“All this is only for the mice and myself to admire!”
— Catherine the Great
“The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.”
— Gary Wolf
“The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.”
— Craig Venter
“A mouse never entrusts his life to only one hole.”
— Plautus
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
— Margaret Atwood
Cage a bunch of mice in a giant box and give them everything that they could ever need. Outcome? Not happy mice, but complete extinction within five years, in multiple experiments. Why, when they had everything? Maybe the “everything” is missing something vitally important for survival long-term. What might this be, and does it have any implications for human survival?
Apologies for this peculiar digression, but I have been struggling to make some useful sense out of all of the verbiage out there predicting imminent collapse of almost everything important. Most of these appear to be based on “gut feel” or on a fairly narrow viewpoint. Nothing really persuasive.
But something very big – and completely different from anything we have ever experienced – seems to be underway. Maybe a perfect storm kind of happening. Next post, I hope.
Meanwhile …
John Calhoun’s mouse utopia experiments
While digging around for something useful in figuring out what’s going on collapse-wise, I ran across a couple of short articles in Natural News about researcher John Calhoun’s 1960 “mouse utopia” experiments. [Here is a very helpful summary of the experiments and findings on The Physics of Life website: “John Calhoun’s Experiment”]:
Ethan Huff caught my attention with this one:
“The world we currently live in is the antithesis of freedom. It is an engineered globalist experiment involving ‘caged’ living; fake, chemical-laden ‘food;’ social media and technological authoritarianism; and an endless supply of fake fiat ‘money’ that the globalist overlords use to rob the masses and amass more power for themselves. The result of all this will be self-extinction, as demonstrated in scientist John Calhoun’s 1960s ‘mouse utopia’ experiment.”
“That experiment, in case you are unfamiliar with it, involved caging thousands of mice in a giant box and giving them seemingly everything they could ever need – at least from the experimenter’s perspective. They were given all the food and water they could ever want, easily accessible to them, while being insulated from the normal predators these rodents would encounter out in the wild.”
“Initially, the mice living in this utopia appeared to thrive. They ate and drank to their heart’s content, reproduced abundantly, and lived happy-seeming lives. Over time, however, problems began to arise, resulting in population declines and an eventual trend towards self-annihilation and extinction.”
“Calhoun replicated his experiment multiple times using both mice and rats, and the outcome was the same every time: full-on extinction within 1,588 days. It turns out that small rodents were not meant to live in confined spaces, even when there is seemingly enough of it to go around for everyone.”
Note that the space available was adequate: the size of the habitat was designed to host 3,840 mice, about double the experiment habitat’s actual capacity needs.
The real story is not space limitations …
Reading further in The Physics of Life summary, the conclusion Calhoun actually reached is somewhat different. Confined space wasn’t the problem:
It was the lack of challenges that led inevitably to extinction.
Mike Adams, chief honcho of Natural News, pointed out the actual extremely important conclusion:
“Many scientists have dismissed any link between Calhoun’s “mouse utopia” experiments and human society, but in the years since these conclusions were drawn, human society has come to strikingly resemble the self-annihilation tendencies of the mice.”
“For example, in human society today, we note that socialism / progressivism teaches children that competition is bad. ‘Everyone’s a winner’ is the mantra of our time, and this creates an environment where children are not challenged. In fact, it is no longer even socially acceptable to subject children to any challenges at all. Students are selected into colleges merely based on their skin color or sexual orientations, and corporations hire people based on precisely the same traits, regardless of merit. As Kuban writes, the principle conclusion of Calhoun’s experiments is as follows:”
“– The lack of challenges gradually spoils the behaviour of subsequent generations of a population.
– This degeneration is inevitable and leads to eventual self-extinction.
– Due to the lack of challenges, the extinction of a population is inevitable.
– It lasts several generations, but is inexorable.”
I think that Mike didn’t quite see what I saw. I saw the WEF’s Great Reset and its New World Order screaming at me. As WEF leader Klaus Schwab glibly noted:
“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
The WEF’s New World Order is planning to confine the bulk of the world’s population to cities, which is very sustainable so they believe, and to supply each resident just what is needed for this “happy” life. Nothing to struggle against or worry about. Utopia for us.
A no-challenges life leads inexorably to (mice) extinction
Well of course we mostly-humans are not mice. Calhoun also did these experiments on rats, with the same extinction outcome. We do seem to have a sizable population of rats among our mostly-human population, so perhaps his conclusions are generally applicable to humans as well.
The Physics of Life article seems to address this issue in a somewhat helpful manner (see comments section at end):
“Sophisticated living objects are born with a given structure and given basic behavioural patterns due to its DNA. Moreover, they are equipped with the possibility of acquiring new skills. The neonate has the opportunity to learn from the parents, the environment and the community. This learning encapsulates the essential behaviours of their own and their offspring’s survival.”
“Firstly, they learn how to feed – in John Calhoun’s study, due to effortless provision, the youngsters did not learn this. So they could not learn how to act pursuantly. If they are not able to acquire food, they cannot acquire other things, like a partner, community etc.”
“Secondly, the subsequent generations did not learn what they should do gradually, from generation to generation, they became worse and worse teachers. This led to a total loss of breeding, because children gradually lost their knowledge of bringing up their offspring and how to get a partner.”
“Initial survival, understood as survival of myself, is due to DNA. The survival of more sophisticated species depends on nurturing acquired from those around us. Scientists call these MEME’s. The study shows how MEMEs degenerate causing extinction.”
“Creatures with higher cognitive abilities would be able to restart their normal pursuant life, provided the degeneration is not deep enough and they have to fight to survive. The mice in Calhoun’s experiment had no such an opportunity to resurrect their community.”
Just think about a life without challenges. I can’t even imagine such a life. Or maybe we all got a taste of something like this life during our COVID lockdowns. Workplace and work challenges are vitally important to the wellbeing of most of us. Zoom-enabled interactions can’t really replace challenging face-to-face interactions.
Even though we are not mice or rats – or at least the majority of us aren’t, mammals do share many fundamental behavioral characteristics. Dealing with survival challenges seems to me to be one of the likely commonalities.
Serious living challenges are how we learn and adapt. No challenges, little or no learning. Calhoun’s experiments suggest that low-level mammal behavior in a no-challenge environment has some chance of leading to extinction, as Mike Adams points out above.
Are we headed for a “no-challenges” world?
Two recent posts – here and here – looked at digital IDs, digital self, and digital money as moving ahead very quickly in our world right now. These seem almost surely to lead to very strong control over populations globally. They aim to tell us what we can do and what we can’t do. Just follow the rules as the leaders lay them out and we won’t have to worry about much of anything.
Seems pretty much like a Calhoun mouse life to me.
Maybe the correct way to view Calhoun’s findings is that they apply at basic instinctual levels in mammals generally. We, or at least most of us, are known as mammals so perhaps the generalization that “lack of challenges in life can lead to extinction” applies to us.
We should therefore not strive for, or let others force us into, a highly-controlled life. We should be left free to learn the hard way, as I have pointed out here and here.
A life without regular learning challenges is not living.
So, where I come out in all of this is that many of our leaders are unknowingly leading us into a few- or no-challenges world that will result in an effective extinction.
Timeframe for our extinction?
Mice have a lifespan of 12 to 18 months. Calhoun’s mice extinction span came out to around four years – about 3 to 4 lifespans in mouse-ville. Human lifespan globally is around 70 years, so that our mouse-type extinction might occur over 200 to 300 years. That’s a pretty long time, unless our extinction clock started ticking quite a while ago.
On the downside, our global-ruler-wannabes may well succeed in accelerating this extinction, which is now called “depopulation” – a much less threatening term. The driver here is not likely to be lack of potential challenges, but instead an excess of control measures leading to a no-challenges world. And we can’t forget about our now-regular pandemics that are helping out greatly.
Live free or die
New Hampshire’s official State motto – live free or die – seems to capture, at least in rough terms, the challenge we are facing today. The battle is not “democracy” (which does not exist in practice) versus “totalitarianism” (which seems to have a somewhat limited half-life). Control seems to me to be the underlying issue.
People generally require a fairly sizable degree of personal control over their lives. This obliges them to live with their consequent good and bad outcomes. Some folks don’t like this part of having control, which probably makes them good candidates for whatever Klaus and his WEF are up to.
Qualifying the “life free or die” challenge operationally today seems to be more like “give me sufficient control over my life” or … something unpleasant will happen. Few want to have either absolute control or control over absolutely every aspect of their lives. They are likely to give up control willingly over aspects of life that they really have no ability (or desire) to control effectively.
Of course, people will have widely differing ideas of just what they want or need in their personal set of “controllables”. A social and political control environment that accommodates a reasonably wide range of individual controllables seems ideal. Needless to say, such a human-utopia appears to be under great challenges today.
To me, at least, this argues strongly for a world of diversity – especially including diversity of what people are entitled (not “allowed”) to control. A world of diversity is certainly not anywhere close to a “one-world” anything. It would be a world containing nation-states of many sizes and control natures. It would also require relatively free movement between states so that people could locate in one that best-fits their needs for personal control.
Reduce government scope of control
Government by its very nature is a control mechanism. It is rules and enforcement measures. Some are clearly necessary, such as you can’t go around killing whoever you want, while others are needed within tight and acceptable constraints. We do need government, as I concluded in the prior post, but it has to be limited greatly by some means or other.
Limited government is a truly great challenge, as the U.S. founders deeply understood. While you do need some government, human nature in practice gets in the way of effectively limiting its reach. In the post referenced above, I argued that government effectiveness was inherently determined by its leadership, which is heavily populated (about 10%) by sociopaths, psychopaths, and the almost-psychopathic. Such leaders tend to want more control, not limited or less control.
Such is perhaps the world’s greatest challenge today: controlling and limiting government. This may sadly turn out to be impossible in general, leaving the unpleasant options involving protests, civil wars, and all manner of similar nastiness.
Turning our world into a Calhoun mice world seems to be what many leaders and wannabes are up to at this moment. Actually, worse than that. Calhoun’s mice had everything they needed to live physically, but only freedom within their caged environment. Our caged environment is called a One (New) World Order.
Living under a challenge-free but highly-controlled world seems likely to lead to human extinction, or at least to the Georgia Guidestones population goal of 500 million. Of course, some of the as-yet un-depopulated folk may inconveniently consider the control environment itself to be their main challenge.
Bottom line:
Even though Calhoun identified lack of challenges as an inexorable extinction path, it seems that human nature is going to create an endless array of living challenges for us non-mice humans. So, we are in no danger of a Calhoun-mice flavor of extinction. Our human nature, probably with the help of many nuclear bombs, may take care of the extinction matter expeditiously. Otherwise, we will continue to manufacture an abundance of life-supporting challenges that will prevent a Calhoun mice-extinction event for us non-mice.
Related Reading
- Mike Adams in Natural News summarized the extinction cycle of Calhoun’s mice and rats:
“Phase A – Day 1 – Strive period – Establishing territories and making nests. First children born.”
“Phase B – Day 105 – Exploit period – Rapid population growth. Social hierarchy established. Offspring higher in those with social dominance.”
“Phase C – Day 315 – Stagnation phase – Population growth slows. Males become feminized. Females become aggressive, taking over roles of males. Violence becomes common. Social disorder skyrockets. Male mice begin to assume female roles (mouse transgenderism). Mouse / rat homosexuality begins to emerge. Pedophilia grows rampant as ‘they begin mounting the young.’ Fertility falls in females. Mothers reject their young.”
“Phase D – Day 560 – Death phase – Population collapses. ‘No young surviving.’ No longer any conception. Non-reproducing females resort to eating, grooming and sleeping. No interest in socialization. No social skills learned by remaining survivors. No ability to be aggressive, which means no ability to defend their young or their nests. Avoidance of all stressful activities, including anything resembling competition. Preoccupation with grooming and physical attractiveness. Inability to navigate challenges of the real world. Only the outer appearance of being superior, but lacking cognitive and social skills. Totally unable to reproduce, raise young or compete for anything.”
“Lawrence W. Reed, writing for FEE.org, adds the following observation on all this in an article about the rise of the welfare state:”
“The turning point in this mouse utopia, Calhoun observed, occurred on Day 315 when the first signs appeared of a breakdown in social norms and structure. Aberrations included the following: females abandoning their young; males no longer defending their territory; and both sexes becoming more violent and aggressive. Deviant behavior, sexual and social, mounted with each passing day. The last thousand mice to be born tended to avoid stressful activity and focused their attention increasingly on themselves.”
- In the same article, Mike concludes in his usual wishy-washy manner that:
“This is precisely the path being pursued by left-wing socialism / communism / collectivism. This also highlights the dangers of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) or welfare / stimulus giveaways. When you give resources to populations without any apparent scarcity or competition, those population raise generations of offspring that are incapable of functioning in society.”
“We are seeing all the other signs of the mouse utopia collapse in modern human society as well:
“– Infanticide and abortion, even the celebration of killing the young
– Rampant homosexuality and transgenderism
– Pedophilia and exploitation of the young by older members of society
– Increased violence
– Collapsing socialization skills, exacerbated by masks and lockdowns
– Obsession with self-grooming behaviors, as we see demonstrated by today’s youth when it comes to selfies, social media presence, etc.
– Collapse in fertility of both males and females; spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, inability to cope with adversity
– Bullying of certain individuals in the population, withdrawal from social circles. If these mice had guns, there would have been mass mice shootings.
– Complete withdrawal from biological reproduction as transgenderism, pedophilia, violence and lunacy takes over.”
“Does any of that sound familiar? It sounds like every left-wing city in western society. What the mice demonstrated in the 1960s, left-wing humans are living out in the 2020s. The only real difference is that a generation of mice takes about 50 days to play out, while a generation of humans takes about 20 – 25 years.”
“In summary, population itself is not the problem. Collectivism and the welfare state is what will lead to humanity’s self-annihilation.”
“As economist Thomas Sowell stated, ‘The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.’”
