He wanted to see what they'd do.
They didn't disappoint.
Or, I guess, they did.
Every single time, the rats ruined everything for themselves and each other. They never reached their carrying capacity, not even close. They overcrowded each other on purpose. They started competing for resources and fighting for no reason. It didn't matter how much food Calhoun gave them. It didn't matter how comfortable or how sanitary he made it. The rats always hit a social or psychological tipping point. After that, everything went to hell in a handbasket.
It grew to about 2,000 rats and then fell all the way down to 27 before the end of the experiment. The nondominant beta rats started attacking each other, even when they had plenty of food and even girlfriends.
The females ran away.
They hid.
Even the dominant females started wounding their own babies and kicking them out of their nests before they were old enough to survive on their own. The mere presence of a dominant male triggered violent behavior. Eventually, the population became completely unproductive.
Nobody wanted to work anymore...
Their social bonds disintegrated. The rats became dysfunctional, violent, and withdrawn. Only a handful survived.
Those rats made it by cutting ties with civilization. They moved to remote areas of the paradise. They didn't do much except eat, sleep, and groom. They wandered around the edges, I guess for exercise.
Calhoun called them the beautiful ones.
After rat civilization collapsed, the beautiful ones kept their distance from each other. They didn't try to mate or rebuild.
They left each other alone.
Calhoun called these events behavioral sinks. It wasn't exactly a failure, either. He gained insights that we can learn from.
We're living through a behavioral sink right now.
Look around...
Corporations have been nurturing our worst impulses for a hundred years. They've conditioned generations of Americans to chase happiness through consumption. We even have a name for it:
Retail therapy.
When we discover the lie at the heart of consumerism, they throw a bunch of mindfulness seminars at us. They tell us we'd be happier living on a ranch or a farm, then they buy up all the farms. They tell us to spend more time with family, then they berate us for working from home.
No wonder we're going crazy. (...)
Look at how we're acting. We're voluntarily crowding into the least habitable cities and states. Look at the population growth in places like Texas, Arizona, and Florida. People should be trying to get out.
Instead, they're packing in.
We've got a big problem with angry young men who think they're doomed to spend the rest of their lives as incels. They're driving away women with their own crappy attitudes, but they don't see it. Young women are giving up. Some of them are just trying to get through one day at a time. Others think they can solve their problems by wearing seventeen friendship bracelets.
As a society, we’re not okay…
We're actually doing worse than the rats. We've created a handful of rich rats and allowed them to hoard all of our cheddar.
by Jessica Wildfire, Ok Doomer | Read more:
Image: ShotPrime Studio
