The world is a terrifying place. No sooner do we enter it as infants than we find it filled with things from which we must be protected. There are few impulses in the vast catalogue of human responses so powerful as a mother’s instinct to protect and the human defense mechanism. We are built to survive. We live in an age of computers and automobiles, planes that break the sound barrier, space shuttles and micro-chips, but we still find the hair raising on the back of our necks when a stranger is following us down a darkened street. The will to survive, and all those primal impulses that accompany it, will never leave us, it seems. But is this an entirely good thing? If the knee-jerk instinct to survive creates such positives as increased adrenaline in response to danger, heightened senses in high risk settings, maternal instincts, and intuition, what else comes with it? What else do we fear? Here, at the top of the food chain, we fear one another.

The roots of prejudice are in such darwinian impulses. At the dawn of human existence survival depended on strength, cleverness, and protection of one’s own “clan,” or family. We existed in small, and later larger, groups. Weaker members of the pack didn’t survive. Any threat to the pack was either destroyed or avoided. So contact with outsiders-- those humans not of our clan-- was frightening. Here are the origins of racism: you aren’t one of us so you are a threat. As clans connected and blended the world contained fewer “outsiders.” In our own time it is understood by enlightened individuals that the last tribe is the tribe of mankind: one group, no borders, all related.

What, then, about survival within the tribe itself? We don’t like, as a species with the marvelous ability to be self-critical and reflective, to think about those early ancestors. Weaklings were culled from the pack. The powerful survived. The sickly were sacrificed. The pack endured and became stronger. Surely we have evolved beyond this.

Or have we? Our society still ridicules the weak. Young men grow up with the stigma of the "90 pound weakling.” Football heroes are still revered. Women with the curves indicative of reproductive ability are admired. We still mock and taunt the pip-squeak, the runt, the weakest of the pack. And we still fear the larger members of humanity’s tribe.

In those caves and dens of man’s earliest existence the biggest human got the most food. The strong survived. The powerful could take your food from you and leave you hungry. And in today’s world, when those playground taunts that echo our earliest selves come, what form do they take for the large person?

“You’re so huge I can’t fit in the seat with you.”
“Don’t let her near your candy, she’ll inhale it.”

Our fear of fat centers around our fear of space infringement and food supply. It comes from an ancient place.

What is interesting is that in contemporary societies that treat larger bodies more understanding and acceptance, a tribal-clannish living pattern seems to still prevail. African, American Indian, lower-Mediterranean, and Persian cultures, in which people of size are more widely accepted and in many cases celebrated, are more predisposed to multi-generational homes, multi-family homes, and closer familial communities. In such cases size is not so much a threat as a show of strength: we are bigger and have greater bounty, and therefore our group is powerful.

Yet in the cult of individualism that is western culture fat still creates a knee-jerk, darwinian response. We fear size. We treat anorexia with pity and obesity with panic. The weak may be sacrificed to their own weakness, and it is a shame. The large are a threat to space and must have their space reduced, their intake restricted. While thinness is viewed as either personal choice or (in extreme cases) pathology to be treated with compassion, fatness is viewed as an offense of excess to be treated with restriction and intolerance. Those who starve themselves are no threat, those who eat to excess are.

The tribe of man should have evolved beyond the cave. There is enough to go around for one and all. Simone de Beauvoir, the great philosopher, says that to exist is “to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.” Truly enlightened humans transcend the need to struggle to exist, and accept it as a given; they rise above and through existence to a place where more is possible and mankind is empowered to control its own fate.

And so sizism, indeed all prejudice, is obsolete. Just as the 90 pound weakling can grow up to be Bill Gates, so too can the fat girl become Wilma Mankiller, Maya Angelou, or Margaret Thatcher. We can accommodate those who come in smaller shapes; we can medicate the sickly. The world produces enough food and provides enough space for everyone. Compassion and generosity can feed the hungry and minister to the sick. Tolerance and understanding can accept the large and resist the impulse to fear those larger than us. We are all one clan. There is room enough for even the largest in this tribe of humanity.