Current psychology is often blind to the existence of the larger being of which we are a part. Because of that blindness, many highly regarded therapeutic experts have a habit of dictating impossible cures. A group of prestigious doctors, for example, appeared on television’s Phil Donahue show determined to show how you can confront stress as one human in isolation.129 If you’re a housewife and society seems convinced that your daily chores are on a par with garbage collection, the specialists gave the impression that all you have to do is sit at the kitchen table and talk yourself into self-respect. One homemaker stood up in the audience and put the prevailing notion in two short sentences. “It all depends on the image you project,” she said. “If you think well of yourself, other people will think well of you.” Thinking well of himself was not enough to save Scipio Africanus from the contempt of the Roman senate. Nor will it be enough to magically alter the degree of respect the Western world accords those who clean house, cook, and raise children.
One of Donahue’s guest authorities declared in no uncertain terms that “you don’t have to be a victim of what society or what anyone else thinks of you.” But according to psychologist Sol Gordon, founder of the Institute for Family Research and Education, projecting a positive attitude works, not because of changes it makes on the individual psyche, but because of improvements it generates in relationships with others.
The best way to turn off the self-destruct mechanism is not to weep over childhood traumas until we can finally love the child within. It is to realize that the self-destruct devices are controlled by social forces: our sense of how we measure up to the standards of those we respect and our relationships with friends, husbands, wives, and even our dogs and cats. (The idea that relationships with animals can protect our physical and emotional health is not whimsy. Studies of heart attack victims have shown that owning a dog or a cat diminishes the odds of a second attack.)
Science would be well served to retain individual and kin selection’s insights, admit their limitations, and move on. The fact is, if individual selection’s survival instinct is our ruling force, then self-destruct mechanisms should not exist. Or, at best, their action should be limited to aiding those who carry genes nearly identical to our own. But animals of all kinds are born with a virtual arsenal of built-in poison pills. And a range of evidence even wider than that which I’ve had the space to present here indicates that these biological circuits are linked to the interests of a coagulation of fellow creatures who are not necessarily kin.
The concept of the social organism is more than a mere metaphor. It is closer to the comparison between a wave of water and a ray of light, two radically different phenomena subject to many of the same natural laws. For example, cyclic AMP acts as an intracellular messenger nearly everywhere in your body, but it is also the alarm substance that slime mold amoebas sensing starvation send to rally their solitary fellows into a consolidated, sluglike beast.130 The gene NM-23, which controls the clustering or dispersion of cancerous cells in humans, also handles congregation and dispersion among the cells of the slime mold.131 Contrary to contemporary theory, evolution is not built solely on competition between self-interested loners. It also relies on contests between teams of individuals striving for group survival. As a result, physiological feedback loops often call upon the individual to sacrifice his health—or even his life—for the sake of a larger whole. We have inherited much of our biology, including that involved in behavior, from the cellular ancestors who first learned to form communities. As a consequence, innumerable organismic mechanisms operate within assemblies of human beings. In coming chapters, we’ll encounter quite a few of them.