it continues to drive desire. Because the reward system isn’t delivering the goods, excess unfolds d

it continues to drive desire. Because the reward system isn’t delivering the goods, excess unfolds driven by a wanting system that is looking for pleasure in all the wrong places. When we were hunters and gatherers, excess was an unborn concept. We lived on the edge then, enjoying scraps of whatever kill arrived on the fireplace, together with the tubers gathered up on the day. We, at least many of us in the West, live in a world that has a 24/7 cafeteria of food and drugs. It is a want it-have it culture. As work in molecular biology shows, and as I will pick up in chapter 4, some of us start off more vulnerable than others, susceptible to sampling from the cafeteria at all hours of the day and night. The combination of a heavily marketed environment and a biological susceptibility to excess, is a losing combination for the consumer. The work on addiction provides a template for thinking about how individuals and societies ignite a path to excessive harms. In the same way that excessive eating gets going and going out of control when the dopamine system drives an irrational desire to want more and more food that is liked less and less, so too is excessive harm often driven by a similar decoupling between wants and likes. Individuals start with a desire to acquire wealth, to physically harm those who are unlike them, or taste the sweetness of revenge against someone who acted unfairly. These desires are often linked to an experience of pleasure or the anticipation of pleasure. But as such actions and their consequences accumulate, the pleasure derived diminishes, as money is acquired just for the sake of having more, while individuals are injured, maimed, or killed because this is the policy that must be pursued. Liking 1s no longer part of the equation, leaving cold desire to do its work at the expense of innocent others who get in the way. To develop this idea, and especially the link to excessive harm, I have to fill in a missing piece in our discussion of desire. Everything I have discussed in this section has focused on individuals and their core corporal needs for survival — or in the case of drugs, recreation. I haven’t said a word about how desire works in the social arena, whether the same systems are in play when we compare our own desires and resources with others, or with other opportunities. When desire is motivated by what others have or have achieved, are the same processes in play as when we eat, drink, or gamble? These are important questions as the desire to accumulate great wealth or to harm others is often motivated by comparison shopping, assessing what others have relative to our own status. The most primal starting point for comparison shopping is the world of hierarchies, a world where the desire to dominate rules. Power hungry Whether you are observing a social insect, fish, lizard, bird, rat, whale, monkey, or human, males are bigger and bolder, more boisterous, brash and brazen, and more motivated to get into a brawl than females. Though biologists don’t define the sexes based on these differences, they use them to understand Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 63 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012809