    4

    4

    and sp

    ecialized scents also help beasts tell who is part of their own

    pack and who is not.7

    Humans, too, need ways of identifying who they're supposed to

    take care of and who they're allowed to oppose.  Some of those

    identifiers include how you hold your fork, what language you speak,

    what kind of clothes you wear, how close you stand to someone,8 how

    you say hello, what haircut you choose and what color you paint your

    face.

    Leaders fashioning new social organisms seem to instinctively

    recognize  the  fact  that  they  will  have  to  find  ways  to  brand  their

    converts as different from everyone else.  Moses coined a slogan,

    "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."  He enjoined his

    followers to inscribe the sentence on their doorposts, where they

    would see it every time they went out and came back in, and to tie

    scraps of parchment marked with the phrase to their arms every

    morning and every night.9  To make sure that Jews would be marked

    as separate from the members of any other group, he even gave them a

    distinctive diet.

    Lenin was born in a supremely middle-class family.  But he

    dressed in the unmistakable clothing of a worker, adopted workers'

    slang10, and encouraged his followers to do the same.  Then he pointed

    to an enemy with a radically different style of couture and speech--the

    well-coiffed bourgeoisie.

    Mohammed gave his followers a set of prayers and ritual

    washings to execute five times a day, then instructed the faithful to

    signal their identity with the whiskers on their chins--shunning the

    razor and glorying in the growth of their beards.11

    Each leader gave his followers a set of markings to identify them

    as one of us.  And he set up the signals that would make spotting the

    unbeliever easy as pie.

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