    25

    25

    m

    potential personalities that will never be allowed to live.

    Frustration, as the researchers have demonstrated, breeds rage.

    Hatred is a despicable by-product of the human condition.  Nature,

    however, frequently utilizes such garbage as building material.  We

    will see how she has employed the psychological detritus of hatred in a

    minute.  But first, let's take a close look at another example of how the

    natural world often turns a poisonous excrescence to good use.  The

    instance I have in mind keeps each of us from turning to an oozy blob.

    Communities of cells living in the seas roughly 600 million years

    ago  had a chemical disposal problem.  From the surrounding waters

    they took in large quantities of calcium, a substance that could--in

    megadoses--poison them.  To function effectively, the cells had to

    constantly filter the calcium out of the water and deposit it outside the

    cellular back door, where the mineral wouldn't interfere with the cell's

    internal functions.

    Somewhere along the line, a cellular community evolved a clever

    way of getting rid of its unwanted calcium contaminants.  The

    collective compacted its discarded calcium sludge into safe cylinders,

    and laid these solid slivers of deactivated toxic waste along the interior

    corridors between the huddled cells.  The disposal technique produced

    a surprising benefit.  The discarded calcium rods became structural

    beams that gave added strength and power to the cellular cooperative.

    They were bones, devices that made revolutionary forms of movement

    possible, and eventually enabled cellular superorganisms to lift

    themselves out of the water onto the land.42

    In human society, another kind of garbage, this one psycho-

    logical, is used for similar structural purposes.  The waste product, in

    this case, is frustration, the frustration from which hatred is distilled.

    The frustration of humans collects much as calcium accumulated

    in the space between cells of the early ocean-living, cellular

    communities.  To avoid damage within the group, much of it is

      echanisms crying out vainly for a moment of triumph, thousands of

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