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No individual confronts his environment alone. None of us
wanders the woods in solitude, killing our food with weapons we
alone have invented and made. When you're out of work because of
an economic depression, the depression is something over which you
have no personal control. Like the bee, the best you can do is rush
from one fellow denizen of the society to another, swapping
information and hoping for salvation from other human beings. You
can curry favor with your former boss, or call all your contacts for
another job. Your crisis is a reminder of your dependence on others.
A financial depression is a paroxysm in a human network, a
network that produces food 1500 miles from you, the food that will
someday sit on your table. Humans you have never met, tucked in a
distant corner of a sprawling economic web, craft your furniture and
build your house. You do only the small part a bee does in the
corridors of her hive. It is the social system, the superorganism, that
performs the task of facing down a hostile nature.
Individuals nourished by this interdependence come up with
marvelous things. Shakespeare took a language shaped by the
networking of millions of minds over eons of time, pulled historical
legends from early England's rise and tales from a Roman Empire that
had long since died15, then combined them with the zeitgeist of his era
and created plays unlike any humanity had ever seen. Sigmund Freud
knit together the experiments of the French scientist Jean Charcot, the
experiences of his fellow physician of the mind Josef Breuer, the
"talking cure" invented by one of Breuer's patients, Greek myths, and
the religions of primitive tribes to craft the theory of psychoanalysis.16
The brain that makes a decision about whether to throw George
Bush out of office or support Bill Clinton's health policies, about
whether to follow Mao in a violently destructive Cultural Revolution
or demand that Mao himself be overthrown, about whether to turn
Eric Frommian individualism into a national creed or go hog-wild (as
the Revolutionary Russians did) for collectivism, is not a mass of tissue
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