Cram enough rats or mice into a cage and they start eating each other.
The world population is approaching 8 billion people, but somehow I doubt it will make it that far. Experiments have been performed on rats and mice, crowding them into cages and letting them reproduce like mad. The end result is madness. Some rats devolve into sloth-like creatures who come out only to feed. Others turn violent or even resort to cannibalism. Still others turned gay and started humping each other all day long. Birth rates start to plummet as fewer female rats carried to term or took care of their offspring. The whole system broke down, even though the rats have unlimited food and water to survive with. The author of the study called this "behavioral sink" and at the time, it was a hot topic among the "zero population growth" set - back when we cared about population growth and before we just gave up.
Funny thing, that. After abandoning its one-child policy and promoting population growth, China now faces a decreasing population in the coming years. People feel too stressed to have more than one child - if any - and are waiting longer to get married and have children, because of economic concerns. Kinda hard to have kids when you are sleeping at the gigafactory and working 80-hour weeks. Quality of life comes in to play.
The Japanese, as usual, are ahead of this game. After decades of crowding people into capsule hotels or jamming them into subway cars at rush hour, the country faces a decline in population. Younger people are just not having children or say they cannot afford them. The population ages and the workforce shrinks. And in a frightening parallel to the rat studies, some young men (mostly men) are retreating to their bedrooms and refusing to leave - for years at a time.
Both China and Japan have population densities far higher than many other parts of the world. But as in the rat study, most of these people are crowded into urban areas. There are plenty of rural, sparsely populated areas in both countries (I've been to them, in Japan) but like the rats in the study, who all crowded into one cage, people seem to enjoy the company of others, or find it more convenient to live en masse.
I think overpopulation can be tied directly to all of our world problems, from global warming to terrorism, to various proxy wars, the rise of religious fundamentalism, new sexual freedom, random violence and so on. In a sparsely populated world, not many people care if you are an asshat, but when you crowd people together, being a wanker means pissing off other people, who in turn, get violent or see violence as the only solution to their problems.
The Calhoun experiments of a "rat utopia" sound a lot like what is going on in the world today. We are told by some folks that what the world needs is more rat utopia - guaranteed annual income and the like, so that people can exist with no purpose in life and just sloth around, play video games all day long, in between microwave burritos and masturbating to internet porn.
Of course, some people believe that humans are not animals and thus not subject to animal instincts. Look around you - that isn't true. What we see in humans is the desire to explain individual behaviors as being aberrations and not part of an overall quantum behavior pattern. A mentally ill young man shoots up an elementary school, and we want to read his "manifesto" to understand "why" he did it. We don't want to think about the larger issues of a society that fetishisizes guns or that promotes racial hatred or ignores mental health issues. Like the rats in the Calhoun experiments, parents drop the ball in their parenting roles, ignoring the signs of mental health problems, or even denying they exist. In one celebrated incident, a mother decides her son isn't schizophrenic but "autistic" and that the "cure" is to buy him an AR-15. Chaos ensues.
If all this sounds pessimistic, it isn't - it just is what it is. Anyone with any sort of background in math and science can easily figure out that there is an "end point" to population growth, and we are seeing all signs of this end point, right about now. Eventually, resources become stretched thin and people start fighting and killing over diminishing resources. The Calhoun experiments show that rats and mice will form gangs and defend their food sources even in an environment of unlimited food resources. But of course, we have no such unlimited resources, making the problem all that more difficult for us.
But long before we are fighting over the last kernel of corn, other things will kick in. Diseases, plagues, epidemics and pandemics will thin out the population. We end up polluting our environment to the point where we are swimming in our own excrement. The Calhoun experiments provided a "rat utopia" with perpetual food, water, and clean bedding. Imagine how it would have been if the rats had to fight over food while knee-deep in their own poop.
For decades - centuries now - mankind has been faced with this issue and this choice. Do our big brains allow us to think our way out of this trap? Because it is a trap that every species on the planet has confronted at one time or another. Can we logically see this coming and take steps to avert disaster and extinction?
For most people, the answer is a vehement "No!" Superstition and Religion (and I am being redundant here) dominate the thinking of most people, planet-wide. Almost every major religion exhorts its followers to "go forth and multiply!" in order to out-populate competing religions and races. Needless to say, this is a recipe for planet-wide disaster.
The Elon fan-boys were entranced by Musk as he seemed, at first, to be offering a vision of a world where logical thinking would replace self-interest and self-dealing and superstition and conspiracy theories. We would all live in a wonderful future where rooftop solar panels would power our houses by day, while Lithium-Ion battery packs kept us going at night. Meanwhile, our pollution-free electric cars would recharge from the sun. Rockets would take us to the Moon and Mars, where humanity would form colonies and explore the solar system! It was a beautiful dream. It all came crashing down.
For whatever reason, it seems that Musk has abandoned that dream in favor of self-dealing and self-promotion. He is embracing the ultimate superstition - the Republican Party. No doubt when his vaunted Tesla "Cybertruck" comes out, it will be "blowing coal" with a 10-liter diesel engine, now that his new friends, the Koch brothers, have gotten him to see the light.
It is a battle - for the hearts and minds of humanity. Centuries ago, they called it the "age of reason" - with philosophers like Voltaire wondering whether there was more to life than the brutish exploitative existence that most people lived. Our revolutionary forefathers, albeit many of them slave owners, were fans of those philosophies and often agnostic in their religious beliefs. Thomas Jefferson cut up his bible and pasted "the good parts" into a book to form his own "Jefferson Bible."
Today, these thinkers are characterized by the Religious Right as fundamentalist "full gospel" Baptists who slavishly followed every directive of the Bible, even the parts that disagree with the other parts. In fact, they make these "founding fathers" into quasi-religious characters whose pronouncements are like those of saints - and should be followed without question, even if what they are alleged to have said was never actually said.
We are devolving into a world of superstition and disbelief. Even as our technology advances to dizzying heights, fewer and fewer people actually know how even basic technology works. Today, most people cannot drive a manual transmission car or even change a tire. It isn't that they are incapable of doing so, but they chose ignorance over knowledge. Even worse, they posit ignorance as a social advantage. After all, only "the little people" actually know how to fix things.
At one time, I was optimistic that maybe we would turn things around. During the Clinton years, there was talk that the national debt might actually be paid off in a few years - thanks to the end of the Cold War and that "the end of history" was right around the corner.
But even then, the seeds were sown. I mentioned before how the culture of belligerence has taken hold in America - and worldwide. The fetish with guns - and the willingness to use them at the drop of a hat - is only part of the problem. The obsession with being "tough" and violent is the other part. On YouTube you can spend hours watching "road rage" videos from all around the world. Someone is "mad" that another person isn't driving fast enough because "they are in a hurry!" but yet they have enough time to start a roadside fist-fight. Worse yet are all the "fight" videos that are filmed in elementary schools and junior high schools. No one condemns this sort of juvenile violence, but in fact, in the "comments" section you see MMA fans dissecting the punching abilities of the various combatants. No one bothers to ask as to whether routine violence on the playground is abnormal.
The list goes on and on - the fierce nationalism I wrote about earlier, for example. This isn't some isolated incident that can be traced to one or more petty dictators or dictator-wannabes, but rather a worldwide trend driven by the "I've got mine, Jack, you get yours!" mentality as the rats fight for that last bit of food kibble (or barrel of oil).
The very, very scary thing about the Calhoun experiments is that even after the rat (or mouse) population plummeted back to more normal breeding levels, the aberrant behaviors continued to exist until extinction. Over the millennia, mankind has used wars as a means of checking population growth. disease, drought, and other "natural" phenomenon also served to keep the population in check. If Calhoun's experiments have any application to mankind, it would seem to indicate that even if population were to be severely decreased (by, for example, a major war or pandemic or the like) we would still drive ourselves to extinction.
I always thought that apocalyptic movies such as "The Stand" or "Children of Men" or "Mad Max" or the like were kind of stupid, in that these movies posited that a huge portion of the population would be wiped out by disease, infertility, nuclear war, or whatever, but that the surviving population, instead of coming together, would fight each other to the death. The narrative is that food and gasoline would be in short supply, but if you think about it, if 9/10ths of the population evaporated overnight, the supply of food and whatever would be more than enough for the remaining few.
Now, I am not so sure. The Calhoun experiments seem to indicate that even as population pressures relax, "behavioral sink" would result in the remaining population turning on itself.
In gardening, it is often necessary to prune a shrub or tree to ensure that it is healthy and grows well. Here on the island, we have a lot of Azaleas, which like the acid soil under the pine trees. Ours were looking kind of ratty after nearly 50 years, so I cut them down and ran the stubs over with the lawn mower, hoping the patch would go back to lawn. Well, that was two months ago and the Azaleas have come back, with a vengeance. This time around, though, they are full and hearty and not the scraggly mess they were before.
It is too bad we can't be like the Azaleas.
UPDATE: If the Calhoun experiments have any validity as applied to humans, then I guess Mark and I are a pair of "the beautiful ones" - living remotely and spending all day grooming our fur and napping.
