Why?

May 21, 2022 Pat Moriarty

Marshall McLuhan reminds us — some people navigate their way around life using only their rear view mirror.

“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, they tend always to attach themselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Why?

A while back I came upon a study of captive monkeys that suggests one kind of answer.

A bunch of bananas had been suspended from the top of the cage that housed three mature monkeys. The only access to the bananas was from a stepladder.

One of the monkeys, who was both clever and agile and also liked bananas, decided to head up the ladder. When he reached out to grab the bananas he was washed down the ladder with a fire hose, blasting all three monkeys over to one side.

Cold and shivering, the three monkeys regrouped and thought about what had happened.

Monkeys don’t have a real long memory and, after a while, a second monkey thought again about the bananas and headed up the ladder. Same thing — a fire hose washed all three monkeys over to the side of the cage.

They picked themselves up, shook themselves off and hoped the sun would come out to warm them up.

After another couple of hours, the third monkey couldn’t resist and he went for it. Sure enough, same result — fire hose and cold, wet, miserable monkeys.

All three monkeys became convinced that going for the bananas was a bad idea, and went on with the rest of their lives.

Then the zookeeper replaced one of the monkeys with another. The new monkey arrived, looked up at the bananas, looked over at the ladder and couldn’t figure out why the other monkeys hadn’t gone for the bananas.

He headed for the ladder and got about one rung up when the remaining “experienced“ monkeys tackled him and pummeled him into submission. He quickly learned that climbing the ladder wasn’t a good idea.

A week later, the zookeeper replaced the second monkey. The new monkey spied the bananas, headed for the ladder, and the remaining two monkeys tackled him and pummeled him into submission.

Finally, the third monkey was replaced and, you guessed it, the same thing happened, and he was pummeled Into submission.

So by this time there was no monkey who had ever actually experienced a blast from the fire hose. All these monkeys knew was if they even eyeballed the forbidden fruit, it would invite a pummeling.

Sadly, these monkeys had no capacity to ask the question — WHY?

WHY are the bananas unavailable?
WHY can’t we even try to to snag one?

If only they could ask WHY, they might discover a HOW.

And yet we smart monkeys — capable of asking WHY — often do not.

We do things — even bad things — without asking WHY. Worse yet, we sometimes sanctify the bad things we do (like prejudice) in the name of a higher authority.

We may consider ourselves the smartest monkeys on the block but our actions often appear no more enlightened than our cousins in the cage.

WHY?

It’s not that we haven’t got the tools to question — it’s that we choose not to question.

Often, we choose to offload our questions to others, like men and women in black robes and roman collars or charismatic charlatans who are more than willing to do our thinking for us — for a price.

All for not choosing to wrestle with the WHY’s of life.

So let’s stop assuming that the way things are is the way they must be, and start asking — WHY?

Just a thought…

Pat

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