Here's a little hors d'oeuvres, Right In Two by Tool, while you read the article that follows.
Aaand the recipe as well, if you care.
Angels on the sideline
Puzzled and amused
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused
Don't these talking monkeys know that Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two
Angels on the sideline
Baffled and confused
Father blessed them all with reason
And this is what they choose
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs
They forge a blade, and where there's one they're bound to divide it
Right in two
Right in two
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs, they make a club
And beat their brother down
How they survive so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant is a Creature who would squander the ability
To lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Fight over the clouds, over wind, over sky and
Fight over life, over blood, over air and light
Over love, over sun, over another
Fight for the time, for the one, for the rise and
Angels on the sideline again
Been so long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Right in two
Right in two
I think the original 2011 Psychology Today article "What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Human Behavior," by Michael Michalko is for subscribers only, but this abbreviated follow-up by Dario Maestripieri covers it well enough.
This is how Michalko described the experiment in his blog post. "This human behavior of not challenging assumptions reminds me of an experiment psychologists performed years ago. They started with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string with a set of stairs placed under it.
"Before long, a monkey went to the stairs and started to climb towards the banana. As soon as he started up the stairs, the psychologists sprayed all of the other monkeys with ice-cold water. After a while, another monkey made an attempt to obtain the banana. As soon as his foot touched the stairs, all of the other monkeys were sprayed with ice-cold water. It's wasn't long before all of the other monkeys would physically prevent any monkey from climbing the stairs.
"Now, the psychologists shut off the cold water, removed one monkey from the cage, and replaced it with a new one. The new monkey saw the banana and started to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attacked him. After another attempt and attack, he discovered that if he tried to climb the stairs, he would be assaulted.
"Next, they removed another of the original five monkeys and replaced it with a new one. The newcomer went to the stairs and was attacked. The previous newcomer took part in the punishment with enthusiasm!
"Likewise, they replaced a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey tried to climb the stairs, he was attacked. The monkeys had no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they were beating any monkey that tried.
"After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys had ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approached the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been around here."
Michalko then concludes: "People sometimes do the same in the workplace. How many times have you heard, "It has always been done this way. Don't mess with what works." Instead of challenging these assumptions, many of us, like the monkeys, simply keep reproducing what has been done before. It's the easiest thing to do."
As a palate cleanser, this reminds me of the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Read it.
The premise is silly, but suspend your disbelief. You've sat through hokier movies before. A telepathic gorilla (warned you) puts an ad in the newspaper (people used to do this sort of thing): "Teacher seeks student. Must have an earnest desire to save the world". Someone answers the ad and the gorilla shows him who we are from an outside perspective. You are gonna shift your paradigm if you haven’t already.
Would you conform when you know the crowd is wrong? When you know the crowd is trying to fool you? I'm not referring to being a rebel without a cause. That's different.
Now let's put it all together, nibbling on some dessert paired with cocktails.
Most of us are constantly beat down from childhood. We assume we have pretty good childhoods because we compare them to everyone else (Five Monkeys Experiment). For most us, our childhoods don't look too bad compared to what's normal, unless it was an outlier filled with neglect or abuse on one end or an extraordinary (by our standards) amount of love, support, freedom, and boundaries setting, etc that we evolved to require over millennia.
But the truth is that normal has become extremely lacking of what we need as human beings, and we are blind to this precisely because it is normal, precisely because it is what everyone else is experiencing and and has been for as long as we can document in civilization, so we assume that it's right. We are all perpetuating an extremely unhealthy, abusive culture, constantly beating the shit out of one another. That's our baseline. That's what we think is normal and good and right. And we grow up in that. And we become adults and raise our own in that.
It reminds me of this comic I saw once. Can't seem to find it, but I'll describe it with a thousand words or less. In panel one a boss yells at the manager for not performing well enough. In panel two the manager is at home yelling at his wife for not having dinner ready (it's a sexist comic). In panel three the wife is yelling at her son for not cleaning his room. In panel four the son is yelling at his dog for something. I don't know, probably just being a dog.
But we all know this happens. This isn't breaking news. Shit rolls downhill daily and across generations. What we don't realize, though, or fail to recognize at least, is that it accumulates over time, crusting over. We have eons of this old, crusty shit clogging our cultural arteries, stifling our collective love, our life force.
We judge and criticize over the most asinine things. Just let people be people, people. Stop fighting amongst yourselves. The only fight should be to defend yourself or to defend other people who cannot defend themselves. That's it.
Otherwise, mind your own effing business. The universe multiverse is too vast and diverse to be concerned about such trivial matters that we fight over. What difference does it make if a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman or someone loves lots of people or in a creative way you find taboo or whatever? (Obviously there are consent lines that cannot be crossed; see the defend clause above.) What effect at all does any of that have on you, except for the effect you're trying to make it have?
That was just one example of literally more than one. The point is, for this and a million other things, you stay in your bubble and they stay in their bubble, and when bubbles collide, play nice. It's like having to remind children to keep their hands to themselves, making them sit on different ends of the couch when they can't or even send them to their own rooms for a while when they can't play nice. For Christ's sake!
Ok, here's another: there's plenty of everything to go around. No need to war over land or oil or religion or wagging the dog politics or anything else for that matter. Chewing up people just because? Let me clue you in on something: we are all One. When you attack someone, you are only hurting yourself. This is not some zero-sum game, a race to the bottom. This can be a profit-sharing, cooperative game where we all come out winners (except the Takers--we can eliminate them because they are only trying to throw the game).
If you re-approached life and all your values with fresh eyes, instead of what you were programmed to believe from childhood by observing and mimicking, what would your beliefs and values really look like? Would you believe what everyone else assumes to be the correct way just because that's the way it's always been done?
"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3).
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