Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

Pancreas (p. 147)

From chapter "Narcissism"

Imagine this: a pancreas decides that the rest of the body doesn’t consist of other members of a larger community, but instead that the pancreas is the supreme organ, really the only organ who matters. All of the other organs, indeed, all the other cells of any sort, are taking up space and energy that could be better used by the pancreas. The pancreas starts to grow, needs to grow. The growth of the pancreas is natural. This is what all organs do: they grow and fight and compete, and the strongest, most fit organ survives. That’s life. And who needs a fucking appendix anyway? And there’s plenty of surplus intestine. And for crying out loud, there are two lungs and two kidneys. It’s incredibly selfish of the lungs and kidneys to have redundancy when the pancreas needs those wastedresources. So, good, done deal. One lung and one kidney gone. Next it needs to displace some gray matter. Oh, you say that gray matter won’t survive outside the brain pan? Too bad, so sad; the rule of nature is adapt or die. The gray matter can adapt to living somewhere else, or it can die. And frankly human supremacists have shown they don’t really need their brains anyway, having already substituted ideology for perception, thought, and reasoned and/or sensible response to external conditions.

The pancreas takes over more and more of the physical body, and more and more of the body’s energy. The rest of the body is completely mortified, and is also dying. But that’s not really a big deal, since the size and growth of the pancreas are all that matter.

A few of the cells in the pancreas think it’s a really bad idea to kill off the body that is the pancreas’s only home. But the vast majority of the cells in the pancreas are pancreas supremacists, who either believe that God—who looks like a giant Pancreas—gave them the body into which the pancreas is supposed to go forth and multiply, and over which the pancreas is supposed to have dominion and show good stewardship; or they believe that evolution gave the pancreas the tools to make the rest of the body jump through hoops on command. Pancreas über alles.