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one wants to divide such a warring community even more, the easiest way to do it is to draw a dividing line between those who are allowed to belong and those who are to be excluded. This could be ‘foreigners’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘Jews’, ‘right-wing extremists’, ‘Russians’, ‘terrorists’, ‘blacks’, ‘gays’, ‘those who are unvaccinated’ and so on… The grounds for these racist distinctions as to who is considered right and who is considered wrong are manifold and arbitrary.

Psychological social experiments clearly show that people are easily seduced into devaluing and even hating others when they are persuaded that they are something better, that they are superior to these other people and the others are a danger to them. It can be as easy as telling people with brown eyes that they are superior to those with blue eyes or vice versa.22 They then begin to devalue these other people, become aggressive and become entangled in perpetrator-victim dynamics.

14. Love and Fear

Within the human psyche, love and fear are antagonists pitted against one another. When fear prevails, there is no psychological space left for love. Fear, like love, is a primal instinct. Fear signals that there is something dangerous and threatening to us. It activates our stress system which alerts us to prepare our natural capabilities to ward off the dangers that are present and to protect life and health, both our own and the health and lives of others.