Everyone Wants to be Special

Why do people gamble when the odds are close to certain that they will lose money? Obviously because they enjoy it. But why do they enjoy it? There is the pleasure of occasionally winning, of course. But that doesn't completely explain it as that pleasure much be matched, and even overmatched, by the more common losing. There almost certainly is some social pleasure--although plenty of people gamble alone at a slot machine. My sense is that people gamble because when they win they feel special--a kind of Hobbesian exhilaration or Veblenian status. I won and you didn't: even the remote possibility of that occurring is what propels them to lay down money that will most probably be lost. This is undoubtedly related to human competition in general and may indeed account for all sorts of odd human behavior--the compulsion to shop, the inability to cooperate, the need to display wealth and to dominate others.

Yet this need to feel special is, from another perspective, deeply problematic, for it means that most people make decisions based on emotions, not logic. It is particularly problematic in a democracy where individuals often vote in seemingly incomprehensible ways--, for example,voting against their own interest. And it may account for the reality that many people often support dictators or moral monsters because they believe that this person will make them part of somthing special--the dominant or exceptional nation, for example. La Boetie's On Voluntary Servitude would seem to reinforce this notion--one can feel special through a kind of identification with someone else or some fantasy.

The La Boetie piece I know only through reading Sarah Bakewell's A Life of Montaigne, a very intelligent biography and commentary on the French writer. And I've read Montaigne on and off over the years, but her discussion really clarified his attraction. He makes clear our limitations and our inconsistencies: he conveys what it feels like to be alive and conscious, in our limited and inconsistent way. Perhaps his perspective underlies the moral imagination--the ability to imagine someone else's life, an ability sorely lacking in many individuals. (I say this conscious, I think or hope I think, of my own limited moral imagination.)