1. On Drinking Alcohol
We look at alcohol’s ritual, psychological, and cultural function. Starting with Dionysus and the ancient Greeks, we compare alcohol with psychedelics and other drug and explore what’s going on beneath the surface at after-work drinks through this lens.
Can you really trust someone you have never seen with their inhibitions lowered? Is transgression required for bonding? We attempt to reach some deep conclusions over some good whisky.
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Welcome to Echoes Underground. In today's episode we talk about the true function of alcohol.
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We start with Dionysus, the ancient Greek's terrifying god of wine, and we end with the psychological consequences of monotheism.
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We get there via an in-depth discussion of what's truly happening in the ritual of after work drinks.
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Follow us underground and enjoy.
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Why do you think that alcohol is important?
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Why are we drinking it now?
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Well, it's a... I mean, obviously it's been used as a ritual drink for a long time.
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The notion of...
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Quite strong.
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Yeah, the notion of intoxication.
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The Greeks had no word for alcohol.
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It's Arabic, isn't it?
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Yeah.
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They thought that the power of intoxication that was in the wine was the god, Dionysus.
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In a literal sense?
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Yes. Yes. I think that is the easiest way to conceive of it, yes.
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That it is the power of the god manifest in the...
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Well, in the very tellingly named spirit.
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That is the god.
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Which is an interesting notion.
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But an entirely logical one when you...
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Or rational one.
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If you're not aware that there is a particular chemical compound.
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Or how it acts.
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Yeah, and I guess it must have been quite a confusing experience if you didn't know the mechanism.
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Or like when I was in Yemen, occasionally people would sidle up to me and ask...
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What does alcohol do to you?
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How do you feel when you drink alcohol?
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Because all they knew about alcohol, because there was none in the country really.
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Is that it turns people crazy.
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Almost like turns you into a werewolf.
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You start doing mad things.
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Things you wouldn't normally do.
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And you became something other than human.
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And this really is up there with what pork tastes like.
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But that was just pure taboo.
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They assumed that pork must taste incredible for it to be banned.
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But alcohol, it was a transformation.
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I suppose it sounds like with what you're saying there that they almost conceive of it as a kind of possession.
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Yeah.
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And I suppose that you can immediately reach for a hypothesis there of why a religion would want to prohibit it.
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Or at least why certain members of a religion would want to prohibit it.
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Because it is competition, isn't it?
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If you are being inhabited by a divine force or a powerful force that is not the god that you worship.
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Then you can immediately see how it's problematic within that scheme.
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Yeah, in exactly the same way that psychedelics were problematic to the government in the 60s.
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They built this great machine that was the US state and then suddenly Hollywood refused to take part in it.
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Well, yes, because of course it fills you with an ideology.
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The experience seems to have an ideology.
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It's a vector for an ideology, isn't it?
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That ideology is that actually we should be nice to each other.
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The world's a nice place.
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And that subsuming your individuality into a machine in order to kill or be killed in Vietnam is maybe not the way to go.
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Yeah, although I guess it doesn't read perfectly across to alcohol.
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Because alcohol, after a pint and a half of beer, everything is very pleasant.
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You're a nice person.
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But then that can switch over a couple of beers later and some people get violent and aggressive under alcohol in a way that I don't think you see with psychedelics.
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So there's an unpredictability to it.
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You're right.
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I suppose though that in the sense that they are both a form of possession looked at in one way.
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Because you become something that you were previously not.
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Or is it just an earthing of things that are latent?
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Or is it an amplification of traits that are there?
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Is it a reduction in self-control?
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Or is it actually, does it have content, does the experience have content that isn't already within you?
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It comes back to the notion of possession.
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And Dionysius, was he predictable?
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Did he have a brand that was always a sort of chill, that good time guy?
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Oh, definitely not.
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Certainly not.
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Certainly to me, and I think to many modern scholars, the scariest god.
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Because he very much represents an unbridling, shall we say, or an unchaining of passions.
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And it very much has to be carefully contained within ritual in order for that to be controlled socially.
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And you can look at it in lots of different ways.
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You can look at it from the kind of social construction or social regulation perspective.
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And you can conceive of Dionysius as the element that kind of bucks against control and order, the more Apollonian thing.
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And therefore needs its own place and its own rituals in order for the steam to kind of be vented.
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Or you can view it as the completely unpredictable, the dark, almost like the shadow of the subconscious,
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or the dark, uncontrolled monsters that lurk in the subconscious erupting outwards at certain moments.
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And you can see it as the uncontrolled element that's within all of us that has to be expressed from time to time,
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but in a context where it can be managed.
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But all of the myths are quite clear that if you try and fight him, you are.
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It's not going to end well. It's really not going to end well.
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Enthius, he's ripped to pieces by his own mother by hand who believes he's a lion.
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And she carries his head back into the city saying, you know, hooray, I've killed a lion.
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And then Dionysius allows her to see that it's her own son.
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That kind of sounds half alcohol and half psychedelics, doesn't it?
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There is that theory. There is that theory that actually, you know, the Greeks, there was much more than wine in the wine.
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You know, there's herbs and there's a lot of stuff in there.
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Yeah, and that needs digging into, doesn't it?
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Because some of the reports of drinking wine back then was you'd have to water it down 20 parts to one.
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And we know they didn't have distillation, so it wasn't an alcohol strength thing.
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But somehow this wine was getting its power.
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It was powerful stuff that needed to be watered down 20 to one.
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It's not alcohol, so there's got to be something else going on in it.
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I think so. And they also drank it hot.
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So it would have been more of a mulled wine.
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Evaporate off the alcohol, wouldn't it?
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Well, yes. Yeah, possibly.
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There are lots of reasons to think that it might. I mean, for one thing, the ancient Greeks were extremely competent herbalists.
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You know, they knew all of the stuff that was around in the countryside because, of course, they're living in that world.
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They are subsistence farmers, most of them, and they've been there for a long time.
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And they know the plants and what they do.
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It seems almost... We know that there are psychedelics available in the Greek countryside, if you know where to look.
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They're in the English countryside.
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And not just the Liptycap mushrooms, but also DMT in the Common Reed.
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And we can see in the kind of earlier accounts of contact with the certain groups in the Amazon that their knowledge was...
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What was interesting about it was it was not dead knowledge. It wasn't knowledge they inherited.
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And actually, when some of these groups were first contacted, the anthropologists were astonished at how few plant remedies they had in their arsenal.
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They might only have five or a dozen different plant remedies for very basic conditions.
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They're like, these guys must be really primitive. They haven't worked out in the Amazon rainforest any more medications than the simple selection that they have.
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And then ten years later, they noticed they suddenly had hundreds of different remedies.
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And they worked out that these people were actually extremely healthy before they came into contact with Western civilization.
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They had far fewer diseases. They had a very healthy lifestyle.
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And so actually, they didn't need much in the way of plant medication.
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They just didn't have it. And as soon as they did suddenly need it, when they came into contact with us and caught a hold of new diseases and started eating less wholesome food,
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they went out into the jungle and through their knowledge of the plants, it turns out that they created new remedies from scratch, through experimentation,
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and through their knowledge of actually the mechanisms involved.
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Which is remarkable, isn't it? Because it is not that, it is not scientific knowledge, or at least it is not wholly scientific knowledge.
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It's not wholly empirical knowledge. They don't have the scientific method in order to build that knowledge.
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Yeah. And nor is it just passed down wisdom that they just copy from their parents and their grandparents.
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They're able to make new knowledge.
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And they're presumably, they're conceiving of the relationships between the various different properties of these plants in a very different way from the way that we would conceive of it.
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Yeah. And the combination is important because it's not like you take one leaf and that cures this and another leaf and that cures that.
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Ayahuasca is a famous example where on its own it has no effect at all.
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You have to mix it with something else. And it's not obvious what that is.
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It's not obvious that ayahuasca would have that effect if you mix it with something else.
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I mentioned common reeds and you can't use that instead of ayahuasca.
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You have to mix it with something else. And just no one had done it, no one would have thought of doing it.
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Because why would you? What are you expecting when you do that?
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But they got there somehow and different groups used different admixtures to get the same effect because they have similar chemical properties.
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And I can't imagine that happening is just through absolutely thousands of instances of trial and error.
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But then again, it's very hard to understand how that would happen without absolute carnage, isn't it?
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Yeah, but also why would you conduct these experiments in the first place?
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Yes, you don't know that there is an end goal out there that's successful.
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Which makes it still very baffling.
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Yeah, but also plausible that the Creeks knew what they were on about.
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And with the plants that are available to you and I here, they'd see something very different.
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But so going back to this idea of possession, I don't think that in our civilization or our society, alcohol serves the purpose of possession.
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No. That's not my experience at work drinks.
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No. Yes. It's much more about bonding, I would say.
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I think it is much more about the idea of building trust, actually.
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Because I think that with inebriation, you let your guard down a little bit.
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You're a little bit more free and you reveal a little bit more of who you are and what's going on with you as an individual.
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And I think that if you do that with other people, that bonds you because you've shared what is actually quite an experience with some risk.
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If you've got drunk with someone, you are bonded with them because you've both glimpsed.
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You've had a sort of a peek underneath the social armor, at least to a certain extent.
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I think it goes even further than that because when you're drunk, you're more likely to break some law or transgress some moral code.
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And you're certainly going to transgress the HR policies and etc. office behavior after a few drinks.
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And that's fundamental to Chinese business.
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The reason why Chinese businessmen are so notorious for getting drunk is the idea is that they are, as a group, transgressing shared moral norms.
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Both getting drunk and what they do under the influence.
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Binds them together.
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Exactly. But yeah. And so it's a kind of threat that you can now dob each other in and get each other into trouble.
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We've also seen what they're actually like under their professional shell.
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I believe there's a concept, the ancient Greeks had a concept very like this.
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I believe they called it a pistis.
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This idea that a group of young noble men would deliberately go and commit a crime together.
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And quite a shocking crime.
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And this would then bind them together as a sort of political slate or as a political faction for life.
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And this was something that was a well recognized cultural phenomenon.
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Even if not a wholly approved of one.
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Yeah, that's really interesting.
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So I think that my suspicion is that alcohol, at least one of its functions in our society, one of the reasons it's so important is because it provides that.
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But in quite a safe and low intensity way.
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Yeah, exactly. It's something you can do with your office mates.
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Go out to a bar. It can still be official. It's still HR approved.
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And whilst no one's ever going to acknowledge why it benefits the business, it really does.
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And I think if you stop having these office drinks, I think productivity will go down.
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Stuff turner goes up massively. People don't want to be at work really.
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And also the thing about alcohol as well is that you can really, really easily graduate it.
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So going to the bar does not mean you have to get absolutely wasted.
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Because you buy it in these quite small units of increment.
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So you can go thinking that, well, I'm only going to have two.
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And that's absolutely fine.
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It's not like taking heroin where you're all in or not.
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You can sort of dip your toe in and you can retain a lot of control up until quite a late stage of how inebriated you are.
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And actually you lose a lot of respect if you can't control it.
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Yes, which is another way of kind of sizing each other up socially.
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Yeah.
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You reveal more of yourself, don't you?
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Yeah, exactly. And if you're the one that has to be put in a taxi and sent back home, you're not getting promoted.
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Exactly. Yeah. So you are seeing, again, I think it's that idea of peeking under the social curtain or the social armor with someone.
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But also seeing what they're made of.
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In the army, if you're joined to be an officer, on the last rounds of the interview process is a dinner where everyone has a bottle of wine put in front of them.
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And so the test is to have a dinner party and there's a bottle of wine in front of everyone.
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And people are just looking and seeing what happens.
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And I think that's quite an interesting test.
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Just get out of the way up front. Because if you can't deal well with that situation, you're not going to be a good person to fight with.
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Yes.
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So yeah, you're prematurely making people reveal something they would never reveal under normal interview conditions or even in a kind of teamwork exercise or physical training scenario.
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You're actually peeking under the bonnet.
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Yeah, that's it, isn't it? You're peeking under the bonnet.
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And I think that is why, I think that is at least one of the reasons why alcohol plays such an important part in our society is because it is an absolutely crucial medium for that group bonding.
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Which is actually quite a banal point, isn't it? But I think there's a much more interesting thing going on about why that works.
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Yeah, and actually you mentioned the team bonding there because most other inebriants it's not really a team thing.
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There's less of a shared experience. I mean you mentioned heroin, that's not a shared experience.
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So I'm led to believe.
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Yeah, I've heard. Well, most of them actually.
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Would you do in one of the books I read recently, they were all going to some space of sci fi books and nationals are going off to the you know some very distant to their place and they each had a suicide method in case it all went wrong.
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And one of them chose heroin because they're like well it's obviously going to be great. It's obviously the best way to go. Would you go in for that?
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If you had to. I don't know. It seems like cowardly but then at the same time you're probably allowed a bit of.
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But see one of the other astronauts decided to take a pistol because he's like well if yours doesn't quite kill you I'll finish you off before I finish off me. Which is a very kind of dutiful and.
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Yeah, exactly. And far less pleasant.
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Yes.
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There's that there's that element of selfishness in it.
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But anyway, I digress.
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It's like Huxley being asked to have some LSD administered to and he was on his deathbed.
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Yes, I think it was masculine actually. Yeah. Yeah. Is that the same?
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I don't think it is quite the same. Yeah.
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But yeah, I mean I think that would be a very interesting experience. One assumes. I mean, of course it's risky because it could be absolutely horrifying.
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Yeah.
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But I mean I respect his kind of like commitment to I suppose I respect his commitment to.
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I don't know what would you call it psychological one's own introspective.
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He's been realistic about the situation because no one ever expects to actually have to administer the suicide bill when you're you know on a deep space mission.
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You assume it'll be fine. And he's actually thought about it. I think you'd assume it would be fine.
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I think I'd be fully expecting to have to. If you're expecting it, you wouldn't get on the ship, would you?
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Well, I mean, I think that I'm not so sure. I don't know.
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I think that you could I think that it is perfectly psychologically plausible to get on a ship thinking that odds are I'm not going to make it under certain circumstances.
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It depends what you're it depends what you're it depends what you're leaving behind.
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It depends what your ideology is and depends what your motivations are.
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Okay. Yeah. It'd have to be a strong reason. Yeah.
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But alcohol.
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So there's that group bonding thing, which we've talked about.
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But I suppose the interesting question is, is that well does it is it the best choice for an individual intoxicant?
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Well, and clearly not because the alcoholism tends to be what happens when you make it a solo sport.
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Yeah. It's almost like alcohol in a group context is very healthy, but alcohol on your own.
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It's not. It's not. I mean, you know, a glass of wine after work. Yeah, fine.
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But more than that, and you're going to get yourself into trouble.
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Yes, very quickly.
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But that again goes back to the idea, doesn't it, of you know, how do you how do you culturally make sense of stuff like alcohol?
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It's dangerous, it's useful, it's powerful, and it's dangerous.
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And that's quite that, you know, I think that's a common sort of triad of properties.
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Yeah. But back to work drinks. I hate to keep bringing them up.
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But yeah, the fact is, it's acknowledged that you will do the work better if occasionally you let Dionysius possess you as a group.
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And if you don't have that, you'll be less productive.
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Yes, the sort of the spirit of the animator team, this boudoir.
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Yeah.
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But I mean, yes, I think that I think that that is that is right.
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You know, I think that that's that's definitely true.
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But I suppose that with that out of the way that we can once again think about, well, what is it possession?
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You know, is that Chap and Yemen right that you that it makes you into a werewolf, that it that it fundamentally transforms you or that it fills you with something else?
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Or is it unearthing what is already there?
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Yeah, my personal experience is it's unearthing.
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Removing inhibitions.
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But I mean, I suppose that is in a sense filling you with something from elsewhere. If you're thinking of, you know, your conscious self excludes a lot of the rest of yourself.
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Yeah, there's other stuff in there, isn't there, that is normally kept out of view, should we say, both of your own introspective consciousness and of the from what other people can observe.
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You know, I think that at least on one reading of the psychoanalysts and modern psychology, there are, in a sense, sub entities with your shadow.
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Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
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But even just the sort of the lower brain systems have their own personalities because they have their own they have their own wishes and desires that sometimes conflict with one another.
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You know, so you might have one part of your system sort of craving, you know, whatever it is, the doughnuts or sex or whatever, but then another part of your system saying no, no, that is definitely not what we need to be doing right now.
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But you're saying that that alcohol is a possession, but it's not possession by an external entity. It's possession by an internal entity.
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Yeah. Okay.
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But then again, you see, I say this is where I think that the best way to conceive of the gods is as actually as internal entities, but as internal entities that that are instantiated in all of us.
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And in that sense, they are universal and they are in that sense.
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You know, they are entities, they are coherent entities that exist across time and space. They've existed as long as we as we as a species have existed, and maybe even there maybe even older.
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But then they don't exist is sort of externally out in space they exist in the pattern that is that is the human organism.
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Step on from the shared unconscious is a shared pantheon.
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They're there in the blueprints. Yeah, you know, they're part of the blueprints.
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And they they presumably serve a they're either they're either things that have coalesced through evolution, at the very least, or they actually do serve an adaptive purpose.
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Well, yeah, if they weren't useful, they would have like evolution would have got rid of them.
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I assume so. Yeah, I mean, because because you can have these sort of, you know, these sort of useless offshoots, can't you that they're like the appendix and coccyx and so forth.
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But but I think that it's, I think it's an open question as to as to what precisely they would be if you accept this, this, you know, this idea, even in the first instance, whether they are adaptive or not.
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I actually think that that's in a way that's that's that's a later question. I think the more interesting question is, are they you know, is it useful to think about gods or spirits in this way as entities that exist within the structure of our minds, really genuinely within the structure of our minds.
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And as such, you know, they they pre exist us, they will they will exist after we're gone. They will be excessive, you know, they will be in an inmanent to everyone with a with a, you know, within the parameters of what we might call a normal human mind.
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And they're powerful, because they are, you know, presumably they are there in response to the human experience and the human interaction with with the world. Presumably, they are there as a kind of shortcut, an adaptive shortcut for us understanding the complexity of what otherwise could not be understood.
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Yeah, and so by, by giving a name and rarefying it to almost turn into a character that helps us use it or at least the first step is to acknowledge it's there.
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Yeah, and that you're not going to be a functional human being if you don't acknowledge you got this bit of monkey brain that wants to start fights.
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Yeah. Yeah. And then you can get you can start to have really interesting sort of speculation about well what happens then between the transition from polytheism to monotheism.
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Because you can you can kind of in this you know and the if you accept this line of thinking you can you can kind of start to see polytheism as you know the the rarefaction of a brain, but it's rarefied and it's kind of fragmented and kaleidoscopic and slightly chaotic manner.
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And once you you transition over into monotheism know it's all brought under much more brought under the sovereignty of perhaps the I don't know the ego.
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Yeah, and that's sort of, you've got that theory that the two halves of the brain weren't communicating very well thousands of years ago and so when one half was passing information to the other, it felt like a different, a different personality or you know an actual God speaking to you.
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But polytheism was quite recent. And so I find it hard to believe that the structure of the brain was different or how minds work.
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The brain is very plastic though isn't it. I mean, you know, the brain is, the brain doesn't require evolution to change.
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It changes according to the inputs on it you know on a very other time scale of very much a human life.
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What were the different inputs that the.
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Well I mean I'm really really way beyond what I would I've sort of.
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That's where it gets fun though.
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What I've probably thought about and you know, schematized here but I suppose that you would think of it in the in the sense of that the, the, the, the mind, let's say the mind would by focusing on this idea that there is one unifying principle or one sovereign power within the
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universe would organize itself such in a much more self controlling manner.
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So you know presumably the the networks would reorder themselves to prioritize the top down nature of control or something like that.
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So you you get more of a sense of your mind becomes more of the more of an individual in the sense that it's not divisible you know it doesn't feel like it's divisible it feels like it's a it's a coherent whole and more clearly demarcated and so you almost lock bits without.
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Yes, and you lock bits away. Yes, so certain bit in order to make this happen certain bits get locked away.
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Yeah, much more not always healthy.
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No, but necessary perhaps.
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But perhaps effective in other ways.
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But yes, this is the you know this is way beyond what I could really sort of empirically justify or have to really go away and think about it in great depth but yeah, I think that other people have other people have had thoughts along this.
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This is definitely not this is definitely not my sort of original production.
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Yeah.
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It's not quite like having multiple personalities but a bit like that.
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Yes, it's a bit like, I suppose it the notion is that a genuine polytheist is is very open to the notion that they want different things at different times and in different circumstances and that they are.
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Sometimes we'll clash with each other but don't don't create a sense of psychological dissonance.
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So an extreme example would be like berserkers is going to that zone.
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They become something else or is a to me something more subtle than that.
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I mean possibly.
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I'm just thinking of the most recent thing I looked into this which is basically the berserkers are basically a myth that didn't happen but I don't know whether that's.
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I know what you mean. The three been going over makes it possible. Yes, that you can just unleash the you just unleash something.
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Yes. And then and then it goes back in its box once it's spent and yeah, you know, but it's more kind of acknowledged and it's it's there and whereas you know for the for the monotheist that stuff has to be stamped out you know has to be denied because it's it's it implies possession by a power that is not the one power.
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Hmm. Then you have the problem with soldiers going back for war where they're having to be one very different thing.
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Hmm. I can have kind of stun them they are back at home.
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Yes, and I you know I think that obviously it's still the mind doesn't succeed in in just being one thing.
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But I suppose that it's the idea is that it is more is is much more motivated to try to be one thing. Hmm. And under this system and it does cause problems. Yeah.
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Back to work drinks is that you take a whole self to work or or just part of it.
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I your work is different to your son around your friends.
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Yes.
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I think it's more that you you because you're not seeing the whole person when you when you get inebriated are you you're just seeing you're seeing something more of them.
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You're seeing how they act.
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You see you're seeing how they have fun.
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And actually of course having fun and playing and joking is a really really fundamental way that we read each other in it's a form of play that actually is so fundamental for mammals to kind of scope each other out.
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This is you know our mutual sense of humor how we how we kind of get how we play.
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Yeah I think that that element is in a way it's I think it provides a space for adults to play that they otherwise couldn't do.
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That makes sense.
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Yeah it does.
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I guess it used to be that you'd have a lot more sports at work for example which is part of that but but sports isn't quite play when it's organized.
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No because play is much more freeform isn't it.
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Yeah and work drinks is freeform.
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Yes.
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Anything can happen.
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Yeah.
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I think in a way I think it is the way that adults play.
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I mean I think yeah there's no goal there's no it's open ended.
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Yeah.
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It's not a finite there's no win condition.
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You kind of construct a you construct an experience for yourselves over the course of the night don't you.
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Yeah.
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You kind of bootstrap a narrative.
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Yeah.
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That you will refer back to in the future.
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Yes and yes it provides that that bedrock of a relationship doesn't it that you that you had that you shared that narrative experience in the same way that children do when they play.
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So yeah that that's why you know if you're if you're not if you're not an unfortunate person who's an alcoholic you definitely should drink.
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It's it's it's really it performs a lot of functions.
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You know I'm glad we've we've solved that.
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Yeah.