It’s Kinda Obvious.

Big weekend in British Super Bikes, the showdown where the BSB championship is won or lost. It’s OK this isn’t about pistons.
Two monkeys in an experiment. Man gives both a slice of cucumber, both happy, man gives one cucumber and the other a grape, monkey throws cucumber back at man in disgust. Sound familiar? Oh and the other monkey happily eats the grape. It seems primates have a sense of fairness or to be more precise unfairness. We’re happy to get the grape and pissed off to get the cucumber. This leads to two effects. One, get the grape, and two, retaliate if you don’t. This explains the whole of human history. When all else changes these two themes are constant providing through the centuries the rich, the poor and conflict. From hunter/gatherers to industrial farming, tribes to states, wooden clubs to missiles we appear to have a Caligula complex. To us being either happy to get or pissed off to not get seem the obvious two sides of the same coin, but is that just a quirk of our primate brain? Other animals try to get because they need to survive, but once it’s been decided who’s got the morsel the other just turns to their own preoccupation of getting something else. Try the same experiment with squirrels and you’d get a different result. So we have these two constants throughout the whole of human history, i.e. they’re not about to change soon. But what has changed and continues to is our capacity to get more grapes and to retaliate. The rich have the potential to unbalance world economies and war has the potential to destroy it. It seems only a matter of time before our innate primate sense of unfairness destroys us. While we piddle about with our petty righteous considerations we overlook this deviant primate drive and its repercussions. Back to BSB. On the slow down lap the winner and loser stopped to give each other a hug of mutual affirmation. The winner when asked about riding with the pain of an earlier injury said, “I’m on a real high right now, you could kick me in the nuts and I wouldn’t feel it.” You don’t get that in Formula 1.