Be a Man and Don’t Die Like a Mouse

A blog that I recommend:

Collapse of the West, a Search for Survival

I vaguely recall hearing or reading, a long time ago, about an experiment where mice or rats were raised in crowded conditions and went crazy, or something like that. Probably some science fiction. I filed it away in the depths of memory, apparently. Then today, I ran across this thorough and devastating piece by the above blogger at Return of Kings:

What Humans Can Learn from the Mouse Utopia Experiment:

“Many [female mice] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term, or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Amongst the males the behaviour disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic over-activity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organisation of the animals showed equal disruption…”

[…]

“The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioural sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 mice in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual mice would rarely eat except in the company of other mice. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.”

(Here’s the Wik on Dr. John Calhoun, with additional background and explanation. And here’s a book, Tragedy in Mouse Utopia: An Ecological Commentary on Human Utopia that “Mark” recommends).

The Return of Kings article also has some intriguing development of the parallels between the mice behaviors and various phenomena like the Hikikomori of Japan, “gender equality” and Korean men wearing makeup.

As I’ve pointed out in a number of discussion forums, blog posts and comments over the years, mass shootings of the “Columbine” type were quite rare before the 1980s. Then they took off…despite the fact that any bullied teen boy of say, 1929, could have taken Dad’s .30-30 Winchester to school and offed a dozen people in 30 seconds. But they didn’t. Why not? (A perusal of these lists shows that mass killings, and not just with firearms, have occurred all over the world and for at least 150 years. Of course they also happened before that, probably far into pre-history. We just don’t have the records. But the increase beginning in the 1980s is striking).

I’ve previously concluded that prescription psych drugs (almost every mass shooter is on them) and cable news coverage (feeds fantasies of fame and immortality) explain the timing. Perhaps that’s part of it, but perhaps it’s the individuals whose brains are most sensitive to “utopia” conditions that seem to need the drugs.

Neoreaction, Paleo, the Manosphere and related phenomena can in the blink of an eye be seen as a (partly unconscious) reaching toward rebalancing what’s becoming an existential, civilizational crisis.

Obviously, we need to split up into smaller, decentralized communities with strongly enforced social norms, clear sex roles, less screen time and more physical challenges.

Exit. Exit. Only by Exiting the madness will men avoid dying like mice.