Almost No One Sees You As Fully Human

And that’s okay. In fact…it points the way to something good.

Recently, Demi Pietchell of The Starfire Codes hipped me to a term that had somehow escaped me: monkeysphere.

This term refers to Dunbar’s Number: the theoretical amount of people with whom one is able to maintain stable social relationships. Dunbar posited 150 as that number. Beyond that circle, people start to seem much more two-dimensional.

Whatever this number might be, on some level, the concept makes sense. I remember in my late teens saying to a friend that most people just seemed like NPCs to me. Roughly 37 years later, my teen son said the exact same thing. I was probably referring to NPC as defined in role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, and he was certainly referring to the video game version, but the sentiment was the same.

Moral-social conditioning tells us not to express such sentiments, but as teens, that conditioning is a lot weaker. And, in fact, this sentiment is not some sort of detached misanthropy—it is an observation of reality. Everyone on Earth cannot be fully cognitively real to you, or you would not be able to function…

Imagine if every life lost in a natural disaster halfway across the world impacted you with the same emotional force as a tragedy involving a loved one. Imagine multiplying that feeling by 7,000, to account for every soul lost in a terrible flood. Without the phenomenon described by Dunbar’s Number, the world would break you.

The monkeysphere article Demi shared with me was hysterical, brilliant, and brilliantly hysterical. But one part got me to thinking…

"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"

That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point.

What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about 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.

[Note: the article’s formatting has broken. I copied the text into a document and that made it easier to read.]

Those of you who know me well probably know where I am going to go next…

Why would I want to be locked into a political arrangement with 300,000,000 million people, 299,999,850 of whom are psychologically incapable of thinking of me as fully human?

Doesn’t that sound like a recipe for disaster? Your fate as an individual is being determined by people who—based on evolutionary psychology over which they have little control—have difficulty seeing you as fully real, even if they wanted to.

You are a thing to them. A source of money to extract. A cause of fear. A vector for disease. An impediment to their objectives. You are the vote who cancels out their vote. You are the car in front of them in traffic.

But Christopher, democracy is the only way we can make things work.

No it isn’t. That is exactly what most people said about monarchy five centuries ago. Repeating the same visionless tropes doesn’t make them so.

But Christopher, we have to find ways to live together.

Yes, we do. But why does it have to be in groups of five million or 50 million or 350 million?

Imagine living in a polity of 150 people. They’re not all in your inner-inner circle, but the largest circle you have to contemplate is at least small enough that you are capable of caring about all of them on some level. And they about you.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Doesn’t that sound more human?

But Christopher, such a village would become insular and stop caring about others.

But don’t you see—they would not be able to care about much more than 150 anyway. This leaves us with two options…

A small polity, in which your fate is tied together with a group of people 100 percent of whom are capable of seeing you as fully real and human.

A large polity, in which your fate is tied together with a group of people 99.9999 percent of whom see you as a thing.

People ought to stop pretending that we are better than human nature. We should stop trying to build societies based on our gauzy, preening vision of what we are, rather than what we actually are. We should build societies that work with human nature, not against it.

Small is beautiful.

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PS: I do personally make some effort to fight this phenomenon. The author of the Monkeysphere article, for example, says this:

That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face.

I have been a New York Yankees fan since I was eight years old, and I do make an effort to recognize that these professional athletes are actually human beings. Perhaps I should at some point write about my resentment of Yankees fans, whose vicious, entitled reaction to Giancarlo Stanton has given him a case of the yips for the last few years. (I actually feel the same wrench of sympathy and hope every time he comes to bat as I felt when watching my son in little league!)

Similarly, I try to be especially friendly to people on the phone, or in person, who are playing some sort of customer-service role. Some of that is because I am highly extroverted. Some of it is self-interest (you get better results when you are nice to people).

Of course, this monkeysphere phenomenon manifests in internet interactions—with people saying things to each other online that they would never say in person, or to someone within their sphere. As most of you know, I put in tremendous effort not to do that—I try to carry on conversations with you as if we were sitting together somewhere. Maybe I don’t always succeed, but people do know that I try.

Still, the bottom line here does not change. I do not want to live in a polity with 330,000,00 people. I want to live in a polity with 150 people. And then I want to try to be really nice to the people who aren’t in my polity. To keep the peace, do no harm, and connect on a human level when we do connect.

PPS: Earlier this morning, I read Third Paradigm’s proposal for a way to make the economics of a small polity work to the benefit of the people in that polity. I will need to read it a few more times in order to understand it, but at first glance, it seems creative and intelligent.