all, just a neck that had haired over.”

 

Pure curiosity, somewhat later, made me wonder how and why destructive cults

were often able, over a single long weekend, to turn many tolerably normal

people into brainwashed zombies and thereafter keep them in that state

indefinitely. I resolved that I would eventually find a good answer to this cult

question if I could do so by general reading and much musing.

 

I also got curious about social insects. It fascinated me that both the fertile

female honeybee and the fertile female harvester ant could multiply their quite

different normal life expectancies by exactly twenty by engaging in one gangbang

in the sky. The extreme success of the ants also fascinated me—how a few

behavioral algorithms caused such extreme evolutionary success grounded in

extremes of cooperation within the breeding colony and, almost always, extremes

of lethal hostility toward ants outside the breeding colony, even ants of the

same species.

 

Motivated as I was, by midlife I should probably have turned to psychology

textbooks, but I didn’t, displaying my share of the outcome predicted by the

German folk saying: “We are too soon old and too late smart.” However, as I

later found out, I may have been lucky to avoid for so long the academic

psychology that was then laid out in most textbooks. These would not then have

guided me well with respect to cults and were often written as if the authors

were collecting psychology experiments as a boy collects butterflies—with a

passion for more butterflies and more contact with fellow collectors and little