The modern slavery between monkeys!

There were a group of scientists who were doing some experiments on some monkeys. The put five monkeys in a cage and made them live there. In the cage, they put a ladder and above the ladder, they put some bananas.

Every time a monkey tried to climb the ladder and get some bananas, the scientists poured very cold water on other monkeys that were under the ladder, they shocked those who were under the ladder.

After a while, whenever a monkey tried to climb the ladder to get some bananas, other monkeys would pull the climbing monkey down and beat that poor one. A while passed and none of the monkeys, despite the inherent desire to the bananas, would climb the ladder because they were afraid of getting beaten by others.

The scientists decide to replace one of the monkeys, monkey number one, with another monkey that has no idea about the situation in the cage. When they replace monkey number one, the new monkey tries to climb the ladder and others pulled it down and beat it.

After a few times of getting beaten, the new monkey also decided to not climb the ladder for bananas, even though it has no idea why climbing the ladder is forbidden. When this happened, scientists replaced monkey number two with a new monkey.

Monkey number two was replaced and the same situation went on. New monkey tried to climb the ladder and got beaten and after a few times it decided to not climb the ladder even though it didn’t know why it is forbidden to climb the ladder or eat the bananas on top.

This went on until all the monkeys were replaced by new ones. Now none of the first monkeys are in the cage and all are replaced by new ones, and none of the new ones ever experienced the cold water but every time a monkey wants to climb the ladder, it gets beaten.

If we could continue the experiment and ask the monkeys why they beat the climbing monkey, their possible answers would be 1: I don’t know, it’s tradition, everybody does it; and 2: I don’t know, this is what is popular among other monkeys, you should obey the public.

Traditions and belief in the societies may have a very interesting or convincing root but they may be obsolete nowadays. I’m not trying to argue about the root of the problems, but how or whether they are affecting us today.

What I wrote was simply imposing a modern slavery of thought on monkeys. A similar story happened to humans, I believe. I truly believe we humans are experiencing a form of slavery, a modern new slavery, in which we have no idea why we do certain things or obey certain systems, but we’re too afraid of getting hurt to disobey it or act against the mainstream.

We are too afraid of swimming against the river, and even if we try to do, other fishes will stop us, and if you ask why they do it, they have no answer, they simply believe our actions are not right.

I try to change this, and I hope you join me.

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Ali Reza Hayati

Entrepreneur, engineer, hacker, cypherpunk.