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So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
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 from it 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 brain 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.
The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much 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 as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern.
It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers.
@Reddscope
1July 14, 2026 315
