Man: It’s the influence of television. Yeah, now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being a-a high, uh, high intensity, you understand? A hot medium … as opposed to a …

Singer: What I wouldn’t give for a large sock o’ horse manure.

Man: … as opposed to a print …

Singer: (addressing the audience) What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? I mean it’s just maddening!

Man: (addressing the audience) Wait a minute, why can’t I give my opinion? It’s a free country!

Singer: I mean, d- He can give you- Do you hafta give it so loud? I mean, aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And-and the funny part of it is, M-Marshall McLuhan, you don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan’s…work!

Man: Wait a minute! Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called “TV Media and Culture”! So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan – well, have a great deal of validity.

Singer: Oh, do yuh?

Man: Yes.

Singer: Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So … so, here, just let me – I mean, all right. Come over here … a second.

Man: Oh.

Singer: (To McLuhan) Tell him.

McLuhan: (To the man) I hear – I heard what you were saying. You- you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

Singer: (addressing the audience) Boy, if life were only like this!

Taking it even one step further: A Biblical verse, if containing some controversial idea, will most likely be criticized or dismissed as “misunderstood” when quoted by a non-religious person (try it – it’s fun). The interpretation in this case may often be proposed as a wrong one. However, the same verse may get lots of attention, perhaps even hours of lecture time when presented by a religious authority. The interpretation then is not to be argued, even if it’s similar to the previous one.

The issue of the alleged divinity of the sages has another interesting perspective. Theoretically speaking, there are two contradicting options: Either those who wrote the Talmud, for instance, were speaking the actual words of God, or they simply wrote whatever was on their human minds. If they did quote the Almighty on everything, then this raises considerable doubts about His Holiness’ knowledge of the world he’d created. Doesn’t he know insects are not formed of human sweat (the tractate of ‘Shabbos’)? Doesn’t he know cats and birds don’t carry poison in their fingernails (the tractate of ‘Chulin’)? Isn’t he aware of the fact that the trachea does not reach the heart and the liver (again the tractate of ‘Chulin’)? Doesn’t he know rabbits, hares and badgers don’t ruminate (the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy)? Is he confused about the relative movement of the Sun and the Earth (the tractate of ‘Pesachim’)? Hell, he can’t even properly count the verses of his own Bible (the tractate of ‘Kidushin’)! And there are many more similar examples!

On the other hand, if they simply wrote whatever was on their earthly minds, then why follow the ancient dictated rules? Why follow commands that were perhaps more appropriate for the era when they were written? Why not adopt an updated codex of rules, made also by humans – but humans who are equipped with modern knowledge of our recent time? And even more importantly: Why not allow the questioning and changing of the old man-made rules?

Even if we do distinguish (as some people do) between the Biblical text and the later extensions – as it happens, most of the religious day-to-day rituals and rules are derived from those extensions and not from the original Bible. This is certainly true for Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

So we make good use of our ancient messengers, our “middle men”. In practice, they are our gods much more than the concept we use to name as such.

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“Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.” – Samuel Palmer

How do we know God wants us to refrain from stealing from others? How can we be so sure the Almighty is against adultery? After all, it’s kind of difficult to pinpoint any individual meeting with him (her? them?) recently. Yet, millions of people seem to know exactly what this mysterious super-power requires from them, to the very last detail.

Not to worry. Where the distance between God and man appears to be too big, there comes the messenger. He is typically a male figure. He carries with him some impressive personality and often also certain extreme physical characteristics. Painters and sculptors love him. He seems to have had breakfast with God every other day. What’s much more important – he has been dead for quite a while now, so there’s no way to really ask him about God’s favorite kind of coffee. Some say he’ll come back one day, as part of the overall deal, so there’s another good reason to follow his messages.

We call them “prophets”, “saviors”, “sages” and “Messiahs”. We name them “Moses”, “Jesus”, “Eliyahu”, “Muhammad”, and other ancient names. It’s easier for us to relate to their human appearance and to the tangible texts they allegedly left behind, than to some abstract God. They of-course penetrate our mind at a young age, together in the same package with heaven, angels and respect to the unknown.

So, not all men are created equal. If you ask the Christians, not all men are even created men – some are genetically related to God (hmmm). Actually, the Hebrew Bible also mentions “sons of gods” in various places (Genesis, Psalms), which seems to be inherited from older Canaanite texts. The Jews have it organized a bit differently: The sages are said to be closer to God and succeeding generations are said to lessen in spiritual power – thus simply reversing the facts of human and cultural development.

Our tendency to look for cosmic conspiracies makes it easy for us to glorify ancient events as well as old heroes. The stories about them are found here and now, but their human weaknesses are not visible to us. Can you imagine your favorite hero in some embarrassing situations? Perhaps cheating someone, having a sexual fantasy, or even suffering from diarrhea? Instead we typically imagine them with shiny eyes, standing powerfully in a high spot, speaking words of guidance.

Alas, even the words they speak in our books are not necessarily their own words. We almost take for granted the way modern media and politics alter what leaders and politicians have to say. Yet we totally ignore the fact that this trend has not been recently invented. Putting words in someone else’s mouth is a very old art. Modern studies demonstrate many such cases in the Jewish Talmud, for example. It requires a great measure of naivety to assume the absolute integrity of any ancient text, especially one that deals with people.

If you came across the legendary British TV series “Yes, Minister” (and later named, “Yes, Prime Minister”) – lucky you! Manipulating someone else’s words can be done directly, but the more elegant and stealth way to do it is to reinterpret the meaning. You can say almost anything you want about someone’s words as long as he or she is not there to defend their original meaning. The Talmud is literally full with “X said Y but he actually meant Z”. The sentence gets extra strength when the interpreter himself (never herself!) is also considered sacred enough.

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The Orthodox Jews have a name for this: Emunas Chachomim – faith in the wise ones, the sages. Whatever my rabbi says is sacred. There is no doubt he is right. If something later appears to be wrong, look for the reasons elsewhere, not in the words themselves. It’s important to emphasize again that this is how they feel. And this is based on Biblical text itself: “…and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they shall teach thee.” (Deuteronomy, chapter 17, verse 10). This is indeed a closed loop: God says I should listen to my rabbi, which in turn teaches me that everything God says is right!

There are a couple of other issues, worth mentioning on this complex road of forming one’s way of life.

Yehoshua Bar-Yosef wrote the book ‘A Heretic Despite Himself’, which tells a long and colorful story of the road from Orthodox Judaism to the secular world. In the beginning of the story, our hero keeps participating in monthly gatherings with his male friends, away from their wives (for a good religious reason, you know). Their dancing ritual together – producing that high feeling – is described as far better than having sex.

People searching for their “identity” also seek a group of which to be part. We usually enjoy Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ when we’re too young to fully understand what’s going on (The king is naked! The king is naked!). Yet the message is clear and true: The power of the crowd is real. It both pressures and strengthens. The pressure is in the sense that we hate to appear different than the others. As for strengthening – have you ever participated in an event, where a large group of people with a similar ideology were performing some ritual together? Whether in political or religious context, one gets rather emotional in this “I encourage you and you encourage me” situation, and things seem as if they must be truer than ever.

Having a clear and well-defined goal fits well in this picture – just ask any successful high-tech startup manager. If you know exactly what you want to achieve and how you’re going to be rewarded at the end, you are also liable to share that feeling of “I am right”.

Another issue has to do with Newton’s first law of inertia. In addition to our being programmed to follow what we absorb as kids, we start implementing another program in our brain when we grow up – the program that makes it difficult for us to change things. Again, we are programmed to preserve our perception of the world, as we grow older. And yet again, another characteristic of ours is that we think we do a good job in examining the alternatives and choosing constantly.

This is somewhat correlated with what’s known as the Touchy-Feely Syndrome – the tendency for people to overvalue things they have touched or selected personally. This characteristic of ours is often a good reason for why investors stay with an investment for too long.

By the time many people dare to really think about altering their way of life, they have already established their position in the society around them. By then it might be very difficult to change the day-to-day behavior – What you wear, how you speak and where you live – even if perhaps you now secretly believe in completely different things.

Sometimes you unknowingly lie to yourself, only in order not to change things. You may even invent some intellectual excuses to explain why you’re right (“Doctors don’t know anything”, “Praying is proven to physiologically help”, “The king is not actually naked”). You must prove to yourself you haven’t been wasted all these years in vain. Other times you don’t bother lying to yourself any more, and knowingly decide not to change things. It’s a fact that there are people raised in a religious atmosphere since childhood, who are not religious anymore by any definition you may think of, except for their external appearance and surroundings.

George Orwell wrote ‘Shooting an Elephant’ in 1950. This story about life in Burma became quite famous. So did Orwell’s description of the man who grew to do what he was expected to do: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

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“It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.” – Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

The workers of San Diego’s Wild Animal Park were facing a strange kind of problem. While promoting the California condor breeding program, they reached a point in time when they were about to see some newly hatched chicks. However, they had to take precautions so that the chicks would not see them. They actually used some puppets to hide their hands, in order to fool the chicks.

Raising animals in captivity introduces a whole new set of problems, some of which are surprising. It appears that many kinds of chicks and cubs tend to imprint whatever they see after they are born and follow it around from then on. They interpret it as their mother, and interestingly, evolution has programmed them to follow their mother and mimic lots of her behaviors.

Humans – so it seems – are also extremely open to imprint things they see around them when they’re young. Families who have migrated from one country to another have often encountered another related syndrome: It appears that their small children have picked up the new language miraculously, to such an extent that they switch spontaneously to speaking it. They sometimes even do it in the presence of their parents, who barely understand the new sounds. They seem to do it especially when they’re excited or upset.

We largely absorb our understanding of the world around us from the way we are brought up. We are built to do so. In spite of what we may think, we have little control over this process. Have you noticed how in an Islamic environment, most people grow to be Muslims, while in a Christian environment, people somehow grow to worship the Trinity? The very same person would argue passionately about totally different things, if they had spent their childhood among others.

From the moment we are formed until we are full grown, our perception of this world changes from almost zero to everything we know, or think we know. Generally speaking, this dramatic change may be contributed to two sources only. One of them is found in our genes and the way we have evolved – for example: No one taught us how to suck milk as infants, or how to hold objects tightly with our little baby hands. The other source of our knowledge is in everything we see, hear, smell, feel and taste – whether this data comes from still objects, plants, animals or other people around us. This is what we grow up with, and is eventually the major source of information for us that turns into the abstract contents of these little boxes in the top of our heads.

And what do we see, hear, smell, feel and taste in this modern world of the 21st century? From the moment we start hearing stories, we learn about God, the Bible, miracles and saviors, monsters and witches, vampires and aliens. From the time we start seeing pictures and signs, we see the artistic comforting face of Jesus Christ, the glaring eyes of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and/or copies of the New Testament in every Western hotel room. It would take a really strong personality to put some solid sense into this stream of confusing emotional input.

The following famous joke illustrates the spirit of things:

A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales.

“Whales can’t swallow people,” the teacher said. “Even though they are large mammals, their throats are very small.”

“But Jonah was swallowed by a whale,” the little girl replied.

“That just can’t be,” the teacher said. “It’s physically impossible.”

“When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah,” said the little girl.

The teacher looked down at her, smiled and asked, “What if Jonah went to hell?”

The little girl replied, “Then you ask him.”

You see, the little girl in the joke is merely you and I. We are programmed to act in certain ways and follow what we are repeatedly told. It is a human characteristic to consider things shown to us when we are young as true. It is another human characteristic to think we control this process and choose our truths. In fact we largely don’t.

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So why do they do it? Why do herds of lemmings have this drive of committing suicide together? Better yet, do they do it? Yes they do – in a Walt Disney movie called Wild Wilderness that was released in 1958. Few lemmings were actually pushed over a small cliff and filming tricks produced the effect of lemming mass suicide. This lemming exodus into the abyss later turned out to be a true story in the minds of many. There was no question of “if”, but only of “why”.

As for now, the Roman Empire was around much longer than Walt Disney Studios. Not too many Christians even know how during the Roman times, many of the rituals concerned with the Egyptian goddess Isis evolved into Virgin Mary rituals and related art.

Cults don’t need many centuries to form and evolve. Our present day Santa Claus stories are less than 200 years old and the famous red image is even younger, originated in a Coca-Cola commercial. Richard Feynman (1965 Nobel Prize winner in physics) talked about the ‘Cargo Cult’ of the South Seas islanders in post-World War II, where people developed a cult of imitating airport rituals and air controller behaviors (using mock wooden earphones and antennas), waiting for the airplanes to arrive and drop goodies. Just imagine how a few thousand years of politics and interests can promote memes and cults.

The Jewish religion talks about the chain of tradition: Allegedly, the Bible was dictated by God and written by Moses. Then it was passed from one generation to another, together with the necessary oral interpretations, which were also put into writing at a later time. To complete the picture, the original event was said to be witnessed by the whole nation and the knowledge of this has also passed between generations, to this day.

In a previous chapter, we mentioned Rabbi Yehuda HaLevy and his old book ‘The Kuzari’. Among other things, Mr. HaLevy actually compiled a kind of mathematical proof for the truth behind this tradition: “Suppose someone would suddenly invent such a new story,” he claims, “and suppose this person would start saying that all the people witnessed the revelation on Mt. Sinai. Then the neighbors of this individual would stand up and say they’ve never heard such a thing from their fathers, so it cannot be true.” Therefore, he concludes that the story has not been invented, and the event must have actually occurred as described from fathers to sons nowadays.

This so-called proof ignores the simple fact that traditions develop gradually. The story is not all-or-nothing. It has many components, and for a long time every father has told his sons slightly different things (mothers and daughters, apparently, don’t count). Many other traditions, some of which you probably know very well, have gone through similar processes. My own Jewish father, who has long history of speaking the truth, told me very different things. Furthermore, no neighbor stood up or said anything. Hence, chains of traditions do change with time.

In many other cases, a story had begun its journey as a folktale. It had been innocently told by fathers to sons and known to all. Much later it acquired the stamp of (allegedly) an historic fact.

When we try to analyze some more important ingredients of developing traditions, we may find a few more characteristics in common:

• It typically takes several generations for a tradition to form – especially “big” and rich traditions. It is a slow process. The new tradition with all its myths and rules is formed not all at once, but with contents complementing and updating other contents, over long periods of time.
• New traditions and beliefs are typically created based on stories which somehow satisfy certain desires of the believers as well as excite their imaginations.
• The processes involved typically include large groups of people, and also the acts of promotion by some authorities and/or by the media, whatever that may be.
• Faiths are typically implanted at a young age, or make use of related things that were acquired by the believer when he or she was young.

Hence, if you meet a stranger in the park, and he tells you about a purple omelet he had for breakfast, this can hardly qualify as the beginning of a new religion.

Don’t you want to hear what great rabbis have to say about the process of forming a tradition? Of-course you do! Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was a famous American Jewish Orthodox rabbi, who was born in Belarus and later lived and died in New York. Rabbi Feinstein was considered by many as one of the leading Orthodox rabbinic scholars of the 2nd half of the 20th century.

In his well-known responsa Igroth Moshe (Letters of Moshe), Rabbi Feinstein answered the difficult question of “Can so many people be wrong”. He stated that:

“Everything a person does and keeps believing as true – even if it contradicts the common sense – is not due to insanity, but even wise people start to believe in nonsense, mostly due to incitement. Seldom they are also self-mistaken due to something they imagine in a dream or also while awake. And after they have already started to believe in it, they just as well may give their lives for their nonsensical belief.”

Not exactly what you’d expect from an important Orthodox Jewish rabbi, right? Yes, unless you knew this specific answer was aimed at… Christianity rather than Judaism. It’s the tradition of the others that is formed in such a way (thank you Yaron Yadan for this reference).

‘The Song of Hiawatha’ was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the 19th century, based on North American Indian traditions of many years. Here are some short extracts from this beautiful poem:

Should you ask me, whence these stories,
Whence these legends and traditions,
. . .
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer.
. . .
On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life descending
On the red crags of the quarry,
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.
. . .
And erect upon the mountains
Gitche Manito the mighty
Smoked the calumet the Peace-Pipe
As a signal to the nations.
. . .
From the Vale of Tawasentha
From the Valley of Wyoming
From the groves of Tuscaloosa
From the far-off Rocky Mountains
From the Northern lakes and rivers
All the tribes beheld the signal
Saw the distant smoke ascending
The Pukwana of the Peace Pipe.
. . .
All the warriors drawn together
By the signal of the Peace Pipe
To the Mountains of the Prairie
To the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry.
. . .
Oh my children! My poor children!
Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you!
I have given you lands to hunt in,
I have given you streams to fish in
. . .

If Rabbi Yehuda HaLevy is right, we should start worshiping Gitche Manito “the Great Spirit”, before it’s too late.

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“The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.” – Henry Havelock Ellis

We’ll start this little fascinating research with three different short stories. One of them is somewhat fictitious. The other two are based on fact. Two of them (not necessarily the same two!) have been widely spread over the Internet and are simply quoted here. The third has been kept relatively in secret. Which is which? Let’s leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Story 1 – The Indians and the Winter

It was autumn, and the Indians on the remote reservation asked their new chief if the winter was going to be cold or mild.

Since he was an Indian Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the weather was going to be. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.

Also, being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the weather service and asked, “Is the coming winter going to be cold?”

“It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed,” the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

The chief accordingly went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared.

A week later, he called the weather service again.

“Is it going to be a very cold winter?”

“Yes, it’s definitely going to be a very cold winter.”

This time the chief instructed his people to collect every scrap of wood they could find.

Two weeks later, he called the weather service again.

“Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?”

“Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”

“How can you be so sure?” the chief asked.

The weatherman replied: “The Indians are collecting wood like crazy…”

Story 2 – On Space Shuttles and a Horse’s Ass

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that’s the way they built them in England and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

And bureaucracies live forever…

So, the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it that way and wonder what horse’s ass came up with that, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story…

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank.

These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse’s ass.

Story 3 – From Ancient Rituals to Modern Kitchen Sinks

“Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus, chapter 23) – this original Biblical text in Hebrew forbids the reader to cook a young goat or a calf in his mother’s milk (some say “in his mother’s fat” – the two words are very similar in ancient Hebrew).

Why was it so important for the author to forbid this specific type of cooking?

Apparently, by examining the context and matching it against old known rituals, the author was referring to some particular ancient ceremony: The pagan peoples of the region where the ancient Hebrews lived had several such rituals, opposed by the Hebrews. In one of them they practiced the killing of a young calf or a goat, and used his mother’s milk or fat to cook it and probably sacrifice it to their gods.

Almost a thousand years later, in the beginning of the first millennium, in a very different environment, the old texts were reviewed with a totally different mind-set. Every word counted, and the so-called “words of God” had to be fulfilled to the very last detail. Then this turned into a ban on consuming most kinds of food containing meat and milk at the same time.

During years to come, just to be on the safe side, so to speak, chickens and other birds were to join the celebration. It took about one thousand more years to gradually form a very detailed codex of rules, dictating exactly how many hours should pass between eating a steak and enjoying some cheese. How should the pots and pans be purified in between? What should be the temperature of the water used to clean the dishes, in order to prepare them for the other kind of food?

Today, in many Jewish religious homes (as well as in the kitchens of the Israeli Defense Forces!), you’ll simply find two sets of dishes: One for meat-based food, and the other for milk-based food. In many of these homes you’ll find two separate kitchen sinks for this purpose. And of-course stainless steel is preferred, as it is less porous, and stands a lower chance of holding some microscopic residue of the opposing food, God help us.

These were our three nice stories. By now you should have already guessed the immortal truth behind all this. In his book ‘The Selfish Gene’, Richard Dawkins introduces the “Meme”. Memes, like some viruses, pass from one brain to another. You can plant a meme and track its progress. A meme is a basic unit of the replication of ideas, and sort of has its own life. Many of us nowadays, who often use the Internet to forward rumors, have probably contributed to the progress of some memes.

Cults may or may not be based on true historical facts, or they may be based on a mixture of facts, legends and speculations. Sometimes when you just speculate things, initially it looks somewhat detached from reality. When you mention the same things for a long time, the very fact of doing so repeatedly creates the impression that it’s based on facts. Experiments by psychologists even proved that people tend to develop seemingly real memories of old events, when being under some pressure to believe those events actually happened. Furthermore, many times, half-truths mixed with lies (whether intentionally or innocently) are much more convincing than the absolute truth.

The following story, perhaps a myth as well (bearing several variations), also gained much publicity in the electronic media recently:

Story 4 – Thou Shalt Not Climb the Stairs

It starts with a cage containing five monkeys.

Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result – all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace the third original monkey with a new one, then the fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around there.

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