Sometime around 1957, in a fluorescent-lit lab at the University of Wisconsin, psychologist Harry Harlow carried out a study that would come to haunt the field of behavioral science. The experiment, which would be difficult to receive grant approval for today (for good reason at that), involved separating newborn monkeys from their mothers just hours after birth (evil!). The infants were then placed in solitary confinement with two ersatz “mothers”—one, a minimalist wireframe fitted with a bottle of milk; the other, soft and wrapped in fabric, but offering no sustenance.
Harlow was initially of the opinion that the need to relinquish hunger prevails all else—that the monkey infants would bond with the wireframes that fed them. But to his surprise, the baby monkeys clung to the cloth-covered surrogates, seeking not food but what could only be described as comfort. Even when hunger drove them to the bottle, they reached across while still tethered to the fabric-clad dummies, desperate to maintain a grip on whatever their infant monkey minds passed for affection.
Harlow couldn't bring himself to accept that the infant monkeys were not acting on the basis of material want, and thus theorized that perhaps the monkeys were cold; the reason they clung to the fabric dummies. He introduced heat lamps to the wireframes, thinking the monkeys would then have little reason to stay with the cloth-covered variants. He was wrong. The infants, by and large, continued to embrace their cloth mothers, rejecting guaranteed nourishment and warmth in favor of the illusion of intimacy.
Us humans, distant relatives of those very same monkeys, might recognize something of ourselves in them; Survival may require material provision, but to live—to truly live in any meaningful sense—we need connection, community, a place to belong. And when those are unavailable in their true form, we’re remarkably adept at manufacturing their semblance.
In Harlow’s lab, monkeys were offered a facsimile of family. Today, we receive ours in the form of institutions driven by self-serving motives. Corporations, nation-states, and religious organizations all trade heavily in the affective language of belonging. “We're not just a team,” the HR handbook insists, “we’re a family.” The corporate workplace does not merely pay your salary—it adopts you, or at least it wants you to believe it has. A strategic embrace, aimed not at emotional nourishment but at extracting labor. The more you identify with the “family,” the more loyal—and pliable—you become. Right until they no longer have any use for you (a situation too many of my friends have found themselves in within the last year alone).
Governments, too, perform this sleight of hand, albeit on a much larger scale. The indoctrination begins at birth, often quite literally: my own child, born in Houston, Texas, received a certificate designating him a “Little Texan” before barely getting a chance to open his eyes. We are inducted early, taught to love flags, sing anthems, and revere founding myths, all before developing the cognitive tools to question them.
It is perhaps for this reason that immigrants pose such a conundrum. They were never swaddled in the national mythos of their new adoptive lands, their loyalty suspect. Despite often being a vital source of labor as well as state-funding (In 2023, documented immigrants contributed $561.9 billion in taxes to the U.S. treasury, while undocumented immigrants supplied $90 billion--a total of approximately 15% of overall tax revenue), they remain outsiders. It is true that many immigrants may be fleeing terrible conditions in their places of birth, in which case the warm embrace of a new country may be all the indoctrination they ever need. But it is also that assumption that causes adopting nations and its indoctrinated citizenry to become perplexed by the immigrant who acts upon the very basic human right to critique, protest, or dissent. "How dare they bite the hand that feeds them?!"
Though, logically speaking, it makes sense that an outsider would be better equipped to notice preposterous practices (which every culture and every nation has its particular fair share of) more so than those simmering in the soup of a particular ideology their entire lives.
The irony, of course, is that most migrants leave not for ideology (as is sometimes assumed), or even because of violence, but for economic survival. Not unlike Harlow's monkeys, they seek nourishment—a salary, stability, the proverbial milk bottle. But in doing so, they often remain psychologically tethered to what they left behind. Like Harlow’s monkeys, they reach outward for sustenance, while clinging inward to the memory—or fantasy—of home.
The curious inversion of this dynamic can be found in the so-called "expat". A term rooted in colonial history, it is today most popularly applied to the digital nomad: that lightly tanned, MacBook-carrying figure with a gym membership and zero sense of fashion who flees the stress-by-design of the Global North for the leisurely disorder of the Global South. This specimen is not escaping danger, nor is it searching for food. Its income flows uninterrupted from Seattle, Stockholm, or Sydney. What it seeks is something else: the warmth and texture of fabric instead of the cold, calculated geometry of wireframes. It wants the feeling—however contrived—of embrace.
Here, too, though there is an economic undercurrent. The expat’s dollar, euro, or pound stretches further in Bali or Bogota than it does in Berlin or Brooklyn, where they sometimes cannot even afford to survive. Worse off than Harlow's orphaned monkeys, the expat has no false mother to hold onto and instead leaves home in search of both nourishment and affection. This can make the inherent turmoil of the so-called expat kind of worse than the traditional migrant who's only missing one of those things, not both. Despite readily afforded privileges such as freedom of mobility and access to higher pay, neither of which the traditional migrant has access to, the contemporary expat's condition is far more psychologically fraught.
It's worth noting that Harlow’s forcibly orphaned monkeys grew up to be profoundly dysfunctional. Their social skills stunted, their emotional range impaired. They could not mate, could not bond, could not parent. The surrogate mothers, while visually comforting, had deprived them of the real thing.
What happens when whole societies are raised on such falsehoods—on corporate “families,” nationalist mythologies, and digital tribes? You don’t need to remove the mother to orphan a generation. You need only replace her with something hollow (mothers in this case not necessarily having to mean actual biological mothers, but rather the entire social framework that make up our lives).
The real mothers of Harlow's infant monkeys may have been distanced, but they were not entirely gone. Neither are yours. Listen carefully, and you'll hear them call your name.
