And Then There Were Six

It’s a small world. Small enough to fit in our hands.

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

Those We Call The ‘Others’

It’s their fault.

Who?

I don’t know. Them, those that aren’t us. The others.

Okay, time for a reality check.

It’s relieving to have something to blame other than ourselves, isn’t it? Especially if that something doesn’t have a face. Only a name — an obscure one at that. An epithet to which we can direct our hatred.

These kinds of bias have been the ground zero for many enduring conflicts. It’s a meager spark that ignites hellfire. Holocaust, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the World Wars — you name it.

Pitting two sides against each other on the battlefield won’t bring neither glory nor salvation, not even for the one victorious. Warfare only ushers death and suffering.

History bares itself open for us to contemplate, and if there is one good thing we can learn from its bloodstained chapters, it’s this:

There are no others. Only us.

In this unanimous, tight-knit world, humanity is a singular entity. A vast gestalt which parts are only separated by several degrees.

Six, to be exact.

So, Six Degrees?

Yeah. There’s this idea which states that we can connect two people, chosen at random anywhere on the face of the earth, in only six or fewer steps. Basically, it’s a friend of a friend chain that can hook you up with anyone.

This idea is known as the six degrees of separation. And it’s not new.

I assume, this six degrees thing may sound familiar to you. There’s a good chance you might have stumbled upon it somewhere on the internet already, so I’m not gonna ramble on too much about it.

That being said, you may still be a bit skeptical about its truthfulness. As do many people — some of which decided to do something about it, and devised various kinds of exploratory works related to this question. Some noteworthy examples would be Frigyes Karinthy’s short stories and Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiment.