Hear no, Speak no, See no …. It’s Not Just a Proverb… It’s Your Monkeysphere!!

Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed up in an outfit of some type. We’ll call him… Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime and the like. Think how sad you’d be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We’ll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and CrapTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, and the other just throws feces all the time. But they’re all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now (as the number gets higher). How many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkeys?

Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

How many monkeys will it take before you stop caring?

Sounds cruel, inhuman? When you look at it in black and white it does, but in reality, that is how we live our lives.

Those whom study monkeys have concluded that the size of a monkey’s brain determines the size of the monkey groups the monkeys form. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they build. They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact (we will leave the ethics of such actions to another writing), that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it accurately predict what tribe size that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so.

As they were doing this study, they came across one brain in their research…a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.
That brain was human. (Where they got it and how it ended up in the study I have no idea… the research never stated)

Let’s leave that for a moment and think about a story…
Think about a tale you may have heard someone tell you about their actions for people they don’t know. Actions, that when you thought about them you found a bit… strange… they would do such a thing, or perhaps their actions were something you have never given any thought to doing. For example; What about a person whom takes half an hour to carefully box up any broke glass before taking it to the trash so the trash guy would not cut his hands?
You may think this is an unusual or useless little story to tell to illustrate the whole monkey analogy, but give it a minute and we will get to the connection.

None of us really spend much time worrying about the garbage man’s welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don’t usually consider his safety or comfort first or at all and if we do, it’s not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife/husband/partner or girlfriend/boyfriend or even our dog or cat.

People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Broken objects, dangerous edges… the list of things we toss that could hurt the person whom has to dispose of it are endless. Yet generally we just do it (for our own betterment and need), and think little about what it may do to others….

Why?
The trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.

The monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkey-like brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the studies of all those monkey brains are correct, it’s physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150 in the human species.
Most of us do not have room in our monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don’t think of them as a person. We think of them as “The Thing That Makes the Trash Go Away”.

Even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage person, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It’s the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people whom we think of as people, (usually our own friends and family and perhaps some neighbours, and then maybe some classmates, or coworkers and then a person or group who has made an impact in your life… (You know, like your church or political party association, and the like)

Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not really people to us (in the truest sense of the idea). More, in terms of the idea of the monkeysphere, they are sort of more this one-dimensional characters with no real defined meaning other than the superficial ones anyone would have from a one-dimensional character association of something..

Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw your teacher coming out of a cinema you were entering or you saw your principal out at the mall with his family. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom/school?

It would have probably translated to something like this…They’re not people. They’re teachers.. that is my principal!!

Now let us look at it in another way. Given these examples, what upsets you more? Your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck and it exploded into a ball of flames? Your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 60,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They’re all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won’t mean anything to anyone on the other side of the world from you (unless they are of course someone whom has entered into your monkeysphere). For that matter, it is doubtful that hardly anyone more than 1000 meters so from where you’re sitting right now will care (or generally even know or give it a thought at all)
This type of behaviour is so ingrained into our hardware that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend/mother would probably sound a little ridiculous to most people. It is why when someone whom is “famous” dies, there is such stark differences in the reactions to those deaths (some people are hit very hard by a person they never met dying because they have, in some way entered into their monkeysphere, while for others, they have not). We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world’s population who are on the outside.

Something to think about this the next time you get really upset when you are stuck in traffic. If (and when) you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, “LEARN TO F+#&ING DRIVE, F@&^ER!!””, sit back for a moment and try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Say you’re standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, (your mouth two inches from her ear), and scream “LEARN TO OPERATE THE F$ING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITHEAD!!”

If you did this, your friends and coworker would think you’d gone insane, and the reaction would be one of total shock and disbelief. You would probably at some point end up apologizing (or loosing them as a friend), but would you apologize to the person you yelled at in your car?
We all go a little insane, when we get in a group larger than the monkeysphere. It is why people seem to be able to act anonymous invincibility when sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a sports player they would never dare say to their face, or yelling at someone driving by for something stupid you perceived them to have done (and so on)

Generally humans probably don’t go out of their way to be mean to strangers, but the simple fact of our existence is, the needs of you or those within your monkeysphere will, at some point or another in your existence, require you to…screw… someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of us wouldn’t dream of stealing money from the pocket of a friend, but don’t mind stealing cable, adding a shady exemption on our tax return, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant or at the grocery store.

You may have a list of rationalizations for your actions in these (and many other situations you encounter everyday) long enough to circle the Earth, but the simple truth is that in our monkey brains our friend is a human being while the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine. That the company is, in reality, nothing but a group of people every bit as human as your friend or that people just like your freind actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us.

Not to hate on religion, but if you really look at it logically, this is one of the ingenious things about religions. It is easier to put the screws to a stranger, so more often than not, religion teaches us to get a personal idea of a God in our heads who says, “No matter who you hurt, you’re really hurting me. (Also, I am all supreme, all knowing and can crush you like a grape).” It seems a bit like if they weren’t writing words inspired by the “Almighty”, they at least understood the monkeysphere (science being used to forward religion… now there is an ironic twist)
The monkeysphere is everywhere in the world. It exists in all ways in which we think, act, react and exist.

Conservatives talk about “The Government” as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole.

Liberals describe “Multinational Corporations” in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity.

“Libertarians” bemoan the evils of both sides and how their way to a utopian world will make everyone escape the monkeysphere (unfortunately they get tripped up when they tie everything… social and economic together… as it is not possible nor logical to be able to live in their idea of existence and be … equal)

Now I am not saying that Government is all good and is doing what needs to be done for everyone, nor am I saying that large Multinational Corporations are wonderful entities and we should love them, and I do like the libertarian idea of equality and self determination. I am merely pointing out the fact that we are an ironic creature and that our monkeyspheres ideas of things often dictate how we see the world (understand it or not).

Think of it in this way. Let’s take, as an example, a lone man who (with all his little helpers… so the story goes) builds children’s toys in his workshop. He is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas to all the boys and girls. What a beautiful story it is. Now cut to reality of where the toys really come from (developing nation’s factories with bargain priced workers), they are an inhumane soul-grinding greed machine… but yet it is actually them that are really bringing this joy to the millions of children at Christmas. Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we’d eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it the Evil monopolizing North Pole. Which story do you tell to your children? Does it (perhaps) depend on your own monkeysphere of life?
But wait, our thinking gets even more complicated. Sure, you can just dismiss the whole thing. The Liberal, the Conservative, the Libertarian. Just think of them as a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards. But the problem is… once you do that…. you’ve just done it again. You have turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. But you see, this is what we do in our thinking… with pretty much all the seven billion human beings outside the monkeysphere.
What is hard to understand is that it’s also impossible for them to care about you.

That’s why they don’t mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don’t work. You’re outside their monkeysphere. In their mind, you’re just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking.

I know you probably will (if you are still with me at this point in reading), think this a terrible analogy, but I am going ahead with it anyway. Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man whom (before his death) spent his time hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who got hungry and had a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who had athlete’s foot and chronic headaches and woke up in the morning with a boner and loved volleyball?

Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You may think there’s an effort to build sympathy for a person (like others in our existence down through time) whom was evil and murderous.

But the fact is, that by simply knowing random human facts about people, they do, immediately begin to tug a bit at ones “sympathy strings”, or at the very least become someone whom you can better take a look at. The more you know about people… or allow yourself to know about them… brings them comes closer to your monkeysphere, and they begin to take on dimension in ways you may never have thought about before..

It seems to me, that it is not about agreeing with the perceived evil (0r good) in this world. It seems to me that the key to understanding people like Bin Laden, or the numerous other persons, governments, organizations, ideas etc that we fight against in life is realizing that we are the caricature on their t-shirts. We are outside of their monkeyspheres of life as well.

Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing them and the government is screwing them even more (Think about the first time you got a paycheck and all the deductions on it.. how did that make you feel? How does it still make you feel?).

Then watch that same kid at work, as they drop a hamburger patty on the floor, pick it up, and slap in on a bun and serve it to a customer.

In that one dropped burger they have everything they need to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter… Which is, just barely.

In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running a large oil company, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it in a crappy way. That many customers or employees just can’t fit inside the monkeysphere.

The kid will protest that he shouldn’t have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a person doesn’t feel sympathy for their fellow person at $6.00 an hour, they won’t feel anything more at $600,000 a year. This is not about saying one is better than the other, one is more responsible (and the like). This is talking about our monkeysphere, and how it effects us all (no matter what the status of a person may be in their life)

Look at it the other way, if we’re allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6.00 an hour, just think of how angry the some person in a factory on the other side of the world is allowed to be when they are making the equivalent of six dollars a week.

Charles Darwin and his assistant, Jeje (pronounced “heyhey”) Santiago deduced that humans and chimps were evolutionary cousins. As sophisticated as we are (compare our advanced sewage treatment plants to the chimps’ primitive technique of hurling their feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware as they are. We have more capabilities in some ways but we still share the same limitations.

One of the primary differences between us and our cousins is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods and video games and the worldwide internets and, most importantly… governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.

This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It’s a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and finding numerous ways to vent our frustrations (that are really in the weirdest ways frustrations about our own behaviours)

This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin observed that we are the monkeys.

If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the monkeysphere. There is a reason why the majority of the “big” nations with the biggest SUV’s with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of what we term “representative democracy” (where you vote for people to do the governing for you)… or are being pushed to move in that direction for the betterment of everyone. All of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).. or what we now want the world to be… Free market

A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting common people feel they are doing something by going to a polling place every so many years and choosing someone whom will have their best interests at heart (notice I said their best interests first…). We can simultaneously feel like we’re in charge while being contained enough that we can’t cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies (I could list endlessly the amount of mindless small, self ego-minded things we get ourselves into a monkey arm throwing freak-out at, but I will leave that up to each person to recognize in their own existence)

Some people in the distant past thought they could sit all of the millions (now billions) of monkeys down and say, “Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we’ll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!” For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, disaster.

Later, another man sat the monkeys down and said, “You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I’m taking a nap.” That person was… Mr. Capitalism. As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. ( Hey. Maybe this is what Ayn Rand was actually trying to say in her non-stop monkeysphere-a-thon rants (and hence mine about her), that instead just got lost in all her hate.)

And somewhere along the way someone invented labels that led to things like…racism. This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person (“Those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!”) but when we start seeing people as being one, giant, group of (terrorists, thieves, communists, socialists, religious fanatics, homosexuals, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, poor people, the list goes on and on an on)….. our monkey happiness again breaks down.

Is it any surprise we as a species can’t really see or understand each other? How are we supposed to take on the worries, troubles, needs and actions of everyone in the world? It is not possible for us to do. Someone, somewhere, eventually will fall through the cracks and when that does, and it is recognized by others, the façade will begin to once again fade and the infighting will start once again. The utopian world we so terrible strive for will once again be out of our reach.

So what is it we should do?

It seems in life that claims that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency. Sure, not every problem in the world is deep, dark and murky, but we as a species seem to think that most problems can be solved by simply doing one thing. We fail to see all the connections.

Reject binary thinking of “good vs. bad” or “us vs. them.” Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs.

But most importantly it seems (and this is the hardest for us as a species), it seems WE ALL need to remember (at times) ….That really annoying person you know, the one who’s always spouting about something, the person who always thinks they’re right, or has the answers? Well, the odds are that for somebody else you are that person. Take the amount you think you know, reduce it by up to 99.999%, and then (generally) you will probably have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your monkeysphere. Even if you know more, it seems a good way to think as going into situations not thinking you know all the answers seems to me to be a much better way to leave one open to actually hearing and thinking about what others say.

There are no supermonkeys in our world, just monkeys. Someone may be better at something than you are, that is a given, so embrace it, but you don’t have to try and be it (or worse yet, resent it). They are living their monkeysphere, as you are yours. Convincing others that we can be (and should be) like them is something we seem to fall victim to in so many ways and is just us trying to excerpt our own self egos. It is not necessary to be like others to be “successful”. This thought is so hard for us to understand.

No one is above/immune or has found the secret success to being the better person. No idea of god, no idea of existence and certainly no individual person. We are all in this together, we all exhibit the same faults (some more than others, yes, but we ALL have the potential for anything we see in our monkey lives). When you begin to put others on a pedestal above you, you begin to fall into the trap of throwing around your feces. People are better at different things, and not so good at others. That is just a fact. Let it go and move on.

Don’t let anyone simplify it for you. The world cannot be made simple. Simple is, as with most things, relative to ones own ideas of such a thing. Anyone who tries to paint a picture of the world in basic comic book colours is most likely trying to use you as a pawn.