Inside The Monkeysphere
 

Continuing with my tradition of posting links to www.pointlesswasteoftime.com articles I present to you: The Monkeysphere by David Wong

Yes, it is humor, but I think it raises some good points about why people treat each other like crap.

And that is why I want to live in a village or a small town. I always imagined it was better then living in a city.
Luckily the biggest city in our country has only about 480000 people in it. I happen to live there. And it is still I don't know how many times over my monkeysphere. That's why we should all live in small vilages at the distance of 1 km from each other. We'd be much more humane!

Until we declared war on the neighboring villages.

Kind of like we all used to do before cities. And it'd be so much easier to segregate ourselves completely from the other 'monkeyspheres' as that they're so far away from us. We'd never even have to think of them as other people... just things that are different from us. Having a bunch of people together in one place may make us less humane on the local scale, but it makes us more so on the global. Living with people of all different nationalities, creeds, races, and religions FORCES us to become more accepting, even if those people are outside our monkeyspheres. We're still forced to interact with them and realize that they aren't animals to be tortured and killed.

I think the main lesson of the article is to be really damned picky who you let into your Monkeysphere, and to jam your way into those of other people however possible.

And to never take any kind of civil service job, because you're only going to end up being a dick about it.

There's probably a good point to be made about the modern mass media's ability to push those with access to mass communication into our circles without having to allow us into theirs, and the ramifications thereof... but apparently there's no reason to bother, since I'm not even talking to real people. Also, it's dinnertime and my sammich is getting cold.

Mmmmm, sammich.

monkeysphere's!!!
 

wow.....interesting, i thought the point of it was to not act mean to the people around u who are annoying and act like morons and say stupid things. They are humans too! so give them some respect... EVEN THOUGH THEY DONT DESERVE IT, and acknowledge that they may have a crappy life like every1 around them. You go home and THEN yell at a pillow or something that has no brain or body or any form of life-like qualities because barely anyone likes to hear about how much you are mad and dislike how somebody treated you.. thats what i got out of it, even if i diddnt agree with all of it..

That's why I decided to go to a smaller college. I can more easily incorporate ppl into my monkeysphere. Of course I never thought of it as a monkey sphere. lol It's quite interesting how he put everything.

I love you all. Come join my monkeysphere! :D

Diverging though, it's difficult reading that and trying to name at least 150 people that I so much as know, even though I've seen millions day-in and day-out. I don't know what the motives were for that article. It didn't seem to take the monkeysphere anywhere, or inspire any sort of new way of thinking, or at least stand as research (which I question, at any rate), as interesting a read as it was.

I don't think there's a limit on a human's 'monkeysphere.' The trump card to it is the same as the thing that drives against it: selfishness. Humans are indeed obsessed with ourselves. It has become my hypothesis, that we can find sympathy in the worst of enemies just by realizing we remember them from aspects of ourselves. Shoot, think of everyone as just a different version of yourself, in search of the same sort of virtue as yourself. Essentially I think that's what we all are.

Interesting article. At first I was afraid they were gonna tell us that organizing into little communes for the good of society was the best thing, but it seems to disrepute communism and socialism.

Ayn Rand was a realist. thats why she comes off as hateful.

Ayn Rand was also a hypocrit. REAL big on personal freedom and ego... that is, unless you didn't do exactly what she said and follow her little philosophy word for word.

But... this isn't an Ayn Rand discussion.

I too was worried about him suggesting we all huddle in little villages and what have you, but he didn't. In fact, I think this is the first David Wong article I've ever read where I couldn't just look at it and wonder what the fuck he was smoking when he thought up this pile of crap.

In other words... it's a decent idea. I'm not sure if I buy into not being able to see more than 150 people as people, though. I may not be able to name names, but I do know that it doesn't really matter who's dying, I have the full realization that said person has friends and family, a favorite color, a favorite food, etc. etc.

But, then, most people aren't like me... if they don't have to directly interact with someone on a daily basis, they won't think anything about that person. They just see them as a face in a crowd, maybe less.

Why? Same reason as Rectangle said. We're selfish creatures by nature. Those people don't affect our hypothetical person. They make no great impact upon his life. Why should he take the time to think about them? ...Not even I take that time unless something big has happened to them.