The Myth of Normal 162

Chapter 14 A Template for Distress: How Culture Builds Our Character “And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue— liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at making people like their inescapable social destiny.” —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Recall Bessel van der Kolk’s crisp remark that “our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms.” I don’t know whether the comparison will discomfit or comfort (perhaps both?), but we humans are, in our lack of an independently self-determined self, not altogether different from our fellow social creature, the ant. In an ant colony, all larvae are hatched with virtually the same set of genes: the queen, the workers, the warriors are created equal. Which creature becomes what, including what biological features they manifest, depends entirely on the needs of the clan. The oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee described this phenomenon in a fascinating article in the New Yorker: “Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors.” Genetically identical siblings will become differentiated into biologically variable adults based purely on signals from the physical and social environment. When a queen is removed from a jumping ant hive, for example, the worker ants “launch a vicious, fight-to-