What a great piece — it raises the most important questions. We are monkeys, to be sure. But we can see each other as monkeys, and that’s the root of our freedom from monkeyhood. Sun Wukong, in the end, becomes a Buddha: not an alpha chimp equal to the Heavenly Emperor, but an enlightened being whose story brings awakening to others. It’s possible for individuals to at least partially transcend our monkeyness. But the tragedy is that our social institutions are designed to lock us into monkeyness, and to amplify our monkeyness at a scale unimaginable by the greatest Alpha Gorilla in the world. Can we design social communities and institutions that temper our monkeyness, or even help us transcend it?