This video has showed up in my feed a few times. Some thoughts. TL;DR, the video says more about your selective vision than it does about society's brainwashing.
We can wait while you watch the video:
The video outlines an experiment of five caged monkeys where one monkey's attempt to reach bananas resulted in punishment for the other four. Eventually, the punished monkeys began stopping any monkey going for the bananas. Then each monkey was progressively replaced, and the community of monkeys used gleeful beatings to prevent the new guy from reaching for bananas even in the absence of punishments. When all five monkeys had been replaced, they still delivered beatings.
It doesn't take much psychic twisting (or giant block letters) to get the point. The abused masses will beat aspiration out of you.
As you should have learned from the internet by now, generalizations are lies. Most of them anyway. There's no record of this experiment. Most articles about this experiment point to a guy named Stephenson in the 1960's who blasted monkeys with air when they played with a fork. Eventually, when one of the conditioned monkeys was put in a cage with another monkey, they kept the new guy from playing with a fork. Sometimes, that is. Like 40% of the time in six of the eight experiments.
The summary of Stephenson's article is "Observational learning and admonition are distinguished as two types of information transfer between subjects which mediate the acquisition of culture in monkeys." In short, monkeys learn from each other or try help each other out.
So, if the original experiment wasn't about the damage of group dynamics or about society keeping the climber down, where did those ideas come from? They were already in your head, ready to be confirmed by a silly little internet video.
In that way, it's kind of funny that the original experiment was about ways to avoid the mistakes of others.
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