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    fortress communities, cut off from the ideas and the delicacies that had once

    made life sweet.  The barbarian "freedom fighters" had loosed the chains not

    of  life,  but of  death.    For  Rome  was  an  oppressor,  but  Rome  was  also  the

    source of nourishment and peace.  In her absence came pestilence and war.

    The superorganism is often a vile and loathsome beast.  But like the

    body nourishing her constituent cells, the social beast grants us life.  Without

    her, each of us would perish.

    That knowledge is woven into our biology.  It is the reason that the

    rigidly individualistic Clint Eastwood does not exist.  The internal

    self-destruct  devices with which we come equipped at birth insure that we

    will live as components of a larger organism...or we simply will not live at

    all.

    Behind these superorganismic imperatives is nature's latest wrinkle in

    the research and development racket.  Despite the claims of individual

    selectionists, human evolution is propelled not only by competition between

    single souls, but by the forms of their cooperation.  It is driven by the games

    that superorganisms play.

    All this lies behind the mystery with which we began--the pattern of

    violence in Mao's Cultural Revolution.   When China lapsed into chaos

    during the cultural upheaval of the '60s, society did not fragment into 700

    million individuals, each fighting for his right to survive.  The social fabric

    ripped, then reknit in a strange new way.  Individuals clustered in

    collaborative clumps.  Stitching each gang together was a force with no

    physical substance--the idea, the meme.  In their battles, the Red Guard wolf

    packs obeyed a basic commandment of the animal brain--the law of the

    pecking order.  And they drew their energy from emotions that remain

    repressed in everyday life--the hatreds, frustrations and hidden cruelty of

    students who just a month or two before had seemed models of polite

    obedience.

      Those who survived learned to live as prisoners in self-contained

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