Alcohol and gambling have very different meanings in 
different cultures. In our intensely individualist and fragmented 
Western world, “booze” is a social bond and a means of festive 
involvement. By contrast, in closely knit tribal society, “booze” 
is destructive of all social pattern and is even used as a means 
to mystical experience.

     In tribal societies, gambling, on the other hand, is a 
welcome avenue of entrepreneurial effort and individual 
initiative. Carried into an individualist society, the same 
gambling games and sweepstakes seem to threaten the whole 
social order. Gambling pushes individual initiative to the point 
of mocking the individualist social structure. The tribal virtue is 
the capitalist vice.

     When the boys came home from the mud and blood