4
4
and sp
ecialized scents also help beasts tell who is part of their own
pack and who is not.7
Humans, too, need ways of identifying who they're supposed to
take care of and who they're allowed to oppose.  Some of those
identifiers include how you hold your fork, what language you speak,
what kind of clothes you wear, how close you stand to someone,8 how
you say hello, what haircut you choose and what color you paint your
face.
Leaders fashioning new social organisms seem to instinctively
recognize  the  fact  that  they  will  have  to  find  ways  to  brand  their
converts as different from everyone else.  Moses coined a slogan,
"Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."  He enjoined his
followers to inscribe the sentence on their doorposts, where they
would see it every time they went out and came back in, and to tie
scraps of parchment marked with the phrase to their arms every
morning and every night.9  To make sure that Jews would be marked
as separate from the members of any other group, he even gave them a
distinctive diet.
Lenin was born in a supremely middle-class family.  But he
dressed in the unmistakable clothing of a worker, adopted workers'
slang10, and encouraged his followers to do the same.  Then he pointed
to an enemy with a radically different style of couture and speech--the
well-coiffed bourgeoisie.
Mohammed gave his followers a set of prayers and ritual
washings to execute five times a day, then instructed the faithful to
signal their identity with the whiskers on their chins--shunning the
razor and glorying in the growth of their beards.11
Each leader gave his followers a set of markings to identify them
as one of us.  And he set up the signals that would make spotting the
unbeliever easy as pie.
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