I recently came across Frans de Waal's TED talk about moral behavior in animals, above is an excerpt. Here we see an experiment in inequality where one capuchin monkey is given cucumber for his tokens while the other gets grapes. The first monkey is understandably pissed about the unequal treatment and throws the cucumber at the researcher. At the end de Waal makes a quip that it's like the Wall Street protest and everybody laughs. But it's not so funny.
Now of course we often laugh when we are uncomfortable and this is certainly the case here. We all feel for the monkey trapped in the experiment of inequality because in his position we see ourselves. The Occupy Wall Street movement was crushed because it represented a threat to the status quo. We live in a free society where we are not free to question the powers that be. Timothy Snyder calls it the politics of inevitability.
Frans de Waal's work revolves around issues of animal intelligence and its reflection in the human condition. Mammals share similar social structures because our interactions are based on reciprocity. We are social animals, but since the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism, an individualist ethos has been encouraged and glorified because it serves the needs of capital better. As Noam Chomsky states in a recent interview, if “you care about others, the community, and so on, ... that’s completely unacceptable in a culture where you want to try to concentrate wealth and power. You don’t want people to have anything to do except to try to gain whatever they can for themselves. In that case, they’ll be very weak, of course. It’s only when you organize together that you can confront private capital.”
So the social level is primary for defining our humanity and political beliefs, and we see with the rise of social networking that great power is being exerted to control and manipulate the mass social dialogue online, because this is where the exchange of ideas occurs. By silencing or obscuring dangerous or subversive messages, the powers that be protect themselves and the society that works to keep them in power. What we need is more empathy and compassion in a world that is increasingly deriding those values. Jordan Peterson and the manosphere for example consistently harp on the alpha-beta male duality and glorify powerful men above feminine “soft” power. Trump plays on this dichotomy with his Hugh Hefner style Playboy politics and retro psychopathology. Rather than being an alpha male, however, Frans de Waal describes Trump as a “bully chimp”.
“There’s a misperception that Alpha chimps are these loud and overly aggressive chimps but that’s not really true,” he said. “Generally, Alpha chimps are the most popular, and these are chimps that tend to share their food the most, show empathy and consolation behavior.”
As I've stated before though, Trump is a symptom of larger forces at work in society. His success and rise to top office reflects an abandonment of Enlightenment values by the culture at large. Could it be that as we become cybernetic beings we are losing those qualities which make us human? Monkeys then become reflections of what we once were and could have been. In this sense, they are more “human” than we are. We still have much to learn.