Seems Goodwin's Law is in full-effect on the Virus list.
> Are you sure Howard Bloom said "most effective" not just
> "effective" ?
Well, actually he didn't say either, exactly. I was paraphrasing.
Here's a quote from "The Lucifer Principle." I leave it to you to
decide how best to encapsulate Bloom's point.
>From "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of
History," pp 93-94:
< Communities of cells living in the seas roughly 600 million years ago
had a chemical disposal problem. From the surrounding waters, they took
in large quantities of calcium, a substance that could in megadoses
poison them. To function effectively, the cells had to constatnly
filter the calcium out of the water and deposit it outside the cellular
backdoor, where the mineral wouldn't interfere with the cell's internal
functions.
Somewhere along the line, a cellular community evolved a clever way of
getting rid of its unwanted calcium contaminats. The collective
compacted its discarded calcium sludge into safe cylinders and laid
these solid slivers of deactivated toxic waste along the interior
corridors between the huddled cells. The disposal techinque produced a
surprising benefit. The discarded calcium rods became structural beams
that gave added strength and power to the cellular cooperative. They
were bones, devices that made revolutionary forms of movement possible,
and eventually enabled cellular superorganisms to lift themselves out of
the water onto the land.
In human society, another kind of garbage, this one psychological, is
used for similar structural purposes. The waste product, in this case,
is the frustration from which hatred is distilled. The frustration of
humans collects much as calcium accumulated in the space between cells
of the early ocean-living cellular communities. To avoid damage within
the group much of it is directed somewhere else, at outsiders. Envy and
fear are turned from a source of diruption to a crator of cohesion.
Nature has compacted mankind's frustration to build the superorganism's
bones.
The demon one society wants to eradicate is all too frequently the god
of some rival group. Baal, the god of the Canaanites, was a false idol
to the Jews. The former Soviet Union's longtime gods--Marx and
Lenin--are our devils. Our revered middle class was the former Soviet
Union's hated bourgeoisie. Social oraganisms--like clusters of anemones
on a rock--face off and fight. From that struggle, they frequently
derive their identity. Battle draws a set of straggleing individuals
together into a firmly consolidated social clump. It give the formerly
quarreling separatists a powerful common bond.
Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully
manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards
outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate;
that each culture dresses the demon of its hatred in the garb of
righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the
superorganism and lead it around by the nose.>
Make of that what you will.
Take care. -KMO