Rat Utopia and the End of Human Civilization

"Mad egghead" John Calhoun in his rat paradise

 


Universe 25 was a mouse study on the effects of overpopulation and overcrowding.  What happens when you provide the ideal environment for mice in which they never had to suffer or struggle for survival?  The outcome was clear:  though the enclosure would hold 3,840 mice, collapse happened at 2,200 despite unlimited resources & ideal conditions (temperature, food, enriched environments, etc).  This collapse was disturbing and included drastic behavioral changes like refusal to mate as well as female aggression toward offspring, male docility/sexual abstinence & widespread infertility.  Eventually all the mice died.

Why is this relevant?  Well, just look around.  The outcomes were eerily similar to what we're seeing with the human race currently with rates of autism, gender confusion & other conditions that inhibit breeding/reproduction.  The study's designers noted that the mice died a first death, which was "social/spiritual," and a second literal death as a result of not having to "struggle" for survival, but I'm not so sure that was the problem since they didn't start dying and acting insane until the population reached a certain threshold.  I'm not the only one to make the connection between this study and possible human extinction due to overpopulation.





Quantity vs. Quality of Life

Endless growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

The human population has exploded in recent decades, growing from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.9 billion in 2020.  The effects on the environment and natural world have been indisputably disastrous, with 50% of wildlife going extinct in the last 40 years, global warming/climate change threatening the survival of everything on the planet, pollution/deforestation running rampant & the threat of nuclear annihilation ever present.  But what if this population explosion was also causing not-so-subtle changes in human biology/behavior that was further driving us to make destructive choices such as killing ourselves by the thousands via the opioid crisis or taking unnecessary risks during COVID?  Things that reduce our numbers by killing existing humans rather than merely preventing successful reproduction?  The building of data centers, Bitcoin farms & other mass polluting, water consuming environmental disasters is unquestionably speeding up our demise as a species.  And maybe this insane behavior is an invisible sort of "self-destruct" button that kicks in when we reach critical mass.

This is essentially what happened in John Calhoun's rat paradise, Universe 25.  Conditions were carefully controlled in terms of food/water availability, temperature, access to social stimuli and removal of natural predators.  There was no disease or other threat to health/safety in this utopia, thus named because it took 25 attempts to get the conditions just right.  Mice were free to spend their days as they pleased, and they were quite successful for a time, doubling in numbers every 55 days (Phase A/B).  When their numbers surpassed 600 and crowding began, the mice started to panic and behave oddly, competing more violently for resources that were readily available the whole time (Phase C).

Example of the horrific violence against children that makes news daily.

Phase D is when things really started to get scary:  mice lost the desire to establish territory, mate or raise their young.  Miscarriages became common; mothers who did give birth often cannibalized or killed their young or abandoned them.  An entire generation of males, dubbed "The Beautiful Ones," emerged at this stage.  They did nothing but isolate themselves, spending all their time eating, sleeping and grooming themselves obsessively.  Their fur was remarkably shiny & soft but it served no purpose as they never attempted to mate or socialize.  They hid from the few "alpha" male mice roaming around committing rape & other forms of violence against anymouse regardless of age or sex.  (Mice are "traditional" in that the males typically protect the females and offspring, so this was a 180-degree departure from healthy mouse behavior). 

When the population reached 2,200 individuals, reproduction stopped entirely.   With the increased violence and lack of mating, a younger generation of mice became adults, but had never been exposed to a “normal” society.  To put it simply, they were just mice living in a world that didn’t teach them how to be proper mice.  They had no exposure to normal social skills, they did not learn normal or healthy relations, and there were no familial structures for these mice to witness anything remotely “normal” for mice behavior. So what was a young adult mouse supposed to do?  It's kinda like that movie, Kids: no adult role models, no accountability or structure.  Just kids left to their own devices, cast adrift in a violent society that treats them as invisible at best & a nuisance at worst.

Male of the species, 2026ish.  (The Beautiful Ones?)

Mind you, all of this happened in the absence of horrors like the greenhouse effect, pollution or contagious pandemics.  It was strictly a result of too many mice in one space, as if they were pre-programmed to self-destruct when their numbers reached a certain threshold.  Researchers termed it "behavioral sink".   






The Impact of Lifestyle

Modern African tribes

Watching a few specials on indigenous African tribes recently, I was struck by what one of the narrators said:  these "primitive" people have to struggle for every calorie and drop of clean water, have no internet access or other technology, walk around nearly nude in the scorching African sun, sleep on dirt floors & must constantly be aware of threats like big predators (lions, hyenas, hippos, etc).  Yet they're always smiling, dancing & suffer none of the modern "mental health" afflictions seen in the developed world:  depression, crippling anxiety, obesity-related disease, addiction, suicide or other self-harm conditions. Their way of life seems crazy to us--backward & uncivilized.  But is it?   

They "work" 15 hours per week and keep all the spoils of their labor.  They never sit in traffic jams or scramble to meet work deadlines; don't pay taxes & aren't isolated after work with their faces in a phone or a bottle of booze.  Their way of life is certainly closer to how humans evolved to live than ours.  They're close with their family, friends, community & nature.  They don't have much in the way of possessions, but they're happy.  Is that not one of the main goals of life and signs of success?  None of us chooses where we're born on this Earth, but these people are making due with very little and do not seem the least bit unhappy.  Westerners, on the other hand, have an abundance of creature comforts and trend less happy/healthy on the whole.  

Nobody's suggesting we revert to our hunter-gatherer ways or trash all our technological progress, but there is a happy medium between the way these tribes live and the sedentary, isolated, hustle-and-grind synthetic life we've been taught to value.  A life in which technology exists to serve us, not the other way around.  

I'm also not suggesting everyone currently alive stops having children entirely, but maybe cap it at 2 per couple until population comes down.  The alternative is far worse & could mean total annihilation of the human race.  And in the meantime you're gonna be forced to give up a lot of your creature comforts and basic survival needs.  Things like watering your lawn on your own schedule or even HAVING a lawn in some places, or controlling the temperature of your own house.  The recent heat wave in Europe has killed so many people it's sparked discussion about how air conditioning in the U.S. is worsening climate change.  In reality, more and more people are going to require it as temperatures become dangerously hot just to avoid hyperthermia.  I shudder to think what will happen when our aging power grids begin blowing out due to overload on these scorching days and the gargantuan demand from data centers.

By 2040, we'll all be unemployed or dying after AI takes our jobs and drinks up the last bit of clean water/shits out clouds of cancer-causing pollution while crashing our precious power grids during the hottest months of the already-sweltering year.  Our only hope is that the noise and light pollution drive some crazy bastard crazy enough to b🔥rn  them all down & trigger the revolution that's long overdue.  It won't be me, but I'll be watching from the safety of my bunker with my respirator & popcorn at the ready. 🍿😷

Will the real American patriots please stand up?