When you go drinking with someone and both make fools of yourselves, you now have a mutual trust built on knowing things that most people don't know. That's also the purpose of hazing rituals in fraternities: you've seen each other do disgusting things, so you trust each other.
Then, there's the nostalgia factor. Being drunk is moderately interesting but it seems to have a high rate at which it produces nostalgia. Even though the after-effects are (for me, anyway) sufficiently bad to counteract any pluses of drunkenness, the sort of nostalgia on which business connections seem to be build is enhanced with alcohol.
I don't know why this is, but if I had to guess, I think that Timothy Leary's "8 circuits of consciousness" theory is, at least to this, relevant. Alcohol causes regression into a childish, emotionally volatile state. It's a time-travel mechanism. It allows people to instill in themselves an illusion that a connection goes back farther in time (and is therefore deeper) than it actually does.
When you go drinking with someone and both make fools of yourselves, you now have a mutual trust built on knowing things that most people don't know. That's also the purpose of hazing rituals in fraternities: you've seen each other do disgusting things, so you trust each other.
Then, there's the nostalgia factor. Being drunk is moderately interesting but it seems to have a high rate at which it produces nostalgia. Even though the after-effects are (for me, anyway) sufficiently bad to counteract any pluses of drunkenness, the sort of nostalgia on which business connections seem to be build is enhanced with alcohol.
I don't know why this is, but if I had to guess, I think that Timothy Leary's "8 circuits of consciousness" theory is, at least to this, relevant. Alcohol causes regression into a childish, emotionally volatile state. It's a time-travel mechanism. It allows people to instill in themselves an illusion that a connection goes back farther in time (and is therefore deeper) than it actually does.