The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

position in the pecking order reshapes physiology.362 After a while, top or bottom position in the pecking order gets to be a habit. Numerous studies show that a creature who has won a fight is more likely to win the next one. An animal who has lost barely shuffles through his next contest. The odds are high he’ll lose again.

The simians raised without social contact frequently sat in a corner of their cage, curled into a ball, their eyes staring emptily into space, and chewed at their own skin, gouging themselves until they bled. That is intropunitive behavior.

The ayatollah pulled off a pecking order trick of astonishing proportions. He preached a view in which Iran was suddenly at the very peak of a new kind of hierarchy. In his rhetoric, Iranians were transformed from mere followers of America to leaders—leaders of an Islamic revolution that would soon sweep the world.

This book is about the social body in which we are the unwitting cells. It is about the hidden ways in which that social group manipulates our psychology, and even our biology. It is about how a social organism scrambles for survival and works for mastery over other organisms of its kind. It is about how we, without the slightest sense of what the

The ritual drove home the fact that the noble was on top and the peasants on the bottom. The Anglo-Saxon word for someone on the crest of a social heap—lord—was a testament to the put-down power of the handout. The word’s literal meaning: “loaf giver.”

California Institute of Technology’s John Hopfield

Hitler used to go through something similar at the height of his power. He would bully an opposing head of state, shouting, fuming, seemingly invulnerable to the inhibitions that weaken other men. Then, when he was alone in his room, the indomitable leader would collapse into a screaming nervous wreck.

Perception is a highly selective process. We see and vividly remember some things that pass before our eyes. We ignore many others. And still others we work to actively deny.

Two means have been discovered to produce depression in laboratory animals: uncontrollable punishment and isolation.