Mouse Utopia 25

Whenever human beings try to create ‘Utopia’, they invariably fuck it up. In China they had Mao’s Utopia, which didn’t really go all that well. I think they eventually managed to feed everyone through the great good fortune that, for reasons unbeknownst to any Marxist professor, some 50 million people stopped needing food.

Some 60 years ago now, John B. Calhoun ran a series of fascinating experiments on mice. He wanted to investigate things like overpopulation and population density and how that related to resource availability to see if any insights could be gained. Perhaps ironically one famous novel exploring themes of hardship and struggle and the futility of ‘the American Dream’ is Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.

I haven’t read it although I probably ‘should’. If it had been called “Of Space Mice and Men: yippee, bang, buzz, look at how big my evil space laser is” I might possibly have given it a try.

In the now-famous experiment known as “Universe 25” Calhoun obtained some weird, and unsettling, results. He started off a mouse colony (damn colonials get everywhere) and made sure they had (initially) plenty of space, and lots of food. They were pampered trust-fund mice.

Things started off OK, but then took a bizarre turn. It’s well worth reading up about it but here’s the AI summary I was provided (via Google - I’ve no idea how to use AI proper and have never used it)

Universe 25 was a 1968-1973 laboratory experiment by ethologist John B. Calhoun, creating a "mouse utopia" with unlimited food, water, and nesting, but no predators. Despite perfect conditions, the population, which peaked at 2,200, suffered a total social collapse, leading to violence, cannibalism, and a "behavioral sink" where breeding stopped entirely, resulting in extinction.

Some of the behaviours observed by Calhoun were even weirder than this bald summary would indicate.

Of course, the obvious criticism is that it’s not really legitimate (or even possible?) to properly extrapolate from mousey things to human beans - and yet don’t some of the pathologies and weirdness (and degeneracy) we’re seeing today seem to have just too many parallels with this attempt to establish a mouse joy vibe?

I like lists. They help me to establish some kind of order in the chaos I often call ‘life’. I’ve stopped making the “things to do around the house” list, though, because it’s too depressing and every valiant attempt to reduce the population of this list results in failure. The items on this list just breed too fast for me to keep up with. I’m only half joking.

The thing about lists, particularly when it applies to some of the great ‘ideas’ of today, is that you begin to get some kind of feel for the enormity of absurdity we’re facing in these ‘enlightened’ times. In no particular order, and as they spring to mind, we’ve had

Cops hunt down black people to kill
Women can have cocks
Borders are immoral
Tax the rich more
Communism would work if done properly
Iran can be negotiated with in good faith
Islam is the religion of peace
All ‘minorities’ are held back by invisible, intersecting, strands of Oppression™
Colonialism and slavery are the reasons why Africa is still poor (on average)
Maths is racist, achievement is racist
There’s no such thing as objective truth
We live in a rape culture (although with immigration that’s become more of a reality)
Requiring ID to vote is very wrong
Mail in ballots are secure
Parents have no right to know about John being a Jemima at school
The nuclear family needs to be abolished (one of BLM’s “policies”, incidentally)
Black people today, with no connection to slavery, deserve (individually) millions in reparations
Countries who actively supplied the product (the slaves) deserve billions in reparations
White slavery is worse than all other kinds of slavery (for which no reparations are requested)
All white colonialism is bad and evil. Other colonizers (like Muslims) get a free pass
The sex binary was an invention of those same evil white colonialists
Accounting is a tool of white supremacy
We don’t need fossil fuels anymore
White people should not be allowed to sell food that is from outside their ‘culture’
White people don’t have culture
Words are violence
Silence is violence
Western nations (but curiously not places like India or China) need to pay gazillions in ‘climate’ reparations
Jesus was Palestinian
Jews control the world and are responsible for all its ills
You can just let people with 35 convictions for violence safely back into the community
Black people need restorative justice in the form of lighter sentencing
DEI isn’t racist
Only white people can be racist
Anyone who feels they are a woman is a woman
It’s OK to be white is a hateful thing to say
You can import millions of people with a very different cultural background to yours with no consequence
Hamas are just resistance fighters engaged in ‘decolonization’
There was a genocide committed in Gaza
There was terrible famine in Gaza
So what about Iran killing 30,000+ protesters; ICE killed 2 (both using weapons at the time)
Removing illegal aliens from your country is the same thing that Hitler did to the Jews
If you voted for Trump you’re no longer part of this family
Biden was as sharp as a tack
The 2020 US election was the most secure in the history of the known universe
The Islamic letter box costume for women is a totally free choice
Trump is a dictator whilst mandating vaccinations and calling for the internment of the non-vaccinated is not dictatorial at all
Islamic terrorism is caused by Islamophobia
Being on time and rational thinking are white supremacist behaviours
No one is safe until everyone is safe
15 minute cities
The world has enough (and accessible) rare earth metals to sustain Net Zero
Evidence of fraud on a massive scale should not be investigated
Free speech is a threat to ‘our democracy’
Requiring that hiring is based on merit is racism
It’s great for kids to see near-naked men in dog masks with fake dog tails shoved up their arses
Food that isn’t drowned in spice is bland and tasteless (obviously these people haven’t ever been to a decent restaurant, and I say that as a spice lover)
Abortion up to term is perfectly fine

If I think of any more before I finish this piece I’ll add them - but isn’t that enough, for now?

What I’m wondering is whether we’re actually in the middle of some kind of simulation, with some great Calhoun-like figure tweaking things just to see how we collectively behave?

It kind of feels like that at times. We’ve degenerated into absurdity. It’s farcical. We can certainly have a pop at Trump’s exaggerated rhetoric - but what about this total moon-unit?

Yes, I chased down the video of her actually saying this. Good Lord

This is but a single grain of sand on the beach of insanity we’re having to walk on. It does afford us some great opportunities for humour, though

And then of course we’ve recently had the fruitcake with the blond Hitler comb-over

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a significant fraction of our populace have gone abso-fucking-lutely bleedin mental.

Some have pointed to the ‘feminization’ of our societies as the main culprit, others cast their gaze over feminism itself. Some blame the internet and smart phones and the crappiest education systems designed to weed out anyone possessing an original thought.

But I wonder whether we just had it too good and the shadow of Mouse Utopia is lurking somewhere.