    11

    No individual confronts his environment alone.   None of us

    wanders the woods in solitude, killing our food with weapons we

    alone have invented and made.   When you're out of work because of

    an economic depression, the depression is something over which you

    have no personal control.  Like the bee, the best you can do is rush

    from one fellow denizen of the society to another, swapping

    information and hoping for salvation from other human beings.  You

    can curry favor with your former boss, or call all your contacts for

    another job.  Your crisis is a reminder of your dependence on others.

    A financial depression is a paroxysm in a human network, a

    network that produces food 1500 miles from you, the food that will

    someday sit on your table.  Humans you have never met, tucked in a

    distant corner of a sprawling economic web, craft your furniture and

    build your house.  You do only the small part a bee does in the

    corridors of her hive.  It is the social system, the superorganism, that

    performs the task of facing down a hostile nature.

    Individuals nourished by this interdependence come up with

    marvelous things.  Shakespeare took a language shaped by the

    networking of millions of minds over eons of time, pulled historical

    legends from early England's rise and tales from a Roman Empire that

    had long since died15, then combined them with the zeitgeist of his era

    and created plays unlike any humanity had ever seen.  Sigmund Freud

    knit together the experiments of the French scientist Jean Charcot, the

    experiences of his fellow physician of the mind Josef Breuer, the

    "talking cure" invented by one of Breuer's patients, Greek myths, and

    the religions of primitive tribes to craft the theory of psychoanalysis.16

    The brain that makes a decision about whether to throw George

    Bush out of office or support Bill Clinton's health policies, about

    whether to follow Mao in a violently destructive Cultural Revolution

    or demand that Mao himself be overthrown, about whether to turn

    Eric Frommian individualism  into a national creed or go hog-wild (as

    the Revolutionary Russians did) for collectivism, is not a mass of tissue

    <<  <  GO  >  >>