Of Monkeys and Men

This world is mixed-up. It's a mixed-up, chaotic world we're in. True, there are some good people out there, but for every good person that's out there, it seems like there's a bad person and some change. And there's a lot of bad things that happen in this world. Murder, theft, the "Scary Movie" series and it's spin-offs; they're all bad things that have happened to the world. And we know they happen, but why do they happen? What drives people to do bad things? You could answer that question with examples of morals or religion or a combination thereof, but I recently came upon an article that, despite its title or opening examples, explains the problem very well. The article is "Inside the Monkeysphere," and it takes a new angle on the whole "good/bad" problem. It presents the theory that we are all living inside our own little worlds, and our worlds can only hold so many people, and we fill these worlds with our friends, family members, and so on. And these people inside our worlds are the people that we care about, and care for, and that's it. Everyone else outside of our world is just another face. We know nothing about them, and that's how we want it to stay. We don't know what kind of people they are, what they like, what they don't like, and we don't care. According to the article, this lack of caring is what enables people to do these bad things. We don't care about them, and we don't care what happens to them, so we have no problem doing them harm. And for that same reason, that's why we care about what happens to our friends and family, but not anyone else. They're not part of our world; what happens to them doesn't affect us, so we don't care. Of course, this is just a brief description, and the actual article goes into more detail about the "Monkeysphere." So I highly recommend taking the time to read about it, it's pretty interesting.
"Inside the Monkeysphere"