Everyone is slightly more monstrous than you realised

I recently read a newspaper article by Alexandra Adornetto (young author of Halo) about how Edward Cullen is the most desirable man who never lived and how he’s raising the bar for smelly teenage boys everywhere. Then I read a follow-up article by William Kostakis (young author of Loathing Lola) about how Edward Cullen is a creepy, sexist, manipulative pedophile, adored by moronic teenage girls everywhere.

In reality, they’re both right about Edward Cullen - yes, he’s incredibly desirable, and yes, he’s a sexist creep. But the thing that intrigued me was a follow-up follow-up article by Steph Bowe (young author of Girl Saves Boy) in which she asked why both Alex and Will felt the need to make such broad generalisations about teenage boys and girls. “Everyone has this crazy need to put everybody else into little boxes,” she says. “The world’s too complicated for people to be so neatly pigeon-holed. Do you ever like people assuming things about you? Why do you do it to other people, then?”

Why indeed? I did some digging. And now, this is my follow-up follow-up follow-up article about the answer to Steph’s question. But be warned - you’re not going to like it.

Read some history books, and you might notice that the number 150 shows up a lot. In ancient Rome, armies were made up of units of approximately 150 men (just like today). The estimated size of Neolithic farming villages averages out at 150 people. Hutterite settlements tended to split up once the population increased beyond 150. The average number of FaceBook friends is only 130, but combine that with the average number of non-FaceBook-using friends a person has (about 20) and you’ll end up with the magic number again: 150.

In 1992, anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed an explanation for this. He observed that the size of a primate’s social circle is proportional to the size of its brain. Large-brained monkeys have more friends than small-brained ones, because the bigger brains make them capable of caring about more other monkeys.

“Wow! Popular monkey.”

Dunbar’s conclusion was alarming: because of our brain size, human beings are only capable of caring about 148 people. This is known as “Dunbar’s number”.

This is why most of the bad things that have happened to you have come at the hands of strangers. That guy who burgled your house that one time cares about precisely 148 people, and none of them is you. The way he sees it, he’s just relocating stuff from the houses of people who don’t matter (you) to people who do (himself). It’s practically community service.

If you’ve ever seen someone shout at a waitress, or boo at a concert, or download a movie without paying for it, you’ll know what I mean. Most people don’t care who gets hurt by their actions, so long as it’s a stranger. A little while ago somebody posted a comment on one of my articles: “This blog sukkks.” It probably never occurred to him that this might hurt my feelings, because I’m not one of the 148 people he cares about. But it didn’t hurt my feelings, since he’s not one of the 148 people I care about, so his opinion means very little to me. (I guess Dunbar’s number has pros as well as cons.)

But those are just the minor things - it’s very difficult to convince people to reduce their carbon emissions for the same reason. Unless you know someone who was in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina destroyed it, climate change probably hasn’t killed anyone within your Dunbar radius yet. Whereas rising petrol prices affect all your friends and family.

So what does all this have to do with Steph’s question? She asked why we categorise, stereotype, and pigeon-hole. And this is why: we meet far more people than we can possibly empathise with. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can’t exactly read every book in the shop, either, because sooner or later, a staff member is going to come up to you and say, “Sir, I’m going have to ask you to buy something or get out.”

So we simplify. We can’t possibly get to know everybody we meet, so we make guesses about people based on their clothes, their age, their haircut.

To learn more about this, you can read David Wong’s hilarious article, What Is The Monkeysphere? The only part David leaves out is the moral of the story: how good a person you are is determined not by how many people you care about, but how well you treat the people you don’t.

In modern society, we’re forced to interact with strangers every day - the good people are the ones who do it with generosity and courteousness. (Someone who donates $50 to Oxfam, for example, is a better person than someone who loans $100 to a buddy.)

In conclusion:

William, Twilight fans are not all the same - keep an open mind when you meet them.

Steph, forgive those who relentlessly categorise one another - it’s the only way we know how to stay sane.

And Alex… what the hell? Edward Cullen is an unrelentingly repulsive character, who is physically and emotionally abusive in a number of ways (painstakingly catalogued here). As boyfriend material, he’s a slightly worse choice than Joseph Fritzl. How could you possibly like him?



MITIFOTIT:
Most Interesting Thing I Found On The Internet Today

From my new short story website, NewPoe.com:

The Colour Red, by Rainlet

My girl, she was always a dreamer. She loved music. She loved to sing it, plink it out on a grand piano, roll around like a dog in her beautiful world of music. I always thought it was a shame, that she was born into this cold, logical family, with more scientists and engineers than Google would know what to do with. I regretted, ever since that time she ran away, chasing her bubble dreams, that we tried to force her, to push her, shove her in directions she didn’t want to go.

Read more here!