    46

    Worldviews As The Welding Torch of the Hierarchical Chain

    "Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that

    everything is alright."

                    Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams,

                      to Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes

    Poetry, science, ideology and religion--the blindmen's canes with

    which we feel out the invisible world, the glue that binds us together as

    a collective creature whose cells are individual souls--help stir the

    social beast to a pecking-order inspired cannibalism.  And once the

    battle is over, the meal is complete, and the rival society is no more,

    poetry, ideology and religion may serve a new purpose.  They often

    become the torch that welds the citizens of the swallowed loser into a

    new pecking order.  They help turn captive chunks of the vanquished

    group into parts of the superorganism that sits there licking its lips.

    Take, for example, Hinduism.  The Hindu religion has seemed to

    its admirers in the west a profoundly spiritual view of the world.  It

    rejects materialism, lays aside earthly desires, tells its adherents to go

    with the flow, to accept the world as it is, to build up a positive karma

    and strive for nirvana in a selfless world.  What could possibly be more

    benign?

    But under the surface, the Hindu religion is not what at first it

    seems.  In fact, it is the device with which one conquering group

    managed to validate its theft of power, prestige, and goods from a rival

    superorganism.

    In approximately 1,500 B.C., a cluster of Aryans drove their herds

    of cattle from Iran to northern India through the Hindu Kush

    mountains.  These were men who centered their lives around two

    things: their cows and their fighting.  So inextricably were the two

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