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Personally I don't like link articles, but just this once check out this article before reading further: Link
Somehow I think this article sums up all the problems we face in this world. If someone's not in our monkeysphere, we're just incapable of feeling any of the compassion that we might show to someone who was. That's why the bum on the street is ignored but a struggling friend will get a helping hand (even if it's just holding a beer).
Suicide bombers? They do it because their monkeysphere doesn't include the targets. We hate hearing that they have lives and families because we don't want them to be in our monkeysphere. Noone wants to think that evil can be done by someone they know well, so nearly everyone uses everything at their disposal to ensure that they don't have to cope with the possibility that no evil is too terrible that it can't be done by the average schmo.
Of course some people have bigger monkeyspheres than others. Your average rabid political animal will have room for followers of the ideology, but would never accept an enemy into the 'sphere. A sociopath might have no room for anyone. Some have room for an entire people. However everyone has an other, and because of this there will always be conflict. It's not a matter of religion or ideology or politics or even economics; it's a simple relic of our monkey past. If we were ants, toiling away in the service of the great ant god in our teeming billions perhaps it wouldn't be such a big deal. But unfortunately we've been cursed with hands rather than antennae and a brain rather than hard chitinous skin.
Maybe it's time for everyone to try and stretch their monkeyspheres. Next time you walk past the bum on the street, remember that he or she also has a story and is probably not just a soulless extra on the filmset of life.
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