The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: while your cranky (albeit quite witty and almost always interesting) geezer style is entertaining when you are railing against a shared enemy, your rants about individuals comes across as mean-spirited and incomplete. Second, unlike Andie, you and I find the on-line community not as satisfying/intimate (dare I say "real") as flesh and wine. It is therefore an error to assume that we are buddies who get the sub-text. When you rail against some generally lower class type anti-social or criminal behaviour what the reader often hears is not their old friend Woj (leaving it to the reader to fill in the details of what his rant means in light of all else that he has written) but an echo of the largest and most vocal voices in the mainstream, against which they fight (or at least argue) on an almost daily basis, turning to LBO (or equivalent) for respite.
This lack of nuance/sensitivity on your part is highlighted by your puzzlement with your wife, as explained in Joanna's response to you, and in turn your response to her (Joanna). Like an autistic genius (apologies if I am mis-characterising autism) your analytical tendency does not seem to extend to analyse and understand the not entirely analytical nature of human interaction, understanding, etc.
So, every so often I get so thoroughly mad at one of your posts that I decide to "kill file" you but laziness saves the day and I get to enjoy the wrath of Woj unleashed in favour of my side!
Since you asked!!!
Onwards...
> I think it is more than just an instinct to win - which I tend to
> agree with you that it is probably hard-wired in our brains through
> evolution. However, I think there is another component to it, the
> instinctive expectation of "manna falling from the sky." I think we
> acquired that instinct during our hunting and gathering past, where
> serendipitous discoveries (rather than mastery and transformation of one's
> surroundings) was the matter of survival. One can conjecture that people
> who developed emotional expectation for "manna falling from the sky" i.e.
> getting something highly prized by sheer luck - also had a better chance of
> surviving the harsh conditions during shortages.
I wouldn't go so far I am afraid. Rather perhaps people with a generally optimistic (over-optimistic) attitude probably had a greater survival fitness. You could be right about magical beliefs, as E.O.Wilson argues, in his case about the selection advantage of "faith" (religion). While we are speculating: it seems an interesting coincidence that the sex for whom winning matters the most evolutionarily (males) is also the one most interested in competing, winning, etc. Of course competition implies that the vast majority lose, and hence the invention of winning by association... a mechanism by which the less virile male can still enjoy the release of chemicals and hormones. I think a similar argument can be used for gambling and other forms of magical attempts at winning. They are no more than convoluted logic-defying means of achieving a goal which is otherwise out of reach. In other words, the attempts at trying to win (in one way or another) may not itself have selection advantages, but may be the result of the overwhelming power and advantage of the goal (of winning), in an evolutionary sense. E.g: why do we masturbate?
Carrol says that the desire to be "number one" is a recent thing in human history... but at least one model of evolutionary history/analysis suggests otherwise: the presence of an "alpha male" in certain animal societies (echoed today in human societies in the Middle East and in the persons of Donald Trump and Hugh Hefner).
(And in arguing this issue in this manner, I am going up against a cherished notion of the left, one that I have adopted and argued for myself. Let us see how I fare relative to Woj in doing so! ;-)).
--ravi