"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
-
Kevin Federline
What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even
e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of
the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go
Inside the Monkeysphere."What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"
First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe
you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up
to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.
Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito,
Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them
now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the
other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal
monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So 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 monkey? 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.
So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.
You see, monkey experts performed a
monkey study
a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain
determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger
the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.
They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they
could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they
could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature
formed.
Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them
a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society
for this particular animal was about 150.
That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets.
"So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"
It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.
Famous news talking guy
Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book
Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor
Russell Crowe).
Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken
glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might
cut his hands."
That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey
point. None of us 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 at all and if we do, it's not in
the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend
or even our dog.
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. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.
"There's that word again..."
The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using
our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the
monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this
to be a number much larger than
150.
Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our
friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a
person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man,
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 who we think of as people, usually our own friends and
family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or
church or suicide cult.
Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.
Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school
teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at
Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal
walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you
had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom?
I mean, they're not people. They're teachers.
"So? What difference does all this make?"
Oh, not much. It's just
the one single reason society doesn't work.
It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or
a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with
a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom
dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 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 the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more
than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.
"Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even
know those people!"
Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel
their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little
ridiculous. 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.
Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic,
when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of
the window to scream, "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" Try to imagine
acting like that in a smaller group. Like if 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
FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITCAMEL!!"
They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere.
That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when
you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player
you'd never dare say to his face.
"Well, I'm nice to strangers. Have you considered that maybe you're just an asshole?"
Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers.
You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either.
The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere
will require screwing 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 the old
lady next door, 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.
You may have a list of rationalizations long enough to circle
the Earth, but the truth is that in our monkey brains the old woman
next door 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 the old lady, or that some kind old
ladies actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us.
That's one of the ingenious things about the big-time religions, by the
way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to
a stranger, so they taught 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 can crush you like a grape." You must admit that if they
weren't writing words inspired by the Almighty, they at least
understood the Monkeysphere.
It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live.
But wait, because this gets much bigger and much, much stranger...
"So you're going to tell us that this Monkeysphere thing runs the whole world? Also,
They Live sucked."
Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The
Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you
and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government
is made up of people
and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human
beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants,
but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is
deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact
that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem
tipping in her capacity as a waitress.
Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe
"Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil
black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity.
Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's
toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at
Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions
of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine?
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 as the fiery
Orc factories of Mordor.
And if you've just thought, "Well, those talk show hosts are just a
bunch of egomaniacal blowhards anyway," you've just done it again,
turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. It's no surprise,
you do it with pretty much all six billion human beings outside the Monkeysphere.
"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"
That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point.
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.
Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding
in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man
who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush
on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and wakes up
in the morning with a boner and
loves volleyball?
Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think
there's an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn't it
strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately
tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension.
Now, the cold truth is this Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of
a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some
redneck's T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is
realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt.
"So you're using monkeys to claim that we're all a bunch of Osama Bin Ladens?"
Sort of.
Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about
how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even
more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck).
Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the
floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer.
In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs 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 Exxon,
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 shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you
thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) 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 man doesn't feel sympathy for
his fellow man at $6.00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at
$600,000 a year.
Or, to 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 Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent
of six dollars a week.
"You've used the word 'monkey' more than 50 times, but the same
principle hardly applies. Humans have been to the moon. Let's see the
monkeys do that."
It doesn't matter. It's just an issue of degree.
There's a reason why legendary monkeytician 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 the feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is
we are just as limited by our mental hardware.
The primary difference 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, though when they do it is widely thought
to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality
manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and
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 joining informal wrestling clubs in
basements.
This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin turned to his assistant and lamented, "Jeje, we're the monkeys."
"Oh, no you didn't."
If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of
the Monkeysphere.
There is a reason why all of the really phat-ass nations with the
biggest SUV's with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of
representative democracy (where you vote for people to do the governing
for you) and all of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people
actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).
A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all
of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing
something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling
a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness
knob on your toaster. 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 ("A woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a
boob and football ban immediately!")
Conversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they
could sit all of the millions 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,
tree-humping disaster.
Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You
want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man,
of course, was German philosopher Hans 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. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.
Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented 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
them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our
monkey happiness again breaks down.
It's not all the French's fault. The truth is, all of these monkey management schemes only go so far. For instance, today
one in four Americans has some kind of mental illness, usually depression. One in
four.
Watch a basketball game. The odds are at least two of those people on
the floor are mentally ill. Look around your house; if everybody else
there seems okay,
it's you.
Is it any surprise? You turn on the news and see a whole special on the
Obesity Epidemic. You've had this worry laid on your shoulders about millions of other people eating too much.
What exactly are you supposed to do about the eating habits of 80
million people you don't even know? You've taken on the pork-laden
burden of all these people outside the Monkeysphere and you now carry that useless weight of worry like, you know, some kind of animal on your back.
"So what exactly are we supposed to do about all this?"
First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see
simplicity. Any claim 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.
So 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.
You can do that by following these simple steps. We like to call this plan the T.R.Y. plan:
First, TOTAL MORON. That is, accept the fact THAT YOU ARE ONE. We all are.
That really annoying person you know, the one who's always spouting
bullshit, the person who always thinks they're right? Well, the odds
are that for somebody else, you're that person.
So take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then
you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things
outside your Monkeysphere.
Second, UNDERSTAND that there are no Supermonkeys.
Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational
seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and
successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well.
No, the universal moron principal established in No. 1
above applies here, too. Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed
to be immune to all the backhanded fuckery we all do in our daily lives
and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught on video
snorting cocaine off a prostitute's ass. A good exercise is to picture
your hero--whoever it is--passed out on his lawn, naked from the waist
down. The odds are it's happened at some point. Even Gandhi may have
had hotel rooms and dead hookers in his past.
And don't even think about ignoring advice from a moral
teacher just because the source enjoys the ol' Colombian Nose Candy
from time to time. We're all members of varying species of hypocrite
(or did you tell them at the job interview that you once called in sick
to spend a day leveling up on World of Warcraft?) Don't use your heroes' vices as an excuse to let yours run wild.
And finally, DON'T LET ANYBODY simplify it for
you. The world cannot be made simple. Anyone who tries to paint a
picture of the world in basic comic book colors is most likely trying
to use you as a pawn.