A/HRC/25/58 is a basic emotion and feature of human life. Unlike animals, whose fears are triggered by imminent dangers to their physical survival, human beings can imagine a broad range of potential threats — even far-fetched or statistically unlikely ones — to which they feel directly or indirectly exposed. Moreover, given the complexity of the human condition, fears can be connected to many different interests, such as social and economic status, the educational prospects of one’s children or the long-term development of one’s community. People may also fear for their religious identities — both as individuals and as communities. For instance, rapid changes in societies may cause feelings of a gradual dissolution of one’s familiar religious lifeworld and concomitant fears of a decline in religious values. 21. Fear is a necessary and useful sentiment as long as it is balanced by common sense and realistic analysis. However, fear is often quite a “narcissistic emotion”.6 Unlike compassion, which requires openness to the perspectives of others and a readiness to move beyond one’s own selfish interests, fear can breed narrow-mindedness among individuals and groups. The emotional under-complexity of fear, combined with an over-complexity of imagined reasons for being fearful, creates a demand for answers which are at the same time simplistic and all-encompassing. People wish to know — and sometimes pretend to know — on whom they can project their multiple fears. 22. Objects of fear are typically imagined as both powerful and, at the same time, deserving of contempt. For example, the Special Rapporteur once heard malicious rumours that members of a religious minority running an underwear factory allegedly contaminate female underwear with a chemical substance in order to reduce the fertility rate of the majority population. As a result of those rumours, the factory was likely to be driven into bankruptcy. However bizarre this example may sound, this type of rumour-mongering is in fact quite typical of hate propaganda, in that religious or belief minorities — including even tiny minorities — are frequently portrayed as wielding some surreptitious power by which they allegedly pose a threat to the majority society. Moreover, the way in which they are said to exercise their mysterious power is imagined as clandestine, unfair and utterly contemptible. In the above-mentioned case, the suggestion of surreptitious attacks against women may furthermore evoke atavistic male attitudes of wishing to protect female community members from external threats — this is only one example indicating that hate propaganda also needs to be studied systematically from a gender perspective (see A/68/290). 23. The combination of fear and contempt occurs regularly in hate propaganda, including in manifestations of collective religious hatred. Fear can even escalate into collective paranoia, and contempt can lead to acts of public dehumanization. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories may be the most intensively studied and one of the most malign examples. While ascribing to the Jews some manipulative power by which they would allegedly threaten societies, the Nazis at the same time maliciously portrayed Jews as being allegedly driven by greed, malevolence and other primitive motives, an approach also employed by other promoters of anti-Semitism, both past and present. 24. The peculiar pattern of combining fear and contempt displays itself in numerous hate manifestations targeting members of religious minorities or individual dissenters who are imagined as clandestinely operating in the interest of foreign powers or otherwise exercising some pernicious influence. In response to these combined sentiments of fear and contempt, two sources of aggressiveness can merge into a toxic mix, that is, aggressiveness 6 6 Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge/Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 20 ff.