The Bubble Theory

As man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless. W. J. ANDEN (1962). The Poet and the City.

People need a certain space, we call bubble, around them to survive. The size of the individual bubble varies with the nature of relationship to others. Lovers have a small bubble for each other, while a Palestinian and a Jew might find any room too small for their bubbles to fit. Why? It is because our preferences and likeliness for other produces certain pheromones that may produce an aversive response or an attractive response. The size of this bubble also changes with situations. In a crowded elevator, bubble sizes decrease allowing us free excess to pheromones of each other. Try snuggling with the lone lady in an elevatorat your risk. As population grows, our bubble sizes must decrease for purely physical reasons. We learn to live in crowded places. Village dwellers coming to urban areas often find it unimaginable how close people can actually live.

Ethnic nonhomogeneity resists shrinking of bubbles and when forced by whatever reason, we clash. The results of clash are amply evident in our social strife. Two factors help us keep our bubbles smaller. First, it is homogeneity of language and culture. And second, it is ideologic homogeneity. When we say we do not get along with some people, we are saying that we cannot make our bubbles small enough to allow people to come close to us. Strange customs, cultures, language and attitudes inflate our bubbles. The author of the old saying that "the birds of same feather fly together" knew a lot more about pheromones long before the chemists declared their existence