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    cut  off from the vocation that gave their life meaning have suffered a

    plethora of physical problems.  But those problems have not been due to

    what laymen call stress.  They have not been the product of hard work or the

    pursuit of excellence.  They've been the result of three factors we discussed in

    the early pages of this book.

    Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism.  We are

    cells in the beast of family, company and country.  Sever those social ties, and

    we begin to shrivel and die.

    There's more.  Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom

    been demonstrated to hurt us.  But we can be damaged powerfully by the

    lack of control.  And without striving to achieve, we cannot control our lives.

    Position in the pecking order makes an additional contribution to

    many of the symptoms we blame on stress.  With our dream of eliminating

    competition, we try to wish the pecking order away.  But the fact is that we

    will continue to live in pecking order structures whether we like it or not.  As

    we've seen, social hierarchies are not limited to "capitalist" or "consumer"

    societies.  Not only do they exist among apes, birds, lizards and lobsters,132

    but pecking orders left their marks in the remains of our ice-age ancestors,

    who thrived fifteen thousand years before the birth of agriculture and nearly

    twenty-five thousand years before the founding of modern industry.  In the

    Ukraine, archaeologists have unearthed Paleolithic palaces of the

    wealthy--tents with a framework of mammoth skulls and tusks and a rich

    covering of fur.  And the researchers have dug up the much more modest

    hovels in which the poor were sheltered.133

    The brutal fact is that the more we opt out of competition, the lower

    our position is likely to be.  That holds true in our lives as individuals.  And it

    holds even more true in our life as a nation.  As the popular expression puts

    it, "If you snooze, you lose."

    Many of the dire consequences supposedly beaten into our lives by

    stress are the product of pecking order slippage--otherwise known as defeat.

    Studies show that one of the greatest causes of high blood pressure in

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