My apologies to George Steinbeck who wrote the novella, "Of Mice and Men", in 1937 about two American migrant workers during the depression. Then there was that 1971 bold experiment that involved mice, but except for that, the similarities end abruptly between the storyline of that novella and the famous (or infamous) 1971 laboratory observations. However, both spoke profoundly to the conditions that did and could describe the trajectory of the human experience on one hand and the fate of civilization on the other.
Bold indeed, but I leave it to the reader's interpretation or criticism. However, one may either agree or disagree with what I write here because the reader will have to admit that there is little room for neutrality on the results of the experiment.
Pictured below (lower left) is a photo of John B. Calhoun who conducted the experiment. His first experiments were with rats in the 40s and 50s; two decades later he used mice, using the same parameters, more or less.
John Calhoun created a rodent utopia, a perfect environment where the inhabitants were provided everything - plenty and never ending supply of food and water, temperature controlled living conditions that can only be described as heaven in a laboratory.
"Calhoun designed "Universe 25" as the ultimate rodent Eden. It was a 9ft x 4.5ft box, divided into compartments with ramps and tunnels leading to food, water, and nesting areas. Importantly, there was no shortage of resources—plenty of food and water, no predators, no disease. The only real limitation was space and social interaction".
He started with eight carefully selected healthy mice - four males and four females.
"The mice population doubled approximately every 55 days. They thrived, reproduced rapidly, and for a while, everything looked like a furry utopian dream".
Then by the 315th day the population reached 620. That was when things started to go wrong.
Everything went wrong indeed but even when viewed independently or applied generally, the conclusions were either indicatively comparable to the human conditions or not at all. That was and still is the point of debate.
You see, "Despite ample food and water, the sheer density of mice led to a breakdown in social structures. The dominant males became increasingly aggressive, attacking subordinates and failing to protect their territories.
Some male mice, instead of fighting for dominance or territory, withdrew completely. They stopped interacting with others, grooming themselves obsessively, refusing to mate, and basically living the rodent equivalent of a hermit influencer life".
However, beyond the physical boundaries there was something that caused the mice's behavior to devolve spectacularly downwards. "Eventually, the entire population died out—not from starvation, not from predators, but from complete social dysfunction".
We can see why critics of the experiment simply attributed the problems to overpopulation. Among humans, urbanization or increase of population densities, whether it is Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, Manila, or New York city are analogous to the experiment, in that the 40 square feet of area that limited the movement of the mice population is similar to urban centers being restricted to the finite geographic definitions of the cities; however, it is not just attributed to the natural perimeters but are due to the fact that centers of employment or availability of work was the main cause of the concentration of people.
The entire mice population in the experiment perished not from disease or external causes but from their inability to reproduce due to what the researchers identified as maternal breakdown or infant neglect by females "overwhelmed by the constant presence of other mice, abandoned their young. Some became aggressive, even killing their own offspring. Birth rates plummeted, and nurturing behavior broke down completely".
Just recently Elon Musk said that "overpopulation is the most nihilistic lie ever told", falling birth rate could end civilization. On Oct 3, 2024 according to his earlier concern he declared on social media that declining global fertility rates "will lead to mass extinction of entire nations."
"The Rise and Fall of the Mouse Empire", the experimenters said, has a parallel equivalent in the history of humanity.
Four years ago I wrote, "All The World's A Stage (Apr. 7, 2012) and I quote, "and all the empires of men merely players; they have their exits and their entrances .. referring to the emergence and collapse of empires at various places around the globe in just the last four thousand or so years".
It was a quick look at history where, "the world's a stage for human conquest after conquest, followed by collapse after collapse - disintegrating into ashes in one place, followed by birth and emergence in another".
I quote once more from that musing, "About 2,300 years before Christ's birth was when the first "formally" recognized empire began. The Akkadian Empire arose from the region we know today as Iraq. As trajectories of empires go, that empire collapsed to be followed by others but always from another region. The Hittite empire came into being in what is now Turkey, in 1600 B.C. The Assyrians from northern Iraq took it all back about three centuries later. Around that time, or maybe two generations later Rome was founded in 750 B.C."
Persia, what is now Iran, had its turn but not for very long, when Alexander The Great put an end to it but the lull lasted only for so long. You see the pattern. "For it was the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome" that summarizes the fate of all that followed. The sun did finally set on the British empire, Spain had a good run and then here we are today - America. So far, it had far exceeded the average shelf life of all prior empires. So far, but can it hold on?
Looking back again, we found that every empire that emerged and collapsed not once did one ever came back to regain its power and status.
I am writing this as a cautionary tale, not in any way a dreadful wish or condemnation but a plea for a re-examination of how and where this country used to be and perchance a fervent and hopeful prayer for the restoration of the values that made it great - a serious look at how to break the curse of the 250-year average shelf life of all preceding empires.
The good life as we typically define it is always relative to how others measure up. We've come up with the term, "standard of living" as a gauge upon which we measure what a good life is and what is not but it begs the question, "compared to what or with whom?"
A lower middle class life in this country is easily far above the average upper class in many regions of the world where car ownership, a home with indoor plumbing and reliable utilities such as water and electricity are examples of privileges denied the general population. That is the reason that families and individuals are willing to leave their homeland to come here even if it means starting over mid-way through middle age or even older. Indeed, viewed from the lenses of the third world perspective, America is comparably utopian.
America, not unlike those that preceded it, emerged from the strong values of generations of men and women who strove to free itself as a colony, to create a nation, and achieved economic and military dominance that twice saved Europe from two world wars, and much of Asia during the Pacific war that ran concurrently with WWII. It was quite a feat.
But today, it faces a challenge not coming from the outside but from within itself. And like all empires that preceded it, it is approaching the "Universe 25" phenomenon that plagued the Roman and Greek empires if we must pick examples. Italy and Greece used to be the seat of those empires. We see only traces of their past grandeur in much of the world today but what is left of the original homeland are facsimiles of their power and influence.
Politically, America is now a divided nation. Socially, it is being challenged from conserving its original ideals by new liberal ideologues who want to fundamentally change the capitalist-based system to a socio-economic equity focused system. It is so perplexing that the new breed of liberal politicians want to change something that had worked for over two centuries into something that is almost anathema to everything that made this country into a benevolent superpower (remember the two world wars it ended).
Empires always failed from within as soon as their population reached the zenith of affluence, overabundance of leisure from the privileges of the haves, followed by a precipitous breakdown in social ethics and behavior.
What John Calhoun wanted to convey from his experiment was that human societies behaved not far too differently from mice that were provided everything as to have found little else to do with their time that used to be spent foraging for food, building their nests, protecting their territory, raising their young, etc. Socialism as proposed by a few politicians will only exacerbate it.
Calhoun concluded from his observations that mice, as with humans, when the sense of purpose, the activities to attain a goal is lost to the ease with which the basic needs are fulfilled, the mind is left to wander aimlessly. He used terms to describe mice to have suffered from maternal breakdown, loss of nurturing behavior that led to complete social dysfunction, which seems to describe purely human flaws.
Critics, of course, will be quick to point out that such conclusions are a stretch. Perhaps. But we will have to ask, for example, why the rise in teenage hooliganism, blatant crowd-shoplifting only occurs in densely populated major cities like San Francisco, LA, and Washington D.C. but not in urban towns and farm land areas? Clearly these phenomenon do not happen in third world countries where excessive leisure time is absent.
What Calhoun pointed out further was that when overpopulation is not saddled by lack of the basic necessities (as with the mice experiment), coupled with family breakdowns, erosion of moral foundations, societal permissiveness, social media immersion, human behavior will sink to its lowest level.
Again, there is plenty to argue about or debate over.
Well, staying with goal as outlined at the top of every musing I write, I leave a lot of space "between the lines" for the reader, so you can take the time to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues you did not have the time to consider but now you may want to look into because you have a moment or two to spare ..
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