Welcome to The Monkeysphere
Listening to Poly Weekly podcasts today brought me to a new
term I’d never heard before: “The Monkeysphere”(which has nothing to do with
polyamory—it was just used by a guest on the show to describe a general
situation where a partner is nice to you but not nice to the waitress or the
cashier or the box office girl).
The
Monkeysphere is the number of people in your societal bubble that you deem
important in your life. You CAN’T
POSSIBLY connect with all six billion people on the planet. Our brains CAN’T DO that capacity of
information-keeping. You largely have connections
with family (I’m counting romantic relationships as family, here), close friends,
many of the people in your own backyard.
Experts say the number limit for
human primates (Dunbar’s
number) is about 150—for monkey primates, it’s more like 50, because their
brains are smaller. So after about 150
people, our brains shut off and anyone who isn’t in our Monkeysphere isn’t a
person. Not really. They’re more like...inanimate objects.
Strangers and acquaintances, by and large, are beyond our
Monkeysphere. So are faceless groups
with whom we don’t identify—social demographics, cultures and religions we
don’t belong to, political affiliations we don’t have. How easy do we find it to be curt or
offensive to telemarketers, survey takers, customer service reps who don’t
speak perfect English (ANYONE who doesn’t speak perfect English)? To angrily speed past or flip off vexing
drivers on the road? To argue to the
death about same-sex marriage, abortion, the death penalty, health care with
those who have opposing opinions? People
who are not in our Monkeysphere don’t matter to us. This is the location of the “Us” and “Them”
mentality. It makes it easy for us to see corporations or
nations, the poor or the rich, straights or gays, men or women, conservatives
or liberals, any aspect we don’t tag as “Ours”, as “Them”. They’re just a horde, to be fought or
avoided, or at the very least, detested, derided, or ignored. Makes it so simple to be at war with entire
contingents of humanity. We all do this
to certain degrees (When was the last time you were steamed by someone who gave
less-than-stellar customer service to you?).
Some of us take it further, justifying it by projecting our indignation
onto the party in question.
This is how trolls think that they can righteously steamroll
others on the Internet—they don’t see the rest of the Internet as people, just
screen names that are fanning the flames of their own ire, and so they deserve
the verbal scorching that they get. And
the anonymity is a plus. How many trolls
would hurl the same insults they type if they were face-to-face with those they
malign online? Not bloody many, I’d
wager. They’d have to look them in they
eye, and then there’s the possibility of retaliation, and that makes it
significantly harder to do. When you can’t
see someone’s face, when they’re not in your airspace, it’s so easy. Easy to swear and flip someone off as you’re
driving by, isolated in the chariot of your own car. Not so easy to do on a full airplane.
Think about your Facebook page, your Twitter page. How many Friends, how many Followers do you
have? Many of us probably have more than
150. And a number of us regularly go
through our Friends List with a meat cleaver, severing those who have little to
no meaningful contact with us. We even have
the gall to ASK our FB Friends: do you still want to be my Friend? Yes or No?
Would we do that in real life? Hell,
no. And we probably spill over into the
‘more than 150’ realm for many of THOSE people, so they rarely contact us, just
as we rarely contact certain members of our own Friends and Followers. We are just out of each other’s Monkeyspheres,
is all. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that we can’t cope with multitudes. We don’t have the time, the attention span, or
the emotional energy to invest so much in so many. Our
brains aren’t built for it. Which is
why communities used to be small, way back before the 20th
century. Even in bigger cities, you had
your neighborhood, and you usually didn’t venture too far from it on a daily
basis. Today, we have the world. And we can’t handle it.
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE WORLD!”
Unless...we adopt that old adage “do unto others” again...because
really, I’d rather not have someone scream holy hell at me because I happen to
not be in their Monkeysphere and I made a mistake. So I’ll try to give them the benefit of the
doubt that they DIDN’T mean to cut me off on the freeway or give me the wrong
change or not close the account I cancelled five months ago. Maybe they were having a bad day, worried
about people in their OWN Monkeysphere—of which I am NOT a part.
I’ll try to remember that they’re important components of
their own Monkeysphere, even though they’re not in mine. They’re still here in this world, popping
into my bubble every now and then. They’re
still monkeys, like me. Still worthy of
a smile, a little understanding, and some peace sprinkled onto their day. And a banana.
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