The answer can be found by considering monkeys.
I found this some time ago and think that there is a lot of truth in it:
"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
-Chuck Norris
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...
Twelve Steps to Total Enlightenment
1. What do monkeys have to do with it?
Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if you wish. 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. You'd be sad if Slappy died, wouldn't you?
Now, imagine you get five more monkeys. Tito, Bubbles, Fluffy, Marcel and ****Tosser. Imagine personalities for each of them. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is distant and quiet. And so on. They're all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Then a thousand.
How long until you can't tell them apart? Or remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? If you get enough monkeys, you'll eventually have enough that you no longer even care if one of them dies.
Now, each of these monkeys is every bit the monkey that Slappy was. It's just that you don't give a rat's ass any more.
2. So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!
Uh, no. Stay with me here.
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 with a simple dissection, analysis and a quick taste, 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 monkey brain -- but a monkey brain nonetheless -- 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.
3. Oooooh. Okay...
I don't get it.
Let's try an example. Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe) about his father, who 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 odd thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend time worrying too much 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.
For instance, I live in a town heavy on little ordinances about what one can and cannot throw out in the trash (lawn clippings must be sealed in clear plastic, labelled, individually sterilized, named and stacked in alphabetical order according to species). Thus, if you listen to people around here speak on the subject of garbage you get nothing but snide comments and strategies to get around the petty rules (just dump the drain cleaner in a pickle jar! Those trash bastards will never know!)
There is almost no thought about what the drain acid or the Black Plague-infected rats in the garbage will do to the poor sanitation worker.
Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.
4. The Monkeysphere?
Yes, the Monkeysphere. That's 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 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 The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
5. Hey! I like my garbage man!
Maybe, but one way or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it's our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church or suicide cult.
This is literally the reason society doesn't work quite right. The people 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 picking up and eating a whole Taco Salad with her bare hands? Or you 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 teachers.
Or think of it this way: Which would upset you more, your brother dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees?
Which would be bigger news to your neighbors, those dozen mutilated bus children across town or 15,000 dead 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.
6. That's not my fault! I don't know those people!
Right. And they don't know 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.
That's the whole thing, right here. Life on Earth, in a nutshell. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside and out of our Monkeysphere and those outside make up 99.999% of the world's population.
Have you ever gotten pissed off in traffic? Like, really pissed off? I think we all have. We've thrown finger gestures and wedged our heads out of the window and screamed "LEARN TO ****ING DRIVE, ****ER!!" We've all pulled the gun out of the glove compartment and let a few fly at the offending car. Not firing at their head or anything. Just, you know, at their tires.
Now imagine yourself standing in an elevator with three other people, two friends and a coworker. A 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 ****ING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, ****CAMEL!!"
They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. You know the feeling, that invincibility of being an anonymous head in a crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face.
7. I'm nice to strangers! Being anonymous doesn't have to lead to assholism!
Not right away, but eventually. It starts when the needs of ourselves or those within our Monkeysphere require screwing someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of 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 or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant.
You may have a list of rationalizations as long as a porn star's beefhorn for doing it, 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 ingenius 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 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 himself, they at least understood the Monkeysphere.
You see? Once you understand the Monkeysphere principle you can see examples all around. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live.
Click on a talk radio show. Listen to conservatives talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Conservative talker Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "the government," even though that money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress.
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. Isn't it strange how, say, 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? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor.
And if you've just thought, "well, those talk show hosts are just a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards," you've just done the same thing, boiled real humans into a two-word cartoon character. It's the Monkeysphere!
