What is the Monkeysphere?
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"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
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?"
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.
"So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!"
Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.
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?"
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..."
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?"
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?"
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...
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First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
You see, monkey experts performed a 
It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.
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.
Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.
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.
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The first page is really brilliant. The second is dubious, there is some truth in it (the reason why morality doesn't work: where there is oppression, there are lies.) However you lost your objectivity as seen in the first page; saying what's right isn't quite enough, you still need to say it in the right way. By using language that incites anger in many, you fail to speak in a way that resonates with many, as you did wonderfully in the beginning.
Just to illustrate, for example you could say "so don't feel bad when you find it hard to care for others; the compulsion you have is merely a shackle of morality" instead of "if you think that you care about them and they care about you, you're just naive and empty-headed." The two statements convey roughly the same idea, but it is obvious which one is more effective.
This is the smelliest piece of behaviourist propaganda I've ever read. The logic of this article is really really flawed, and it surprised me how much explanation and examplification was put on this as opposed to other notes.
I'll elaborate on this later because I must get up in 1 hour but I'm really ashamed as how this page, among so much entertaing and intresting info, is trying to pass this article as a serious way of understanding human behaviour. Its logical flaws really offended me as this article flagrantly ignores the improved symbolic capacities of our brains and the resposability we must take in front of each one of our actions, human properties WE DON'T share with "monkeys".
"It doesn't matter It's just an issue of degree"
Readers beware, as the "Monkeysphere" is one of the most dangerous, profoundly anti-humanistic (as its mere name implies) memes trying to arise from the internet. Probably somebody could stablish strong structural similarities between simian and human behaviour, but if the difference "it's just the degree" there isn't a single reason not to matter. After all, a lot of completely different things are just a different degree of other things, as the "Rape Oil article" from this site arguments as rebuttal for a mislead information. And even in that quantitative difference we can find structural differences between humans and chimps. After all, trips to the moon are the kind of thing that supposedly the limitations of the Monkeysphere would prevent us to do, right?
Nicolas - Argentina
This is the smelliest piece of behaviourist propaganda I've ever read. The logic of this article is really really flawed, and it surprised me how much explanation and examplification was put on this as opposed to other notes.
I'll elaborate on this later because I must get up in 1 hour but I'm really ashamed as how this page, among so much entertaing and intresting info, is trying to pass this article as a serious way of understanding human behaviour. Its logical flaws really offended me as this article flagrantly ignores the improved symbolic capacities of our brains and the resposability we must take in front of each one of our actions, human properties WE DON'T share with "monkeys".
"It doesn't matter It's just an issue of degree"
Readers beware, as the "Monkeysphere" is one of the most dangerous, profoundly anti-humanistic (as its mere name implies) memes trying to arise from the internet. Probably somebody could stablish strong structural similarities between simian and human behaviour, but if the difference "it's just the degree" there isn't a single reason not to matter. After all, a lot of completely different things are just a different degree of other things, as the "Rape Oil article" from this site arguments as rebuttal for a mislead information. And even in that quantitative difference we can find structural differences between humans and chimps. After all, trips to the moon are the kind of thing that supposedly that the limitations of the Monkeysphere would prevent us to do, right?
Nicolas - Argentina
This makes beautiful, beautiful sense. Thanks for writing, despite the fact it was years ago.
i dont think this anology really works. Monkeys arent a member of my species, i'm interested in human survival - so no, i dont care if all 100 monkeys die as long as it doesnt affect any humans. screw the monkeysphere, humans will dominate the earth!!!
until 2012. :)
d_senti...None of the things you mentioned were truly altruistic. Nothing is. Mostly people doing nice things are for very personal reasons. The greatest one is superiority. People do alot of things to feel not only better about themselves, but to reinforce their image of themselves as being 'better' than others. Others may do it simply because they need attention by or interaction with others in order to boost their self image. The thing that I think most of those who have posted negatively to this article fail to understand that these are ideas are free from value judgements. Being an individual who functions in accordance with realities that have evolved socially through the the course of our species is not bad. Rid yourself of that Aristotlean logic right off.
Interesting, I love this article. However I think it's the opposite in my case: I tend to insult only the ones I know and if I am only with them, but not strangers I do not know, let alone random persons in public, for the fear of not embarrassing myself. I am more friendly with strangers than with my friends for that matter. Albeit, this article perfectly describes everyone I know.
p.s. sry if I misspelled anything, english is not my first language.
"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," says the guy who claims that the source of all problems in the world is the Monkeysphere. I call shenanigans.
I don't deny that we have these biological impulses - of course we do. But people overcome them all the time. Everyone who donates to an organization for a disease (that they don't know anyone who has it), gives money to the Third World, drops change in the cup of some bum they barely notice, they overcome these instincts.
You make a good point, initially, and what you say is entirely true on the macro scale. But on the micro scale, it isn't, not always. There are plenty of exceptions, plenty of people who do their job well all the time, refuse to steal ANYTHING, and live good, honest lives. I know many people like this. So you are falling into the very fallacy you condemn at the end of your article.
Brilliantly brilliant article.
Dammit! Nothing kills me like realizing I made a grammar error right after I post. Somehow the percieved anonymity of the internet isn't making me feel any better about it. How does the fact that I care about this relate to my own personal monkeysphere? That's going to bother me now.
The sphere within which I care about what people think about me is clearly a whole lot bigger than the sphere within which I actually care about other people. See how I keep typing annoyingly long comments with no regard for others!
Thanks again David Wong for writing a great article!
I want to write an obnoxiously long comment, but instead I'll keep it short and simple.
This is one of the best articles I've read anywhere. It would be easy to come off as callous, preachy, or insane when writing on this topic, but the author pulled everything off beautifully.
I generally don't read comments, and the only reason that I post one is to give kudos to a good author and hope it encourage him/her to keep writing. Anyway, David Wong's articles are almost all good to excellent. This is the best of them. Well, it's the best one that I've read so far.
I wound up writing too much anyway. Oh well.
great article. jdmills, you ignored the entire article, the point is to recognize why we do what we do. only by understanding our actions and acknowledging them can we hope to evolve enough to someday (hopefully) overcome them to some degree.
socran, i love your idea. we don't have to include everyone in our monkeysphere, just recognize what we are dumping outside our sphere and behave accordingly. that could at least be step one in the million plus steps to figuring out how to live in a global community of billions.
genius article... cracked is surely in my monkeysphere
I've always found the idea of the Monkeysphere a bit strange. I mean, I've always known it was there, but other people seem to react to it so much differently from me. For instance, I did a variant of the trash can thing myself the other day - I hauled a REALLY heavy trash can to the curb, and before walking back inside I realized that I could make it easier on the trash man by putting half of the trash in the much lighter can right next to it. It's not so much that I cared about the trash man as a person. It's just that I realized that a problem WITHIN my Monkeysphere - at the very center, i.e. me - was being dumped OUT of my Monkeysphere. Because I personally have nothing to do with anything outside my Monkeysphere, I have absolutely no business letting anything bad out of it and into someone else's.
'Course, the Monkeysphere is such an integral part of people that people within mine are insulted by my treatment of it. My friend is pissed that I refuse to unfairly vote for him in a contest unless I feel he deserves to win, rather than simply because he's within my Monkeysphere. It's probably best that I don't tell him I would let him die if saving him meant two or more people in China would die instead.
this is so true though..yeah u have helped an old lady cross the street but u only did it so u cant tell someone in ur monkeysphere that ur a "good person". ur only doing good things b.c. u think u will gain from it...
or maybe you do care outside ur monkeysphere or its just not filled up yet..
jdmills, did you even read the article? if yes, do yourself a favor and jump in front of a train.
this article is bullshit and it scares me to think that someone should try to instill the thought into people's heads that it's okay to not care about anyone but those close to you.....how short sighted and insulting....and i can prove it's bullshit....go to youtube and look up several different animal videos of wild animals taking care of the young of an entirely different species of animal....gee, i thought they would be outside of the "mokeysphere" ?
This article is highlarious. But check out them internal consistencies:
"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."
Or click to this website: http://www.cracked.com/article_15967_awful-truth-behind-5-items-probably-on-your-grocery-list.html
Also, like them other notes below note, nice job chiding us not to listen to simplifications, then to give the most simplified version of Communism and Capitalism ever. Funny... and dumb, at the same time. Also, Cracked is the best website on the internet, seriously.
What really worries me is our capacity to understand. Whenever I read an article that 'blows my mind', like this one did, I always get the same feeling, "I already knew this on some level" and, "I'm not going to remember it". I'll probably recount the main points of this article to those within my monkeysphere only to have them say, "yeah I knew that". In truth they do know about the monkeysphere, just like they know about children starving in Africa and global warming but they can't think about more than one at a time. Even the monkeysphere has too many elements to digest or express in one clear thought. - So my scary conclusion; not only can we not care about anyone outside our monkeysphere, this gigantic social issue probably won't orbit around most of our give-a-s**t-spheres for more than a few hours.
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