Civilization Will Be Very Different Soon...

This video is sponsored by NordVPN. Stay protected from online threats and censorship. Get their 2-year plan plus 4 extra months by using my link in the description. In 1968, American ethologist and behavioral scientist John B. Calhoun created a utopia. A perfect world designed for well-being, reproduction, and longevity. If you were a lucky enough mouse to be one of the first to exist inside this world, you experienced a kind of rodent heaven. Endless food, water, and nesting resources, and a clean, stable, well-designed large space with no predators, no storms, and no diseases. However, if you were a mouse born into this utopia just a few generations later, despite the space remaining fundamentally unchanged, just as bountiful, stable, and secure, you experienced a kind of mouse hell. After around one year, the population in Calhoun's constructed habitat went from 8 mice to around a thousand. After two years, it rose to about 2,000. Just two more years after that, all the mice had died. Nothing changed about the habitat or its conditions. Nothing was introduced. Nothing was taken away. It was still fundamentally a mouse utopia. The degeneration and extinction of the mice came solely from the behavior of the mice themselves. This experiment is known as Universe 25. As implied by the name, it wasn't the first time Calhoun constructed a rodent habitat. For decades leading up to Universe 25, and following it, he conducted many rodent-based experiments, building out habitats and conditions, and carefully monitoring and adjusting variables within them. His initial aim was to understand the behaviors of rodents in various population densities to assist with pest management in cities. His research soon expanded and deepened, however, as he began to consider and apply his findings to the management of cities themselves, how humans interact with each other in confined spaces, and how population growth affects both individual behavior and society at large. He wrote, I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life, and its evolution. Around this time in the 1950s and 60s, fears about global overpopulation and its consequences were mounting. Predictions were being made about mass starvations and population crashes. Deviancy and violence were, in fact, already increasing in many modern cities around this time. Many people saw Calhoun's work as representative, or at least crucially insightful, to the conditions humanity was facing and the possible future it might face. In 1954, Calhoun was hired by the National Institute of Mental Health to further advance his research. Here, he began designing, building, and studying elaborate rodent habitats, which would be referred to as Universes. The 25th iteration, Universe 25, is by far the most famous and culturally enduring one, revealing unsettling possibilities about social structures, individual behavior, and how a species can self-destruct under apparently ideal conditions. The universe was a square enclosure 101 inches across and closed by 54-inch-tall walls. Each wall had stairwells with passageways branching off, leading to nesting boxes. Each box contained enough space to comfortably house 15 mice. With 256 boxes in total, there was enough comfortable nesting space to house 3,840 mice in the whole universe. The experiment started with 8 healthy, disease-free mice, 4 males and 4 females. As mentioned, they were given unlimited food, water, and nesting materials. The space was cleaned regularly. The temperature was always perfect. There were no predators or other environmental uncertainties. The conditions were set up to be ideal for life, and then Calhoun and his team simply watched and waited without any further adjustment. What followed, however, just a few mice generations later, was anything but ideal. Over the course of just under 5 years, Calhoun observed what he would describe as 4 phases. The first phase was the adjustment phase. Here, lasting just around 3 months, the initial mice familiarized themselves with the new environment, marked their territory, and began nesting. Then the first pups were born. Here, the second phase began. The exploitation phase. The new mice began mating, and the population began to increase rapidly, doubling every 55 days. In less than a year, there were more than 600 mice. Still, food, water, and nesting was plentiful. But something strange soon began to happen. The third phase. The stagnation phase. Population growth suddenly slowed. It went from doubling every 55 days to doubling approximately every 145. Nearly 3 times slower. Alongside this slowing, a sort of complete behavioral breakdown began to unfold. Random extreme violence, infant mortality, asexuality, self-obsession, and isolation. Mice are inherently social creatures. They have social hierarchies where males establish their position through fighting. The winners gain access to multiple females, and the losers often retreat and move on to start over in different territory. Since there was no friction in the universe, since everything was optimal and easy and available, the population increased rapidly, and this meant there was simultaneously an excess of mice to compete and interact with, while there was also no clear need for competition. If food, water, space, and mating partners are abundant, the point of fighting becomes less clear. Subsequently, social roles also become unclear. Equally, if not more importantly, mice become stuck in these ambiguous social hierarchies with nowhere to go. Where does a mouse go that has lost a fight, or found themselves in a lower-ranked social position when the walls around them remain fixed? There is no escaping the constant sense of inferiority and overwhelm. This led to extreme stress and anxiety, which only further exacerbated the dysfunction, soon causing the mice to abandon social roles and ordinary behavior altogether. Many mice, particularly males, violently lashed out toward other mice for no apparent reason. It was as if the impulse for aggression remained, but the reasons and functions disappeared. Likewise, since many males no longer protected nests, females also became hyper-defensive and aggressive, sometimes even toward their own pups. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some mice simply gave up, receding from the colony into isolation. Calhoun referred to one male group within this category as the Beautiful Ones, because all they did besides eat and sleep was groom themselves. They avoided fights, avoided females and sex, avoided interactions, avoided everything except self-obsession. Likewise, many females hid and isolated in high-up nesting boxes, often experiencing reduced fertility and suppressed maternal instincts. Ultimately, the mouse society broke down. They essentially forgot how to function as mice. They stopped mating and started dying. On day 560 of the experiment, the mice population peaked at 2,200 mice, well over a thousand short of the actual capacity of the habitat. Then, the final phase ensued. The death phase. Just under five years after the first eight mice were placed inside, after thousands more had been born, the last mouse died. The universe was lifeless. Of course, there's a lot of interesting things to consider and interpret here. People and groups have been making interpretations and taking away conclusions from this experiment ever since it was first published. Still to this day, many people map and apply phenomena from Universe 25 onto the conditions of humanity. Admittedly, many things have been, and continue to be, eerily similar and reflective. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the global human population saw a massive, unprecedented increase as infant mortality rates dropped. Several generations later, right now, human birth rates have sharply decreased. Younger generations have seemed to disengage from many ordinary social protocols and timelines, having less sex, and forming fewer relationships. Loneliness is at historically high levels. Radicalization and polarization across views and behaviors are also concerningly high, and increasing. In terms of Calhoun and his team's interpretations and conclusions, they argued that in overpopulated conditions, rodents experienced a dramatic increase in pathological behavior, which spreads and leads to social breakdown. He referred to this phenomenon as behavioral sync. He and others like him applied these findings onto human society, believing that there is a tendency for social animals to self-destruct when overpopulating an environment. He saw this as a possible encroaching risk for humanity if we did not slow population growth or overcome it through other means. In his paper, Death Squared, he wrote, For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial, cultural-conceptual technological society will have been blocked. Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species. Calhoun believed that as the global population continued to increase into the 21st century, we could reach a point where there would be more people than clear social roles in fiscal space. A solution, he argued, was relying more on conceptual, non-physical space. He believed that humans could overcome the effects of overcrowding through a kind of creative ingenuity through technology in abstract realms of culture. The irony here is that, arguably, something closer to the opposite has turned out to be the cause for concern. Increasing global population hasn't directly led to a decrease in available social roles, and it isn't obvious what it has caused and how much. Rather, what appears clearer is that the increased proliferation of technology into every aspect of daily life has made social roles, social bonds, and cultural meaning harder to discern, parse, form, and hold onto. We have created our own kind of Universe 25, not through diminishing physical space, but by bringing the entire world into our homes and minds. We exist now, in large part, in digital and conceptual realms. The internet, media, and the rapidly spreading and shifting memes of culture. What we seem to be left with isn't an escape from the overcrowding of streets and physical space, but an entryway for the overcrowding to enter our every moment. We have confined ourselves too close to each other, addicted to the utopian access of everything at all times. Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? We aren't built for this much stimulation, this much social interaction, this much competition and comparison, and this little structure and clarity. We are bombarded constantly with brief, isolated, meaningless information and interactions. They aren't even really interactions. Much of our interactions with humans now are simulations of interactions, conversations we observe from behind a one-sided screen, huddled alone in our bed or on our couch. We feel the register of social activity, of humanity, but very little of the meaning and resonance. Instead of competing with our neighbors and communities while we're together, we compete with the whole world all the time. Even if we don't participate in online culture or social media or trends in general, we likely observe them from afar, feeling not so dissimilar from those who do participate, left out, confused, overwhelmed, like we're losing some game without any clear rules and undisclosed prizes. What this does and will all ultimately equate to is impossible to say. But on an individual level, it does seem to already be leading to concerning outcomes. Increased radicalization, aggressiveness, numbness to violence, extreme ideologies, or receding into social isolation, apathy, a sense of deviance, a disengagement from social activity. According to global indexes, the world is seeing rising political extremism. At the same time, based on a national survey conducted by Harvard, over 20% of adults report feeling lonely frequently or all the time, with that number rising to around 30% in midlife. Most surveyed individuals say that technology is a contributing factor. One thing Calhoun discovered that is often ignored in discussions of his work is that in Universe 25, as well as in other experiments, he noticed that some deviant behaviors in mice actually proved to be a good thing. For example, he noticed that a certain group of males dug burrows in a specific way to reduce social contact, but the method turned out to be more efficient and functional because they consolidated the process by packing and removing dirt in fewer trips. Of course, deviance isn't always going to lead to good things or greater effectiveness, but the point is, perhaps turning some amount away from the existing conditions and protocols of a society may not always be a bad thing. Perhaps the mice who separated themselves, at least on some level, were actually pursuing the best of the possible situations, even if all situations weren't ideal. In the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Is society healthy that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy. That goes without saying. But why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society? Of course, the goal is arguably always social connection and contributing to a functional society, but perhaps removing or at least distancing oneself from it, at least at times and in intentional ways, is actually the best means toward these goals. Perhaps it's the best of the possible situations, even if all aren't ideal. Ultimately, it isn't obvious what and how much should be taken from Universe 25, as well as Calhoun's work in general. Both are highly critiqued and widely misinterpreted. And crucially, we aren't mice. Even if we share some behavioral similarities, what kinds and how much is unclear. And so, the superimpositions of lessons and morals drawn from mice onto humans is, at the very least, worth seriously questioning. In the end, the mice couldn't escape their world, and in many ways, we can't either. But unlike the mice, we can be more intentional. We can think, reflect, and question. Perhaps we can find a kind of escape not through leaping over walls, but leaping over standards and expectations. Over preconceived answers, over blindly prescribed ideas and norms. If we want clarity, perhaps it starts in the burrows we dig for ourselves. In the words of Albert Camus, in order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion. In order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. Our lives inevitably rely on the internet now. There is no denying that. The internet undeniably provides events opportunity and value. The most important thing we can do, however, is simply be intentional with our online presence and how we engage with it. 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