Read a VERY interesting article, by David Wong, that attempts to make sense of the world and the way we interact through a concept called “monkeyspace.”  Here is a very abbreviated, very paraphrased version in the name of understanding politics.

Imagine you have a monkey named Slappy.  Imagine how upset you’d be if he died (especially because he liked to wear a pirate outfit and you fought crime together).  You’d be pretty upset.

Now imagine you have four monkeys, and then later you get 100 monkey friends.  Even though they are all unique and important, there is a point at which you would no longer be able to remember all their names, and with more monkeys you would even reach a point where you would not care if one of them dies.   How many monkeys would this take?  The answer is known.  Monkey experts have found that the size of the monkey’s brain determined the size of the group a monkey joined.  Bigger brain = bigger society, and the size of a human brain allows for about 150 people. 

This group of 150 people or so makes up our “monkeysphere” or in other words, the group of people that we are able to actually conceptualize as “people.” Those who are out of our monkeysphere become nameless entities such as “The Guy Who Takes the Garbage Away.”  So, even if you know your garbage guy, there is a certain limit to our ability to feel true concern for him. Wasn’t it weird to see your school teachers at the mall…they don’t go to the mall, they’re not people, they’re teachers. 

This is the also the single reason that society/politics doesn’t work.  Think of it this way, would you be more upset by the death of your mom or by the death of 15,000 people in China? They are all humans and all equally dead, but the closer they are to our monkeysphere, the more their death means to us.  The reverse is true also, your death would mean very little to the Chinese.

The problem happens when the needs of you or those within your monkeysphere require screwing someone outside it. This is why many people wouldn’t dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don’t mind stealing cable or adding a shady exemption on our tax return.  Remember the lady is human, but the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine.  And the thought that if we steal cable, the cable company will lose profits and some “human” will lose their job, rarely occurs in our psyche. 

Listen to conservative radio discuss “The Government” as if it were some huge, hulking dragon. Never mind it is made up of people and all the money it takes, goes into the pockets of people.  On the opposite side, listen to liberal radio discuss “Multi-National Corporations” as an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn’t it strange how 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?

So is the point to start worrying caring about 6 billion other people? No, that’s impossible.  But the important part is to understand that it’s also impossible for them to care about you.  That is why they don’t mind cutting your wages, raising taxes, or choking your computer with spam.  You are the “Person with Money in Pockets.”

The inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware.  The primary difference is monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others. Humans, however, require cars, oil, quality manufactured goods, video games 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 brains are able to cope with.

Our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the monkeysphere. That is why the really “awesome” nations with the biggest SUV’s have some kind of representative democracy and are, to some degree, capitalist.  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. We can simultaneously feel like we’re in charge while being contained enough that we can’t cause any real monkey mayhem.

And 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.

So what should we do? 

Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. 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.

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

Last 3 posts by Eric B.

• Nassim Taleb on the Economy - June 25th, 2010
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