Human Nature, Vegas-Style

Organized, institutionalized gambling is an odd phenomenon. Especially when it's with a gambling machine. The casinos are stuffed with people sitting slackly at these bleeping money-vacuum droids, and I can't help thinking of Pavlov or Skinner or whoever and their discovery of one of life's little wrinkles:

a behavior will be much more firmly entrenched if reinforcement for that behavior is delivered sporadically or randomly.

I suppose it's because this delivers a simulacrum of reward for toil, or for perseverance, whereas something that rewards predictably at every attempt becomes simply a fact of life, a bedrock thing. But why would that mechanism, whatever it is, not recognize and repel from a drain of precious resources? This setting--the whole town--is like an industry grown up around a quirk in biology, some opportunist's advantage-taking of one of our psychological weak links bloated to obscene proportions. To my mind, anyway, there's just no escaping a sense of maladjustment in our pouring of money into these machines, of some functional mechanism being preyed upon by gaming operators.

I don't mean to be all holier-than-thou about it. (OK, well, yeah, I do.) I always blow a few bucks myself when I'm in town, and I have at least a small inkling of what drives most people, at least for the gaming part of it. I have an addictive personality to some degree, and I have a sense of how this industry, designed to prey on just this part of the psyche, could go badly for me (though I'm fortunate in that gambling just doesn't do much for me). But for every stuff shirt like me who ineptly parts with his $50, there are a zillion people going just a bit over the top, losing a few grand, drinking a bit too much, hitting the all-you-can-eat buffets. It's all mostly good fun, a bit of harmless release, I suppose.

But as with so much in life, there's a continuum. One can see a lot of overconfident young men, mostly, swaggering around thinking they've got the world by the balls, only to wake up the next day with a hell of a hangover and an empty wallet. Guess it wasn't the world's balls in the vise after all. (The guide books say that a $1,000 bankroll can be expected to last for five hours of $5 and $10 blackjack hands or 25-cent slots. At $25 per blackjack hand, your grand will last just under an hour.) And the further out along the bell curve we go, the darker (if, thankfully, fewer) the stories get, people who lose control and come out of extreme benders and find themselves without any money or credit left. And worse--houses gone, cars gone, wives gone. You don't have to look too hard to find these ugly examples.

Given how vaporous a line separates healthy release from self-immolation, the whole business feels a bit like playing with fire to me. (I hesitate to use the word "healthy" in any context when talking about Vegas; perhaps "understandable" or "explicable" works better.) Somewhere in our collective cultural psyche--or some part of it, anyway; the National Organization of Women will not likely hold their next convention here--the whole business seems to find reinforcement, though. All the promotions show men at the table, their hottie girlfriends at their arms showing obeisance and support. Hookers are everywhere. Booze is handed out free. Cigars are readily available to "celebrate." There's some version of what we recognize as male power being displayed.

But back to my main thought: the gambling is the engine that drives Vegas, and it's responsible for one of the world's great spectacles. This two mile strip out in the middle of the desert seems a singularity. Whatever misgivings I have (and always express) about Times Square when I visit New York--that it's all planned out and sanitized, that none of it is spontaneous or real, that it's manipulative of some base television-watching thing in our nature--I have those same misgivings about Vegas--tenfold. And the balance is much the same, the rewards lagging behind in similar proportion. (Vegas is similar to Times Square as well in that neither place has many natives in it--indeed, I'm not sure if there's even such thing as a Vegas native). Except for maybe the Formula One paddock (which is an entirely different can of worms), I know of no place where so much money is concentrated in such a small space as this strip of real estate. And it's all evolved into this near-perfect form of bait and hook. The big resort hotels make the biggest promises with the most outrageously expensive and over-the-top presentations. And it's tough not to stand slack-jawed in awe. The latest darling of the Strip, the Wynn, reputedly cost upwards of $2 billion to construct. Two billion dollars! And the paint is hardly dry and Steve Wynn is adding on already, nearly doubling the property. As is the Venetian next door. As is the Bellagio. Construction along the strip is like a virus in the air. Vegas is a town in continual reformation and rebirth.

But you don't see an opulent hotel without a full casino. The resorts where the casinos are empty, like the Luxor, feel shabby and have a bit of a pall over them. The concept of the Vegas Resort / Hotel / Casino, this adult Disneyland, seems the perfect embodiment of Richard Dawkins's meme, the unit of cultural evolution. It's a concept honed and polished over a few decades to become something of extraordinary draw and power. It's one of those concepts which gets us to act consistently against our own best interests, a magical formula arrived at where people voluntarily give up their money in vast, almost unimaginable sums. A lot of that money goes back into an increase of spectacle in hopes of snaring yet MORE money, on and on in an upward spiral, all going somewhere not to our benefit.

I can't help thinking (getting all holy again and shit) what this money, all given over to no useful purpose whatsoever, might accomplish if applied to a worthier task. But it is what it is. Call it entertainment, I suppose. We all can't sit at our steam irons 24/7 for the rest of our days.