have been impelled by existential fear to attack those with offending worldviews as a means of defending their own cultural standards, others may have responded to the same existential fear by defending their tolerance-based values even more directly. For some rescuers of Jews during the Nazi era, tolerance for different peoples and inclusiveness in the defini tion of “we” were themselves core themes of the worldview. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 523
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Weimar-era normative upheaval stripped Germans of cultural buffers against existential terror. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 512; Antisemitic Christians could still rescue Jews due to belief-system logic — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 524; Violence both closes down existing ways of being and can open new possibilities