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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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