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fortress communities, cut off from the ideas and the delicacies that had once
made life sweet.  The barbarian "freedom fighters" had loosed the chains not
of  life,  but of  death.    For  Rome  was  an  oppressor,  but  Rome  was  also  the
source of nourishment and peace.  In her absence came pestilence and war.
The superorganism is often a vile and loathsome beast.  But like the
body nourishing her constituent cells, the social beast grants us life.  Without
her, each of us would perish.
That knowledge is woven into our biology.  It is the reason that the
rigidly individualistic Clint Eastwood does not exist.  The internal
self-destruct  devices with which we come equipped at birth insure that we
will live as components of a larger organism...or we simply will not live at
all.
Behind these superorganismic imperatives is nature's latest wrinkle in
the research and development racket.  Despite the claims of individual
selectionists, human evolution is propelled not only by competition between
single souls, but by the forms of their cooperation.  It is driven by the games
that superorganisms play.
All this lies behind the mystery with which we began--the pattern of
violence in Mao's Cultural Revolution.   When China lapsed into chaos
during the cultural upheaval of the '60s, society did not fragment into 700
million individuals, each fighting for his right to survive.  The social fabric
ripped, then reknit in a strange new way.  Individuals clustered in
collaborative clumps.  Stitching each gang together was a force with no
physical substance--the idea, the meme.  In their battles, the Red Guard wolf
packs obeyed a basic commandment of the animal brain--the law of the
pecking order.  And they drew their energy from emotions that remain
repressed in everyday life--the hatreds, frustrations and hidden cruelty of
students who just a month or two before had seemed models of polite
obedience.
  Those who survived learned to live as prisoners in self-contained
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