ABSTRACT
The stranger represents all of people's fears of aloneness, vulnerability, and ultimate death. There are few human settings in which the device of projecting one's feared weaknesses onto another is not encouraged, rehearsed, and reinforced. In group life, the mechanism of projection seizes on the differences between people. In the prayers, ceremonials, and myths of ancient peoples, efforts to gain good fortune for oneself are coupled with prayers and incantations beseeching that all manner of woes, misfortunes, and plagues befall one's enemies. The notion of the Bad Leader especially is so pervasive and such a disarmingly simple view of human holocausts that people flee to its "comfort" over and over again. People were excited by the trailblazing clinical and social psychological studies of the authoritarian personality and the prejudiced person. The same dynamic that determines so much of what people do in individual self-defense is also significantly at play in large-scale events.
