The other day I ran across a description of the Monkeysphere (warning: though fun, it’s very crudely written). It’s an amusing model for why people don’t “just get along”, why we have wars, and why Rush Limbaugh seems like a complete idiot to me.
The model is simple: All of the people you know are people inside your monkeysphere. Everyone else is outside. Our brains can only handle about 150 people inside our monkeysphere. After that, we simply don’t have the capacity to care about all those people. So, we don’t get too upset when we hear about Palestinians and Israelis killing each other; or we find it easy to call Dodgers fans idiots.
You can see the monkeysphere in action all over the place. It holds really well for a generalization. I felt sort of relieved when I read it — now I understood why the world was such a crazy place.
Still, I think it’s ultimately a cynical model. It says that our world won’t get any better because we can’t be compassionate beyond the borders of our sphere. If that were the case, though, Mother Theresa would’ve had a huge sphere (and a correspondingly huge noggin). I believe that those with true compassion have the ability to temporarily empathize with people outside their world; just long enough for an interaction or to make a decision. Then they release that person to make room for the next one. Their monkeysphere isn’t static. They consciously adjust it.
True compassion isn’t an innate talent; it’s a skill. You have to practice it. It’s a difficult skill: you have to learn to accept strangers and let go of people you care for (if you don’t, you’ll go bonkers caring for everyone). The world can improve if we practice this skill and teach it to others.
March 21st, 2005
by theguy
Mother Teresa was not the saint she is made out to be. She actually prolonged the suffering of people because the pain showed that Jesus was paying attention to them.
(Read some of her bios.)
A better example would have been Ghandi or even Martin Luther King.
Guest.