Once you decide in a game that you can devalue or exclude someone, and you can do anything to them that's necessary for you to win, then what you do and how you do it is just based on the tools you have at hand. And certainly in some facets of the culture we will say at little league level that it's not okay to go over and beat up the person on the other side. But it is okay to slide into a base in such a way as to knock them over.  Now as you go up the levels in that sport, it's even okay to slide into a base in such a way that the person may get hurt.

I think what I would call games. I mean we still generally call it play, but they are games, recess, because play still, in a cultural sense, means that it's the not serious stuff, it's the time left over. So games, play, entertainment, those are the things that we call play in our culture.  And they provide us, at least on the surface, what we think of as ways of being where we don't have to be so constrained about our activity. We're allowed to be more free. That's what we think, and that was the intent I think in that part of cultural play. The problem is that very early on when those play activities also become encompassed by the cultural idea of competition, there you go again. The play becomes the same activity as going to law school or mathematics and physics and the other subjects in the school.

I can remember going when I lived on the California coast, I thought I'm out here every day surfing so I'm going to try playing volleyball with the people who play volleyball on the California coast. I just went out to a group and there were five men. So I said, well, can I join you, I'll be the sixth? And they were reluctant but they let me come in. In an hour I never touched the ball once. They were so good at excluding me from that activity which is what the play begins to do. I wasn't a member and I learned, just like surfing, as a surfer up and down the California coast I learned that you've got to be a member. I still carry a scar on my leg from being run over by a surfer in a place where I wasn't a member. And you'd think well California has this image of being really free and surfing as being the ultimate play, being free and you're on the ocean and it's carefree, no. The competition is intense in that activity, just like it would be in football or hockey or anything else. And with the end result, a physical hurt, not even counting the emotional hurt that happens when you aren't included, when you're essentially told by body mechanics of other people, by their eye movements, everything they do and don't say that you're not one of us. And that starts when we substitute our cultural play on the playground with young kids. The kids who are heavy, don't get to play. The kids who can't hear, can't see, can't move, they all get excluded and were taught that exclusion is okay. That it's okay to exclude them because they can't play by the rules that the game is set up for and that's all right to do. So we grow up thinking well as long as it's in the rules and the rules are defined for me to win, whoever I exclude is all right. That's fine, we can do that. So that becomes an okay process very early on for young kids.

Once you decide in a game that you can devalue or exclude someone, and you can do anything to them that's necessary for you to win, then what you do and how you do it is just based on the tools you have at hand. And certainly in some facets of the culture we will say at little league level that it's not okay to go over and beat up the person on the other side. But it is okay to slide into a base in such a way as to knock them over.  Now as you go up the levels in that sport, it's even okay to slide into a base in such a way that the person may get hurt.

So we still have some notion in the culture and it's primarily unspoken that the levels of violence and aggression that are okay in any activity are graded so that we don't allow the two year old to beat up his one year old brother when he takes his truck away. At a certain age we're going to say defend yourself. Well what does that mean, defend yourself? It means if they hit you, hit them back. Well does it mean pull out my gun and shoot them? No. But at another level we go and it says yes it does mean that. It does mean shoot them if that's what it takes to defend yourself. So the entire threat is based on the idea of not only am I important, I'm the most important and I am disconnected from all else. And once I'm disconnected, what I do to them doesn't make any difference.