The Myth of Normal 163

the-death campaign against one another—stinging, biting, sparring, lopping off limbs and heads”—until a few workers win and become, well, monarchical. Without any alteration in DNA structure, the physiology of a new queen changes; “she” now becomes fecund and dominant and will live longer than she would have in her previous worker incarnation.[1] Psychiatrist Michael Kerr, formerly of Georgetown University, noted this same dynamic in his book on human family systems. “What each larva becomes is dictated by a colony level process. In this sense, a young larva is born into a functioning position in the colony and his development is determined by that position.”[2] For all our attachment to our individual self-concept, we are rather antlike in this respect. “There is far less autonomy for a human being than we would like to think,” Dr. Kerr told me in an interview. “How we function as individuals cannot be understood outside of our relationship to the larger group.” In other words, our character and personalities reflect the needs of the milieu in which we develop. The roles we are assigned or denied, how we fit into society or are excluded from it, and what the culture induces us to believe about ourselves, determine much about the health we enjoy or the diseases that plague us. In this, and in many other ways, illness and health are manifestations of the social macrocosm. If the modern nuclear family forms the primary container for childhood development, that container is itself held within a larger context, formed by entities such as community, neighborhood, city, economy, country, and so on. In our times, the context of all contexts is hypermaterialist, consumerist capitalism and its globalized expressions worldwide. Its fundamental—and, it turns out, quite distorted—assumptions about who and what we are show up in the bodies and minds of those living them out. Given the myriad links between biography and biology, cultural norms can also make themselves known in our physiology. We see here the attachment/authenticity tug-of-war writ large. Just as we are conditioned to fit into the family, even if that means a departure from our true selves, so we are prepped—one might even say groomed—to fulfill our