The Mouse Utopia Experiments
What happens when you take a population and give them everything they need to survive?
What happens when you take away all the natural constraints of the Universe and allow a population to do whatever they want without limitation?
Does that population take their environment and use it to create something beautiful? Is evolution accelerated due to the extra resources? Or does something else happen entirely?
Let’s find out.
Enter The Mouse Utopia Experiments
So, this website is purely a work of giving people all the tools they need to succeed in business so that they can free themselves from the world’s restraints.
Most of the time, I teach (or at least preach) business ideas and principles so you can make more cash.
Outside of that though, I’m fascinated by all kinds of things. In particular, I love the wacky experiments that went on in the early-to-mid-20th Century before scientists really developed an understanding of ethics, political correctness and also before they knew what the hell they were doing in many cases.
A particular case that interests me is the discovery of the behavioural sink – the phenomenon that occurs when a population is given access to unlimited resources and freedom.
In the mid-twentieth century, a behavioural researcher called John Calhoun started a set of experiments which tested this on rats and mice.
Now… some of you will think, “What’s that got to do with humans?” and you’ll have to bear with me for a moment.
First; here’s a documentary on the experiments for those of you with a spare twenty minutes:
For the rest of you, let’s talk about the results.
The Results
If you thought that creating utopia would be a good thing, then you were unfortunately wrong.
The rats, and later mice, were subjected to an environment where all their resources were provided for.
This was originally designed to prove that eventually overpopulation would kill them (us) all, but it proved something different.
Instead of starvation and overpopulation being the major problem over time, it was instead social issues.
The rats became so used to company, they couldn’t live without it. And that was just the beginning.
As the population levelled off (the rodents self-regulated) the drives that caused them to compete and reproduce waned.
In essence, the rodents split into several groups:
- Highly social creatures that basically devolved first into herd animals and then later into hypersexual degenerates
- Outcasts that didn’t socialise and instead isolated themselves
As the problems exacerbated, so too did these psychological conditions. First the outcasts would totally isolate themselves, even to the point where if they were attacked, they’d simply allow it to happen.
But then occasionally, these isolated rodents would go pathological and just murder groups of rats.
The hypersexual, hypercompetitive herd animals also went pathologically insane – super competing, having sex all the time and losing any sense of parenthood or cohesion. The females would neglect their young and eventually those young would die of either neglect or cannibalism.
That’s a fitting place to end, but the effects became pronounced to the point where the colonies died off of stagnation.
Woah.
But This Is Just Mice, Right?
Let’s talk about humans and the state of the world without going paranoid nutso (well, not any more than usual.)
In the West, we live in a time and place where we’re similar to the fat little mice.
Our base instincts are lost to us. Social isolation is at an all-time high because socialising has been replaced with Tinder and sports and other social cohesion activities have been replaced by computer games and porn.
There are women who are literally getting to forty years old and freezing their eggs for the hope that one day it’ll be a good time for them to have kids. There are guys that spend decades of their lives prowling for one-night stands and there are Hikikomori on both sides of the gender wall who have checked out of life entirely.
Add to that the inevitable conclusions of all the other economical, societal and global issues, and you have a very strange human-mouse-hybrid utopia.
Now, I’m not really in the business of moralising, but just for kicks and a fun game, watch the news tonight.
How many disasters do you see and how do they relate to the bigger picture assuming we’re living in a mouse utopia experiment?
Alright Jamie… We’re Living In A Mouse Utopia Experiment. What Do You Expect Me To Do About It?
Once you see the forest through the trees, you can think about the things that occur in the mouse utopia. Then you can act against them:
- Stop giving yourself access to unlimited resources (i.e. stop eating doughnuts all day and binge-watching porn or playing video games until you fall asleep)
- Move away from any psychopathic loners who might go mental at any given point
- Build stress into your life constructively (i.e. exercise and DO SOME EXPERIMENTS)
- Use nature as a stressor (so get off the treadmill and go running around a forest and climb trees and stuff)
If you do these things, then you’ll mitigate the effects of the Mouse Utopia. If you help your friends and family do the same, then you are 100% going to make the world a better place.
What The Hell Does This Have To Do With All The Other Stuff You Chat About?
Why does a copywriter and online businessman care about any of this?
Because ultimately everything is interconnected and success is a zero-sum game.
If you spend your life in a cubicle career chasing enough money to buy the next video game, then you’re in mouse utopia and running around that hamster wheel.
When you make a ton of money building online businesses, you can design your life so that you become a fat, slovenly rat who eats Burger King every day and chases the next hedonistic high, or you can pool your resources, keep your eyes on the game and build a better world.
Unlike the poor little rodents, you have a human brain and so can resist the tendency to engage in biological entropy. You can fight, overcome and win.
The choice is yours.