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    At least three times a day, your body uses the logic of the toad,

    holding on to its reserves until it senses the arrival of fresh resources.

    The body uses the same strategy when you go on a diet.  It senses that

    the food supply is disappearing, assumes that you may be forced to

    make it through the next few months with almost nothing to eat, and

    slows your metabolism to build a stockpile.182  Since it holds onto the

    energy tucked away in your fatty tissue like a miser clutching his

    money, you have trouble losing weight.

    These food strategies are controlled by a part of the brain known

    as the hypothalamus.183  What other responsibility does the

    hypothalamus handle?  Anger and the urge to attack.  Cats whose

    anterior hypothalamus is electrically stimulated will maul a rat.

    What's more, like Mongols setting off joyfully on a raid, these cats will

    learn to navigate a maze simply for the pleasure of pouncing on a

    rodent placed at the labyrinth's end.184

    Like the toad, human cultures in periods of hopelessness go into

    dormant passivity.  The untouchables in India seldom attempted to

    overthrow the system that held them in miserable subjugation.  They

    were resigned to their lot.

    But give a social group a jolt of resources, and suddenly it is

    infused with energy, optimism and restlessness.  Servants feel ready to

    grab the knife with which they had been cutting the meat for the

    master and put it to the master's throat.  Nations that had been

    wallowing passively in the slough of despond look for an opponent to

    bash in the hope of gaining fresh territory.

    The Arabs, for example, stayed dormant until oil wealth hit them

    in the early '70s.  Then their terrorists assaulted the west.185  Their

    murderous  exuberance was the product of a chemical cocktail, a

    biological potion dosed with testosterone.

    The lesson is simple.  Defeat makes superorganisms sleepy.  So

    does poverty.  But a military win or a shower of new wealth rouses

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