ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at various texts that point on the one hand to the universal ambivalence towards strangers, and yet also to the need to recognize and overcome such ambivalence if societies are to grow. There would need to be a basic ‘psychological’ tolerance towards the stranger. But one can add that for that process of growth to be achievable, there needs to be attention to the nature of tolerance and intolerance and their impact on issues of identity and fears about loss of identity.
In order to look more closely at intolerance, I look at various intolerant states of mind, something that has been relatively neglected in political theories of tolerance. One can thus see in the accounts from, e.g. Robert Jay Lifton, Christopher Bollas, and Michael Burleigh, how apocalyptic thinking in its various guises creates extreme forms of intolerance, offering a perverse moral universe, where the awareness of difference is destroyed. While intolerance may not reach the extremes perpetrated by the Nazi and communist regimes, the way that intolerant states of mind can arise and be sustained in groups, particularly when encouraged by a populist leader, is similar.
