Political Rats Use Uncle Tom Label

You can learn a lot from watching rats.  Wild rats capable of swimming 90 or more hours will die in minutes if they’re terrified before plunging into water, Dr. Harold G. Wolff, a pioneer of psychosomatic illness, once wrote. When male wild rats were introduced into established rat colonies, most of the interloping rats died within hours after the resident rats viciously attacked them.  The rats died, not from their injuries, but from a deep sense of despair after being “cancelled.”“The fact that the interlopers were excluded from the group seemed to make them more vulnerable,” Wolff wrote in his essay The Mind-Body Relationship (1961).  For humans, “… bone-pointing, hexing, and excommunication of transgressors of tribal mores may shorten life if not immediately kill a man.” A well-known example of bone-pointing is the kurdaitcha man, a kind of shaman who is given the power to punish the guilty in certain Aboriginal groups in Central Australia.   When the shaman points a bone at …