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Awesome read.

You know, I’ve read about the rat experiment in recent years. But I had forgotten the part about how now only did they struggle to reproduce, but we’re disinterested parents when they did have offspring.

That right there helps answer something pretty dark we’re seeing now. Drag queen events aimed at children, parents allowing and facilitating trans ideology, drug abuse and freaking TikTok for teenagers...none of this happens if the parents aren’t checked out in some way or another. Or are such poor parents that they embrace the trash and willfully allow it to infect their kids.

Also, is part of the problem for the rats that they’re literally given everything? They don’t have to struggle for their survival. Seems that the struggle changes this dynamic. That’s your point, to a degree - the creativity and pushing boundaries is what creates thriving societies.

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Modern society does feel very lab-rat-like! What you said to your niece about humans being able to create new environments to overcome the limits of existing ones is true. It also seems to be true that we, like the rats, have a built in psychological limit to the amount of bullshit we will tolerate; but whereas the rats were in cages controlled by humans, we're in virtual cages controlled by other humans who, being part of the unimaginative managerial class you describe, are unable to anticipate all the ways the inmates might pick the locks on the cage door and free themselves, as well as all the ways that humans can creatively sabotage the machine their supposed to be maintaining, but which they recognize as operating to their own detriment. I believe things will break down before they can truly create an unbreakable worldwide prison for our species. They desperately want to do it, but they are limited to using the idiotic and unimaginative middle-management types to make it work; and that will be their undoing.

Great essay, and one that leaves me feeling more hopeful than before I read it!

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Uncle JC nailed it. "They can’t create new things. Humans can. Creating things is what we do. So, these cities we live in now, those are environments we created. And we can create solutions to the problems they create." Thought about stealing it since I have a 9 year old niece but sadly this fascinating topic will never come up. One of her "facilitators" (as they're called since teachers are so oppressive) at her "free school" (no curriculum at all) has a beard and wears a skirt. "When the environment became saturated with rodents, the rats would begin to exhibit certain neuroses and social pathologies which became more pathologically exaggerated and severe over time." Once I get that sailboat to get as far from the human experiment versions of mice city currently underway, I'll probably never see her again.

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by John Carter

> “We’re not rats,” I finally told her.

Glad you mentioned this, John, since that's what I was screaming to myself for half the article. But yes, the rat utopias, the Skinner cages. Pavlov's dogs, all the crude and cruel stimuli experiments were ultimately (in the minds of the Frankensteins who conducted them) all about us. And those in the managerial class have likewise convinced themselves we are all lab rats, at best.

But as I've said before, the formal components flow in the wake of the principle illusion. They see *us* as mechanical rats, not themselves. A human mind cannot organize itself within that ontological framework and continue to function, no matter the words its lying mouth speaks to the contrary. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins do not actually see themselves as machines, but rather every other living being that way, just as Calhoun becomes not a rat in the wake of his experiments, but a god. And so do the managers maintaining the crumbling utopia..

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I can't give them the benefit of the doubt. Would be rulers like to set up the system so that they can rule.

The Fabian Socialists have had goals since the 19th century and their ideas are still in force among the ruling class. Tony Blair, a Fabian, was involved in Labour's scheme, exposed a few years ago, to take control of Great Britain through mass importation of 3rd world populations, while using the tactics you describe here.

The Rockefellers have been heavily involved in doing the same in America and around the world, often in conjunction with the Deep State. The Club of Rome was an effort to implement these ideas.

Now, the middle management types of the managerial class, as opposed to the rulers, are motivated mostly by fear, fear of falling back down with the masses, which they hate, even though many of them came from there. They know their kids could end up down the ladder very easily and that would mean that they would be downward as well. But they don't make a lot of decisions, but just keep doing what they can to comply with their perception of the mandates from the rulers.

The rat utopia experiment is interesting. I am sure the Fabians and the Rockefellers and other Western oligarchs knew all about it. Did they encourage the bad result or work towards a good result? Based on their goal of ruling, they encouraged the bad result. Better to set things up for "build back better", after all.

Soros claimed decades ago that the number 1 problem for implementing his goals was a strong United States. He also has strongly opposed nationalism and openly damaged economies around the world.

The oligarchs have worked to create the conditions they wanted, so that they might rule without opposition. Their plans do not always work out and that annoys them to no end. They hate state sovereignty and hate autonomy from the system.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of the oligarchy believed that the masses were fungible from around the world and there would not be a decline if they replaced native populations with substitutes. This failure of understanding might be the chief source of their utter destruction in the end, as they transform the entire world into South Africa or Brazil.

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How much is physical proximity and how much is psychic proximity?

Europe has city densities which make me cringe to think of them. (I'm a country boy; grew up on a farm the size of Central Park.) Some of our northeastern cities have been dense for quite a while.

However, those dense northeastern cities were really a collection of dense villages: Little Italy, Greenwich Village, Harlem, etc. The social engineers have been demolishing such villages for half a century. Sending such a large fraction of the young to go do college has also broken up the villages.

And then we have the Internet. To be noticed, you compete against the entire planet. This is why people do ridiculous things on YouTube and TikTok.

We need to re-create villages. Break up the cities into neighborhoods (Rule 6). Break up counties that have over a quarter million people. Give every high school its own school board (which oversees the lower schools which feed into said high schools). Community, and democracy, do not scale.

And, of course, close the border. Raise the retirement age and raise taxes to deal with the pyramid scheme we are stuck with. Increase the labor pool by hiring young adults and training them on the job. And pay them enough to start a family. Let's gently lower the population back to the level it was the last time this country was happy.

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People do not seem very inspired now. It's all bleak, so much hate, so much division, the future is a choice apparently between Climate Change APOCALYPSE or (un)-scientific UTOPIA. More people seem to want the former than the latter, the latter preferred only by the technocrats who would manage it.

So what would an actually inspiring future look like? No one wants to dismantle this leviathan (well, lots of us do) without having some kind of vision of what that would look like. That is what we should all be engaged in - though I know from experience it is easier to point to a current evil than an unrealized good...

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This was really excellent. It's so rare to find a writer in this space who can, on the one hand, suppress the tendency to assume malign motives (or even motives at all) for developments whose processes may have a logic wholly their own (i.e. mechanistic consequences of cultural trends, rather than a so-called conspiracy), while at the same time understanding that such trends may indeed influence the planners and managers who preside over said developments.

However the article does beg the question: Why is it that, despite the anti-natal impulses of our environment, there are those of us who still want children? The answer is the same as that already offered to the question of how to fix this problem: We are not rats - that is, we have higher-order beliefs, as rational creatures, that can then impact not only our behaviour but even desire itself, through the top-down cognitive cascade of predictive perception and attention. We want what we think we want.

This is particularly important from an evoutionary perspective, because it implies that those individuals who have the right memes and genes will pass on said memes and genes (such as religious belief, and the genetic inheritance with which such beliefs correlate): we are undergoing a grand selection event. This will be most obvious in Japan, which despite its population collapse will ultimately recover even without mass immigration (there are still a minority of Japanese having lots and lots of children -- just as there are Mormons and Quiverfull Christians in the US, and Haredim in Israel, and Laestadians in Finland).

We are looking at a religious and pronatal future. An excellent book which covers this topic is Eric Kauffmann's 'Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?', which I recommend to everyone. Of great significance is the power of exponential growth, especially when high fertility is combined with low infant mortality (as it is in highly religious groups). See, for instance, the history of Canada (covered in 'Canada in Decay' by Ricardo Duchesne), whose population grew from 15,800 in 1700, to 3.5 million in 1860 - and not, despite the false 'nation of immigrants' narrative, due to new arrivals (who over this period made up only around 0.2% of the population), but due to competitive Franco/English fertility (making Canada a dual settler nation).

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by John Carter

A very well written piece. And it feels good that it ended on an optimistic note. Future is bright and full of possibilities.

One big problem right now is it is very hard to escape Moloch. And impossible at scale. We need an exit option. The way to opt out and organize . We need an alternative to antihuman world order.

And it is very possible to create such an alternative in 21st century.

If you haven't read yet - please read Network State by Balaji Srinivasan (its available for free online)

It outlines how future social organization might look like.

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Well done! You held your breath longer than I could have, regarding the conceit of giving them the benefit of the doubt. I do think the mouse utopia experiments are relevant, but given my perception of the morality of those atop The Parasite, I expect the lessons of the experiments were weaponized against the group they most fear.

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Feb 11, 2023Liked by John Carter

I read about Calhoun's rat experiments when I was living in a soul-destroying megacity. No mystery for me on why his rats gave up on life and retreated into some rodent headspace: I was feeling the same thing. The relief when I left that place was palpable.

For me, privacy is desperately important. I suspect that for humans *ownership* is desperately important. If they can't control some minimum viable space, if there is nothing that is unequivocally theirs, if everything is public and there is no where to get away and *exist*, then they go insane. I certainly would have if I had had to stay. I was probably on my way to some human equivalent of "beautiful one" territory. No on the obsessive grooming, but yes on trying to avoid everyone and everything, crawl in a hole and forget the world.

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Feb 11, 2023Liked by John Carter

As the crowded city population twists into an orgy of self mutilation, drugs and murders the Amish will not miss us.

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I, also, agree with the second opinion, but I think one of the initial draws to urban life is the availability of promiscuity. In ages of decadence, this promiscuity may not lead to produce...for example, homosexual behavior has little chance of causing this cosy condition, which we create, cause that's our mission. See 1850s St. Petersburg and NYC for examples of decadent urban culture and burgeoning homosexual communities. Famous gays of the period include Walt Whitman and Tchaikovsky. Certainly a seven year old boy on a farm can produce a lot of work and is an asset, but that same child in the city becomes a liability that it takes a lot of resources to protect. So listen up to what we say, cause this type of shit happens every day.

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by John Carter

>>>"That lack of imagination means that they’re Malthusians at heart. The see an existing level of technology, and an existing resource base, they have their accountants run the numbers, and extrapolate the future on that basis. Fortunately, the Malthusians have always been wrong. Like communism, it’s a great theory, it’s just applied to the wrong species."

This has little to do with the Rat Experiment itself, but I will argue for the basic concept which I think is missed, once you remove the natural controls on the growth of a population, unnatural controls will begin to be important (nice pic of Cthulhu up top, by the way) If any *ecological* claim can be pulled from Malthus, it is that.

I have been slowly coming to the conclusion that Paul Ehrlich was a fool and that On Population by Thomas Malthus was in reality an attack on the final section of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, in which Paine espouses one of the very first descriptions of social welfare state with benefits to the poor and old to alleviate their miserable state. The later sections of Malthus' pamphlet do not discuss population or farming or even carrying capacity, but focus on Candorcet's and Godwin's political and social reforms, making On Population a triad of objections of poorly considered economic, political and social reforms.

If I am correct, Paul Ehrlich was searching for justification for his book and found what he thought was the perfect example from an obscure economics pamphlet (an author who was a disciple of Adam Smith no less!) and misinterpreted the purpose of the work.

It would be as if Ehrlich thought the pamphlet A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift was about stock raising or tried to use Dean Swift's satirical work as the basis of a whole school of cullinary arts.

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Excellent

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Feb 9, 2023Liked by John Carter

Hmmm. To keep the machine running, we need high quality cogs. Too bad our cogs are becoming more warped by the day. Time for our managerial class to be locked in a cage so we can start over.

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