You are a goal oriented, desire driven, emotion infused material and immaterial conglomerate. You’re your own personal tornado of swirling interests, needs and opposing ideas – equally an individual and a part of a group.

Were you to leave a bunch of children together and just watch them for a while at first you’ll see each one of them actively pursuing their own desire and playing with the thing they want, but after some time chances are they’ll spontaneously organize themselves into a game, creating a social microcosm. We are social to the core and even small children intuitively understand it’s necessary to arrange their personal desire in a way that it can fit into the collective desire of the moment to be able to cooperate with as little conflict as possible. Games are not meaningless and children play for a reason – they are learning the social rules, they are learning that one of the strengths that allowed humanity to thrive was exactly the power of communal effort. They are too small to be able to articulate it but this is what’s happening and. We’re are made to be biologically rewarded by serotonin once the collective goal (of the game) is achieved or just to enjoy the process of working on something together.

We may have forgotten how it felt to play the games of childhood by now but continue to repeat the pattern in higher stakes than finding the one who hides, jumping the furthest or drawing the best Santa. Our games are much more serious now but follow the same system of fusing our own desires with those around us. We need to get along with people and therefore weigh and adjust the course of our desire and the structure it comes to life through by the measure of a common goal.

Society and its rules, norms and values are the product of an eternal tango between an individual and the group. If a desire is left unorganized you become its slave. You can get everything you want if you learn to “play nice”, you can get what you want by giving other people what they want.