PATTERNS FOR LIVING TOGETHER 109 



others composing the social group. This is not an easy thing 

 to do. But it is essentially what sociality demands. The group 

 may, as a group, do things that are distasteful to every single 

 individual in it, and against his individual interest considered 

 fer se. For example, it is easily conceivable that a nation may 

 decide by popular vote to engage in war, even though each 

 person in that nation has, as an individual, no appetite whatever 

 for either killing or being killed. So it is that at the mammalian- 

 human level there always has to be a compromise — a balancing 

 between individual and communal interests, strivings, and goods 

 — rather than the sort of whole-hearted and self-eliminating 

 espousal of communal group interests to the exclusion of all 

 other considerations that would be ideal from a purely social 

 point of view. This kind of complete 100-percent sociality has 

 never been achieved by mammals. Their social structures always 

 have in them considerable gaps left open for individual self- 

 determination — for minding one's own business as well as the 

 communal affairs. Even such extreme social organizations as 

 those of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany have a niche or two 

 carefully left in them that will permit the possibility for the 

 individual to rise and shine as Fuhrer or Chief Commissar. 

 Reflection on the matter leads to the conclusion that one of the 

 most fundamentally distinctive characteristics of mammalian 

 sociality, whether it be of rodents, ruminants, carnivores, or 

 men, is its unfailingly included concept of leadership by some- 

 body. That somebody may be an individual or a group. It does 

 not matter which in the underlying philosophy. But, as anyone 

 will perceive who makes the attempt, it is extremely difficult 

 for us to think of a form of social organization of which we could 

 conceivably be a part which did not involve somewhere, in some 

 form or other, this concept of leadership. 



It is in this respect perhaps more than in any other single one 

 that mammalian forms of social organization differ from those 

 that have been evolved by other kinds of living things, and par- 

 ticularly the social insects, ant, bees, wasps, and termites. In 

 the sociality of those forms there is literally nothing truly 



