Go to the primate section of the Bronx Zoo where you can see our close relatives in the happy primate family leading their own busy social lives. You can also see masses of tourists laughing at the caricatures of humans that the lower primates represent. Now imagine being a member of a higher-level species (say, a “real” philosopher, a truly wise person), far more sophisticated than the human primates. You would certainly laugh at the people laughing at the nonhuman primates. Clearly, to those people amused by the apes, the idea of a being who would look down on them the way they look down on the apes cannot immediately come to their minds—if it did, it would elicit self-pity. They would stop laughing.

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, London: Penguin, 2010 (first published in 2007), p. 193.