The recollections of Gisella Perl are presented to illuminate the ugly realities of barbaric captivities. Providing rich detail about survival behavior in Auschwitz, including stealing among inmates, the physical abuse and “killing” of fellow captives, as well as sex for food and special favors, Perl confessed that the only law in Auschwitz was the law of the jungle: The law of self-preservation. Viewing survival behavior through this dark lens, Perl concluded that only the strongest, cruelest, most merciless captives survived. Readers learn that after digesting frank confessions of this sort in the aftermath of World War Two, scholars and litterateurs became disillusioned with the human experiment. Hoping to salvage hope, they searched the confessional literature of survivors, ferreting-out confessions that illuminated the better part of humanness. As a result, men of bright fancies, as Hume put it in his Treatise, committed the moralistic fallacy, otherwise known as the fallacy of wishful thinking. This inverse of the naturalistic fallacy suggests that the way the world ought to be is the way the world is. Following examples of this fallacy, the corrective views of Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, are addressed critically. Frankl argued that a methodological presentation of survival behavior is difficult because it requires scientific detachment. But insiders may not possess the necessary detachment and outsiders may be too far removed to make statements of value. Alerting readers to the possibility of a personal bias, a bias favoring invitations to life, the conscientious author informs his readers that he had the experience of teaching philosophy in a maximum-security prison, where he developed memorable Socratic relationships with captives.