The Monkeysphere Jason Pargin

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.

@Reddscope

2/6

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
 
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.
 
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 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.

@Reddscope

3/6

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 Bar.
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.
 
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.

"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.

@Reddscope

4/6

"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 whisper "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITHEAD!!"
 
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.

@Reddscope

5/6

"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 of yoghurt and honey and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and loves volleyball? (He actually does)

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.

@Reddscope

6/6

"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 ,a job,school 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. 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."

@Reddscope

30,000 people visit the Louvre Museum everyday, and around 10 Million visitors in total per year.

80% of them are there to see the Mona Lisa.

Assuming the tourists are non EU, The price of a ticket to visit the museum is €32.

Multiplying the ticket price for the number of toursits that visit the Mona Lisa would be 32 by 8 Million which is 256 Million Euros.

The French Government is assumed to make that much just from the Mona Lisa.

@Reddscope

But what makes the Mona Lisa that special?

Even though looks are subjective, she isn't as gorgeous as the books that were written, the songs that were made about how beautiful she is.

We often encounter "She looks like Mona Lisa " in movies,books and songs. It became sort of like a compliment, a standard on how a woman should look like.

There are far more impressive paintings than the Mona Lisa. If its about Techniques and overall aesthetics, The Mona Lisa wouldn't have a chance to stand out.

so Why is she famous??

@Reddscope

The first reason being "The Seinfeld Effect"

Seinfeld is a 1989 sitcom. Before Seinfeld, sitcoms believed that to keep an audience interested for 30 minutes, the characters needed to be facing a " do or die" situation(in a comedic sense) like doing all sorts of things, a try hard to make people laugh.

The plot had to be a problem that could actually disrupt their lives. For instance, a male character pretending to be a nanny to steal jewelries from a rich family and the comedy happening through out the process.

@Reddscope

However Seinfeld, didn't have a secret double life to make people laugh or being chased by polices for comedy.

Seinfeld had an episode were George Costanza tries to get a cheap massage or jerry trying to figure out whether the girl he was dating was once in commercial. They were minor frustrations that happen through life.

The audience loved the series around when it came out In fact it pulled in over 30 million viewer every single week by its final season.

The movies made for the next 3 decades like The office ,Friends and many more sitcoms came in with the same format. They had a simple casual environment with every episode being about comedy through small lies and petty actions.

I f you had to watch Seinfeld now you might find it cliche. You have seen dozens of such comedy and you would find it generic.  but it's the foundation to the comedy movies that were made now.

@Reddscope