Today I headed for the local zoo. It’s a small ground with some 1.500 animals spread over 4 acres. It’s a cold, cloudy day, so sitting inside the monkey house and watching the crested black macaques seems like a good idea. To the left of the building there’s a small house-in-house, the part to the right is a larger, open area with ropes and trees. Even the monkeys prefer to stay inside today. Inside-inside that is.

Sitting on a small bench under some bushes I can actually watch both: The monkeys, behind the windows in their simple abode, and the people passing by, pressing themselves against the windows. As it is Saturday afternoon, a lot of kids crowd the place. But this space is somewhat private anyhow.

The monkeys are sitting inside their abode. Some grooming each other. Some playing with the simple tools provided. Others only sitting. Every once in a while one or two of them will get a sudden burst of energy, leave the abode and do a couple of rounds climbing acrobatically through the open area, play some, have some fun with their fellow inmates, and return. Basically they sit. Sit and eat, or sit and look at people.

The more young, human faces pass by, the more you start to ponder who’s watching whom here. Do the youngsters get to see the monkeys, or do the humans pay their entry fees so the monkeys can have some free reality TV. There are some basic differences between the monkeys and the humans. Because the monkeys don’t seem to have any questioning thought processes going on, they sit 100% in the present. Every move they make, each and every one of their expressions is authentic. Not to be questioned.

Completely different their human spectators. You can see the question marks on their faces. Youngsters and adults. In fact, what youngsters seems to distinguish from adults is that children apparently have no plan where the adults with an air of more or less coolness pretend to possess one. You can see how the questions marks on the children’s faces make them insecure, and the firm look on their parents tries to chase away that insecurity. How they both fill them with emotions. With doubt. With non-understanding. Their wanting to be cooler than their comrades keeps them from doing what monkeys demonstrate: Just be what you are and see what comes. One child is doing somewhat clumsy acrobatics on the railing and asking his friend: “Can the monkeys do this?”, with an air of I-am-so-coolness. I let the sudden wave of inner laughter pass by as I see the macaques swing from rope to rope. Maybe we could, a good dozen million years back. Obviously this skill degenerated.

One woman bends down over the railing to be able to face her toddler, who is small enough to walk below the railing and all the way to the window. The woman points through the window and says “Oh look, the monkey’s showing its fanny.” All the way presenting her derriere to everybody while bending over the railing. Who are the monkeys here, you really have to ask yourself.

No matter how many groups of people pass by, the show stays the same. People think and chatter, the short dialogues that can be heard are concerned with blatantly unnecessary things from life’s perspective, yet they somehow artificially attribute importance to them in some kind of mutual game instead of just chit chatting a bit for leisure. So instead of exploring the apes and seeing what is, they’re stuck in an argument of how they might (or should) be.

If you then remember that these monkeys are an endangered species, because humans burn their habitat or pulverize their sexual organs into useless fertility medicine, then you get the impression that this thinking habit is not so superior after all. It may empower humans over some other species for mostly idiotic reasons with neither short term nor long term progress. But that’s about as much as there is to it. And what humans are doing to their furry brothers seems to be grounded on that strange thinking habit that somehow keeps humans from just living.

We call nature out there cruel. But maybe nature isn’t cruel. Maybe that’s only an illusion we have woven into our network of lies we justify ourselves and our broken societies on. Maybe it is only in our perception that everything is cruel. Our own emotions projected on something we refuse to see as it is. Maybe most animals are living happily together with each other and don’t want to do each other any harm. Just every once in a while some hunger reflex is triggered in an animal. A reflex nobody is to blame for, since it’s wired into the system. Then it goes on autopilot. That’s where everybody else starts to run, on just another reflex. Until that first hunger reflex is no longer active. Then harmony comes back and living together resumes. That’s all there is to it.

Animals apparently don’t kill other animals for the sake of killing (yes, there are rare exceptions, interestingly I remember only chimpanzees, other primates on the verge of too much thought). All the rest basically eats. If you’re born as a predator, that involves other animals. But it’s a short shockwave that disturbs harmony which subsides in the minute the prey turns into food. It’s the side effects of so called human thinking that kills the most beings on our planet. It’s the questioning desultoriness you can feel in those human faces passing by and their weird, unnatural rituals that will be responsible for tomorrow’s extinctions. No matter how hard they try to master their thinking. If you see the importance of leather bag colors matching their leather shoes, it is obvious that only a very few will make it to a point of real understanding. And even in those the understanding will probably come later in their life. I’m not making exceptions for myself here in any way. Been there, done that.

Nature has given us tools with which we can escape this game of pre-programmed instincts. Making use of it, we could even pacify that “eat and be eaten”-matrix to some extent, at least for sentient beings. Exit the holodeck. Find ways in which there is more harmony on this planet. How to be less obtrusive. To advance life and its varieties. So the being Earth thrives. Apparently this does not happen. Not this time. Apparently the difference in our brains which we call progress is really defective and we fell off balance.

At least it was fun just to sit there and watch. One monkey outside the cage.