The Monkeys and the Ants

There was once a world populated by monkeys who had been taught to revere ants. These monkeys were not stupid at all, though to human beings they might seem to be. These monkeys were in many ways the same as what we think of as human beings today.

In fact, they too had religions that taught them the ants should be respected, protected, and even fed. They too had holy teachings that told them to reflect upon the communities of the ants and how they are like unto the communities of higher primates and vice versa. When a monkey wished to learn about spirituality, they would emulate ants, as much had been taught about the simple lives of ants and how one should consider their way of being. The most righteous of the monkeys saw they helplessness of the ants and sought to help them and protect them in any way possible. Theses monkeys were very much like human beings in all ways but one.

Most monkeys, however, paid little mind to these teachings. They liked to devour the ants as a delicacy. Most monkeys didn’t need to eat the ants to survive, but eating them nonetheless made their diets much more delightful-seeming to them. The ants were their desert; what gave them a little something extra. So most did not help and protect let alone feed the ants at all.

Most monkeys would rationalize this to themselves; explaining that the ants were not living up to the descriptions of ants in the sacred texts. “True ants, after all”, they explained, “are written to have communities like unto our own. These ants, however, do not have communities like our communities whatsoever.” Thus, they justified to themselves that “true ants, we would never devour, as they are our brothers; and who would desire to eat the flesh of their brother?”

“If we stop eating these ants, they will die anyway. They will soon get themselves killed by being stepped on, or by any number of things. They might even fight and kill each other. Why should i leave them to die at each others’ hands, whereby i will not benefit, when i can benefit from them? If we feed these ants, they will just waste their time doing wasteful and worthless things instead of looking for their own food.”

Similar monkeys would argue: “These ants steal from our food all the time. When we eat, they try to get our food, and even if some should drop on the floor, they instantly get their sticky little hands all over it and scurry it away.” All of this was said by monkeys who still had the flattened bodies of various ants on the bottoms of their feet. They had not noticed them when they stepped on them. They didn’t step on the ants purposefully, but neither did not consciously try to avoid hurting ants as they walked along. Sometimes they would have these conversations about how the ants had wronged them, while simultaneously stepping on ants, and never realizing that they ants could hear them and that their words were greatly hurt by their words. Instead, they could think only of how these ungrateful ants had offended them by scurrying off with their food from time to time.

One day a group of monkeys decided to give some of the smallest, most insignificant of these ants a wonderful meal. They knew that these ants were particularly hungry, as the monkeys had by and large left them to their own demise; devouring some and refusing to feed the others. They told themselves “this is our food, we have worked hard to get it; climbing trees that reach into the sky! We risk our lives to get this food; we could fall down and die! Let the ants climb the trees for themselves and get their own food!” All the while ignoring the obvious fact that it was much easier for a monkey to climb a tree and carry down food than it was for an ant… especially ants that had to worry about being eaten and that had gone unfed for so long.

A controversy would erupt from time to time: some of the monkeys had discovered that if they fed enough ants, or fed particularly needy ants often enough, that this would magically transform the generous monkeys into human beings. In all other ways, the monkeys were just like humans, but what separated them from humans was the ability to give to the ants what they had risked their lives to pluck from the tallest of trees.

Some would, instead, give the ants rotten fruit that they did not want to eat – neither the monkeys, nor the ants – and these would turn into partial humans which still possessed the tails of monkeys, and who could not understand human language, nor could they speak with human speech. But those monkeys who gave the prized fruits that all monkeys desired, the best of the fruits, so that the ants and their family had enough to eat, these monkeys turned into true human beings. If they did not do these things, they remained nothing more than monkeys their entire lives.

This was how the magic worked. This was all that separated monkeys from becoming human beings, and all that separated human beings from being monkeys.