09/16/2026
THE MONKEY CAGE
WAKE UP, AMERICA
Part Four of Ten
The Banana Safety Department
There is a saying there are three different types of lies: white lies, damn lies and statistics. In my last installment in this series, I showed an example of how statistics used in the WWII were debunked by Abraham Wald.
Nobody believes that he selects. Everybody believes he simply pays attention to credible sources and disregards nonsense. That feeling, the sense that you are the one looking at the whole picture, is not evidence of anything. It is precisely how it feels from inside. The monkeys did not think they were conditioned either. They thought the ladder was dangerous.
Then social media arrived, and we connected the cages. Millions and eventually billions of monkeys could communicate instantly. Effectively, we gave every monkey a hose.
Now we can reward one another, punish one another, correct one another, mock one another, shame one another, follow one another, unfollow one another, and share outrage with ten thousand other people before breakfast. A questionable idea no longer has to die in one classroom, office, bar, church, political meeting, or neighborhood. It has somewhere to incubate.
People who believe it can find one another. They can reinforce the story, add evidence, remove inconvenient details, locate an expert, locate a counterexpert, give it a name, give it a hashtag, and send it into another cage. Truth can spread faster than ever before. So can nonsense. Both travel through the same network.
Eventually, nobody necessarily has to control the cage. Politicians respond to media. Media responds to audiences. Audiences respond to social media. Social media responds to engagement. Advertisers follow attention. Algorithms learn what keeps us watching. Fear works. Anger works. Outrage works. Tribalism works. Perhaps nothing works better than being told, “You were right all along.” The cage begins running itself.
Now put the two halves together, because this is where the modern world actually lives. Wald’s officers had one airplane. Everyone in that room was looking at the same aircraft. They were all wrong together, and one mathematician could walk in and correct the entire room in an afternoon. We do not have that problem anymore. We have the opposite one.
Today every monkey has his own airplane. He has been shown the one that fits, by people who selected it for him, and he has verified the bullet holes himself, and they are real. So has the monkey across the cage. His holes are real too. Both are looking at genuine data. Both can cite sources. Both have experts, studies, charts, video, and a hundred thousand people online who
agree with them. And each looks across the cage at the other and arrives at the only explanation that seems available. How in the hell can they be so stupid?
We asked that question earlier about monkeys fighting over bananas, and it was funny. It is the same question. It is no longer funny, because now it is being asked by two grown Americans who have both done their homework. Neither one is stupid. They were handed different airplanes.
And here is the truly difficult part. Once everybody understands that selection works, no fact can settle anything. Producing evidence stops being an argument and becomes a move. Your source is compromised. Mine is credible. His study was funded. Mine was peer reviewed. The video is out of context. The chart is cherry-picked. Everybody is right about everybody else.
A cage where nothing can be checked is bad enough. A cage where everything can be checked and nothing can be settled may be worse, because it feels like knowledge. Every monkey inside it is better informed than any human being in history, and less able to change his mind.
But that does not mean the wardens disappear. In many ways, we create new ones. School boards, city councils, legislatures, regulatory bodies, governors, presidents, and other elected officials become overseers of increasingly complicated cages. Most people who enter those positions probably do so believing they are there to serve and make decisions. Then they discover that they have inherited a cage built over generations.
A new school-board member inherits policies, curriculum requirements, state mandates, legal opinions, administrative procedures, consultants, professional associations, accreditation standards, testing requirements, and thousands of pages explaining how education is supposed to operate. A new city-council member inherits ordinances, building codes, fire codes, engineering standards, zoning rules, planning procedures, legal interpretations, consultants, and decades of institutional practice. They all look official because they are official.
The newly elected official asks, “Why can we not do that?” The answers come back in order. “That is against the code.” Why? “That is the standard.” Whose standard? “That is what the consultant recommends.” Why? “That is how cities do it.” Keep asking why long enough, and occasionally something remarkable happens. Nobody currently sitting at the table knows. There is the rusty pipe again.
Underneath those elected officials sits something even more durable. Council members rotate. School-board members rotate. Mayors rotate. Governors rotate. Legislators rotate. Presidents rotate. The bureaucracy remains.
The elected official may become the temporary overseer of the cage, but the bureaucracy becomes the permanent keeper of its rules. Again, this requires no evil people. Most bureaucrats can be perfectly sincere, competent professionals doing exactly what the system
hired and trained them to do. Apply the code. Follow the procedure. Document compliance. Enforce the standard. Avoid the exception. Reduce liability. Protect the institution.
Now return to our banana cage twenty-seven years later. The original hose keeper is gone, but sometime before he left, somebody created the Banana Safety Department. The department hired a Banana Safety Administrator, who eventually hired inspectors. Somebody determined that climbing the ladder required a permit. The permit required an engineering review. The engineer required a Banana Load Calculation. Risk Management required proof of insurance. Legal recommended an indemnification agreement. Human Resources required annual Ladder and Banana Awareness Training. Planning determined that the ladder sat inside a restricted Banana Access Zone.
The next essay in the “Cage” series demonstrates how local government and national banking regulations make dealing with those entities a difficult task.
