it continues to drive desire. Because the reward system isn’t delivering the goods, excess unfolds driven by a wanting system that is looking for pleasure in all the wrong places. When we were hunters and gatherers, excess was an unborn concept. We lived on the edge then, enjoying scraps of whatever kill arrived on the fireplace, together with the tubers gathered up on the day. We, at least many of us in the West, live in a world that has a 24/7 cafeteria of food and drugs. It 1s a want it-have it culture. As work in molecular biology shows, and as I will pick up in chapter 4, some of us start off more vulnerable than others, susceptible to sampling from the cafeteria at all hours of the day and night. The combination of a heavily marketed environment and a biological susceptibility to excess, is a losing combination for the consumer. The work on addiction provides a template for thinking about how individuals and societies ignite a path to excessive harms. In the same way that excessive eating gets going and going out of control when the dopamine system drives an irrational desire to want more and more food that is liked less and less, so too is excessive harm often driven by a similar decoupling between wants and likes. Individuals start with a desire to acquire wealth, to physically harm those who are unlike them, or taste the sweetness of revenge against someone who acted unfairly. These desires are often linked to an experience of pleasure or the anticipation of pleasure. But as such actions and their consequences accumulate, the pleasure derived diminishes, as money is acquired just for the sake of having more, while individuals are injured, maimed, or killed because this is the policy that must be pursued. Liking is no longer part of the equation, leaving cold desire to do its work at the expense of innocent others who get in the way. To develop this idea, and especially the link to excessive harm, I have to fill in a missing piece in our discussion of des