    12

    Something was running rampant through his psyche, tormenting

    this man. But it wasn't a physical disease in the standard sense of the

    term.  The tormentor was a set of self-destruct processes that wait

    within us for their day of use. In the case of the man with the cancer

    phobia, the day of use had arrived, in part, because his career as a

    successful executive had come to a sudden halt a year earlier when the

    company for which he'd been working shut down.

    Wynne-Edwards has demonstrated that red grouse on the moors

    of Scotland compete with each other at the beginning of the season for

    territory.  The winners end up comfortably fed and mated.  But the

    losers usually die of predation or disease.  The deaths, says Wynn

    Edwards, are "the after-effects of social exclusion."29

    In the body, each cell comes equipped with a mechanism for

    what scientists call "programmed cell death," "an intrinsic cell suicide

    program" researchers at University College in London say must be

    actively restrained from going into action by positive feedback

    indicating the cell is necessary to the larger organism.30    When  a

    hospital patient is forced to spend months in bed, seldom using his

    legs, many of the legs' constituent cells, sensing that they are no longer

    needed, dwindle to mere shadows of their former selves.  Others

    simply disappear.31  When a human spends weeks or months in space,

    his or her heart no longer has to labor mightily, pumping blood

    upward in defiance of gravity's force.  The heart shrinks dramatically32

    as the cells that no longer deem themselves of value scale down to an

    existence just one step removed from death.

    The individual is a cell in the social superorganism.  When he

    feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to

    wither away.

    As we'll see more clearly a few chapters down the road, the

    demons driving the ad exec mad were the circuits of social disposal,

    "intrinsic suicide programs" similar to those that remove cells whose

    lives are no longer needed by the larger social beast.  If our instincts

    <<  <  GO  >  >>