A meme on this study (link is https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-experiment-and-reflections-on-the-welfare-state/)–which deals John B. (not John C.) Calhoun’s experiments in mouse utopias–has been floating around, and I had intended to make a post on it. But I this is a good commentary.
The gist of the thing is that mice, when you give them everything they need, such that life is easy and requires no decisions, become stupid, decadent, and die. Literally. All the individual mice in the contained utopia die. Every time.
And ask yourself if any specific examples of this come to mind:
Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid.
I will append two comments.
1) Mice have obviously survived just fine in the wild for millions of years. So you cannot use this experiment to generalize to “humanity”, at least humanity OUTSIDE OF A CAGE.
And to be clear, we live very easy, very decadent lives, most of us, that don’t involve life and death decisions, the POSSIBILITY of hunger for most of us, or any real doubt that we will be taken care of, in some way, by someone.
We are not yet in cages of someone else’s making, but greater wealth and ease are clearly not what would be GOOD for us. On the contrary: we need more pain, more challenge, more fear and excitement, and more difficulty generally. Most of us.
In that vein, I’ve been considering reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/0593138767/ref=sr_1_1
You can cut and paste the link. As I say, you need more work in your life.
I probably won’t read it–I think I’m doing OK in the challenge department–but then again, I MAY.
2) What I would suggest is that the system as a whole lost information by losing Complexity, as an Emergent property of countless individual volitional–which is to say they could have gone this way, or could have gone that way, as in the wild–acts.
This leads to the conclusion that just occurred to me that opposite of complexity is not simplicity, but rather decay and decadence. A living human beings behavior is complex. The decay of a human body, much less so. A vibrant human society is complex, richly ordered, many faceted. A decadent human society is monomaniacal, repetitive, simplistic, and lacking in energy.