posted May 14, 2008 08:02 AM
I just did an image search and found this:
Isolation - The Ultimate Poison
What do Lawrence of Arabia and a chimpanzee have in common? Nothing on the surface, but what happens if you remove a human from his social bonds? A book by Howard Bloom - A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History - examines the real world results of what happens when you separate the ties that bind.
The stories of Flint, a chimpanzee studied by Jane Goodall and of that of Lawrence of Arabia provide excellent examples of the consequences of isolation. Howard Bloom writes:
Flint
Jane Goodall, the researcher who has studied chimpanzees in the Gombe game preserve of Africa since 1960, saw the principle at work in a young animal named Flint. When Flint was born, his mother adored him. And he, in turn, doted on her. She hugged him, played with him, and tickled him until his tiny, wrinkled face broke out in the broad equivalent of a chimpanzee smile. The two were inseparable.
When Flint reached the age of three, however, the time came for his mother to wean him. But Flo, the mother, was old and weak. And Flint, the chimpanzee child, was young and strong. Flo turned her back and tried to keep her son away from the nipple. But Flint flew into wild tantrums, lashed about violently on the ground, and ran off screaming.
Finally, a worried Flo was forced to calm her son by offering him her breast. Later, Flint developed even more aggressive techniques for ensuring his supply of mother’s milk. If Flo tried to shrug him off, Flint struck her with his fists, and punctuated the pummeling with sharp bites.
At an age when other chimps have freed themselves from parental apron strings, Flint was still acting like a baby. Though he was a strapping young lad, and his mother was increasingly feeble, Flint insisted that his mama carry him everywhere.
If Flo stopped to rest and Flint was anxious to taste the fruit of the trees at their next destination, the hulking child would push, prod and whimper to get his mom moving again.
Then he’d climb on her back and enjoy the ride. When shoves and whines didn’t motivate his mother to pick him up and cart him where he wanted to go, Flint would occasionally give the exhausted lady a strong kick. At night, Flint was old enough to build a sleeping nest of his own. Instead, he insisted on climbing into bed with his mommy.
Flint should have turned his attention from Flo to the other chimps his age, forging ties to the superorganism–the chimpanzee tribe–of which he was a part. But he did not. The consequence would be devastating.
Flint’s mother died. Theoretically, Flint’s instincts should have urged him to survive. But three weeks later, he went back to the spot where his mother had breathed her last and curled up in a fetal ball. Within a few days, he too was dead.
An autopsy revealed that there was nothing physically wrong with Flint: no infection, no disease, no handicap. In all probability, the youngster’s death had been caused by the simian equivalent of that voice which tells humans going through a similar loss that there’s nothing left to live for. Flint had been cut loose from his single bond to the superorganism. That separation had killed him.
Lawrence of Arabia
Colonel T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. In the Middle East, Lawrence had been a dashing, energetic figure. He had dressed as an Arab, and worked hard to win the respect of tribal leaders. He had taught himself to jump nine feet onto the back of a camel, something few Arabs could accomplish. He had steeled himself to ride across the desert for days without food. He had stretched his limits until he’d gained an endurance far beyond that of the average desert dweller, and he was admired greatly for it.
At the same time, Lawrence convinced the British that he could successfully mobilize the Arab nomads into a unified fighting force. With that force, Lawrence argued, he could help defeat the Germans and Turks in the First World War. The success of his argument boosted his power. When he rode into a circle of bedouin tents, his camels frequently carried several million dollars worth of gold–a gift to cement his negotiations with the desert chieftains.
Using bribery and the force of his personal reputation, Lawrence drew together the widely-scattered Arab tribes to storm Akaba. His force took the city despite seemingly impossible odds, defeating a small Turkish army in the process. After riding the desert for days, and leading the charge in two successful battles, Lawrence was totally exhausted. Yet when he realized his troops in Akaba were starving, he mounted his camel and rode three days and three nights, covering 250 miles, eating and drinking on his camel’s back, to reach the Gulf of Suez and summon help from a British ship.
The sense that he was critical to the success of the social organism had given the young British officer an almost unbelievable physical endurance. When at last the war was over, Lawrence rode into the city of Damascus in a Rolls Royce as one of the conquerors of the massive Turkish Empire.
But once the fighting ended and Lawrence was forced to pack his Arab robes away and return to England, he felt totally out of place. True, he had friends in high places–Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw, among others. But he felt wrenched from the social body into which he had welded himself. He was bereft of purpose–unneeded by the larger social beast. Lawrence went back to live in his parents’ home. His mother said that the former war hero would come down to breakfast in the morning, and would still remain sitting at the table by lunchtime, staring vacantly at the same object that had occupied his gaze hours earlier, unmoving, unmotivated.
Eventually, at the age of 47, Lawrence died on a lonely country road, victim of a motorcycle accident. Or was he really the victim of something far more subtle?
Not long before his death, Lawrence wrote to Eric Kennington, “You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle me and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.”
Experts on suicide explain that vehicular accidents often occur to those who are depressed and courting death. Was it mere chance, then, that T.E. Lawrence, a man of almost superhuman physical skills, was killed by a bit of sloppy driving on a vehicle he had used for years? Or had the former leader of the Arabs’ inner calculators come to the conclusion that, like the un-needed cell in a complex organism, it was time for him to simply slip away?
Remove the sponge cell from the sponge, prevent it from finding its way back to its brethren, and it dies. Scrape a liver cell from the liver and in its isolation it too will shrivel and give up life. Closeness to others can heal. Separation can kill.
excerpted from Howard Bloom’s - The Lucifer Principle
A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History
http://myselfdevelopment.net/index.php/2007/10/24/isolation-the-ultimate-poison/
Which led me to this book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lucifer-Principl e-Scientific-Expedition-History/dp/0871136643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210766425&sr=1-1
"The Importance of Hugging"
- page 239
Lindaland
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