91 Comments

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.

Expand full comment

I think you're absolutely right that the lack of environmental hormesis may play a role in driving them nuts. Without the struggle to survive, they create their own struggles, maybe.

Also very on point about parents giving over their children for systematic emotional and sexual abuse by groomers, and smiling while they do it, is very likely related to all of this. Something went fucking sideways in their heads, for sure. Same with the nutters who raise their babies on vegan diets, IMO. More obvious analogies, of course, are all the kids who get neglected by parents more interested in drugs, alcohol, and TikTok themselves, for example.

Expand full comment

It feels weird to fault parents, since I have been on the receiving end of parental judginess because of my ASD boys’ behavior sometimes, and knowing the all-consuming effort it takes to even raise kids. But I have seen stuff recently that has made me finally acknowledge we have a parent problem. To be fair, though, the conditioning to deny parental instinct starts early - something I’ve been trying to write about, but it’s excruciating to process when it results in life-altering damage. But the brainwashing is real, starts before you even have kids, and is crazy painful to recognize when you’ve been forcibly snapped out of it. But it’s ramifications today are pretty devastating.

Expand full comment

That's gotta be tough. Is your son way out on the spectrum?

Now, add in Skinner box dopamine hijack loops that forcefeed those parental brains a steady diet of antisocial luxury beliefs, and we're really cooking with emotional napalm.

Expand full comment

Cooking with emotional napalm... sounds about right!

And I have two ASD boys. They are in varying stages of functionality, but not very independent individuals - and may never be. But I do believe in miracles, so I guess I shouldn’t sound fatalistic about it. 😆 It’s just crazy to see the overwhelming degree of neurological disorders emerging. To channel Mr. Bray - I need someone to tell me how this ends. 😂

Expand full comment

It absolutely kills me that people can look at the explosion in ASD (and all the other weird shit happening) and say, oh, it's just an improvement in diagnosis. Nothing to see here. In other news, another 18-year-old athlete died suddenly from climate change, as has always happened. This is all normal and you're a far right science denying conspiracy theorist spewing racist hate if you think it isn't.

Expand full comment

It's WORSE than that. It's now hate-spewing-bigotedness to consider autism a disorder! This is all very natural, you know. It's evolution. I was even lectured by a so-called autistic adult that it is their CULTURE. (Which is not to say that autism doesn't actually give some super cool abilities to some people. But they pay hell for it, and anyone who thinks or claims otherwise is full of crap.) Again. Tell me how this ends. (Nowhere good.)

Expand full comment

I've heard that and always roll my eyes at it. Reminds me of the congenitally deaf parents who prevented their child from receiving treatment that would restore hearing because being deaf was their culture. Disabilities are not different abilities and they definitely are not superpowers.

Expand full comment

Disinterested parents do exist, but many do not have the resources (especially the time) to do the job that needs to get done. In the last century or more the formation of children and adolescents has been taken over by schools. This results in the homogenisation of experience, kids falling through the cracks, the mischiefs of activist teachers.

The de-skilling of parents is the inevitable results from experts taking the place of families and communities.

Expand full comment

There's some truth to that. People who homeschool used to be the crazy ones, but a lot of us just assumed we'd be consumed with childcare up to a certain point, then school steps in to take part of that away from us. It's the expectation. I like the slogan, "I do not coparent with the government," but you actually do, and you don't even recognize that you're conditioned to expect or even want to. You have a baby, and then the hospital and then pediatrician tell us what do with that baby. Here, they don't even allow you to leave the hospital unless you can prove you have the appropriate car seat. I mean, the more I review how all this went down for my own kids, the more my mind is just blown that I never noticed it.

Expand full comment

I believe we need a certain, fixed amount of struggle to be fulfilled. And if we don’t have that struggle externally we make it up internally. We’re wired to solve problems, to achieve, to exert physical effort. If we don’t do these things our internal processes and thoughts spin up into a variety of fictional struggles that often manifest as mental illness or strife with our immediate community. Put another way, I think we are all somewhat insane and it is struggle, ie a way to keep our minds occupied with immediate problems, that keep us sane. And of course, the amount of struggle we’re wired for varies between individuals.

Expand full comment

Marxcissism is an autoimmune disease of the mind.

Expand full comment

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!

Expand full comment

I think they're already breaking down.

Expand full comment

🗨 We live in an age where mountains of bullshit are built on molehills of truth.

Can't last so much longer, and a solid hope sure sprouts from fertile soil 😁

💬 Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Expand full comment

The Earth may be middle aged, but we live in the cosmic dawn. Perspective matters ;)

Expand full comment

Perspective/framing does matter, on multiple planes/branes, time's but one 😉

🗨 except it wouldn’t really be downsizing, they would be upsizing everything good in life

charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/to-happen-everywhere-it-must-happen

Expand full comment

Saw that. Living the dream....

Expand full comment

Made me to learn of maverick countries without standing armies 🤸

Expand full comment

That's a bit misleading. Costa Rica's standing army is called the US military. It's simply an extreme version of the underinvestment in the military that the European vassals get away with. Which suits the imperial center just fine.

Expand full comment

Well said!

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

What in the actual fuck is your niece doing in that environment? Are her parents nuts? Rhetorical. You've got my full sympathy ... as does she. I hope she emerges unscathed.

I remember when free schools were a cool idea. I still think they are. The problem with all of those projects is that they emerged out of a primarily left-wing cultural milieu, meaning they had no immune defense whatsoever to the mind virus.

My niece is a bit luckier than that. Her parents have a very good handle on what's going on in the world, and raise their kids to actually think for themselves and push back against their teachers whenever necessary. During the worst of the COVID mania, my niece was openly mocking the masking and hand-sanitizing, undermining the teachers' authority to her friends, and ripping off her mask every chance she got.

Expand full comment

In Portland, soon bearded things in skirts will be the norm. I laughed when I first read about free school and my predictions came true. It turns out if you leave a four year old boy to his own "curriculum" it will be 230 days of playing Minecraft for 6 hours - el nephew. Those prog ed ideas always seemed counterintuitive for a reason. It's one thing to escape state indoctrination centers, but a whole other to let them do nothing. Who knew that kids need structure and guidance. Shocker.

Expand full comment

Yeah. I'm all for a larger degree of freedom and autonomy in education, letting children pursue their interests and such. But their tastes have to be formed, which often requires a degree of prodding and, frankly, coercion. If the kid's main interest is 'smoking meth', no favours are done to them by enabling it.

Expand full comment

Yeah, there needs to be a little bit of structure and nudging. The 'free' part of that should be accommodating the kid choosing what constructive educational path he or she wants to follow to become what they want to be. And keep the really useless stuff like television or Minecraft out of the environment during the school day.

Make it clear that they are going somewhere. Let them choose from alternative possible destinations.

Expand full comment

> “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..

Expand full comment

As I said to a physicist friend who was insisting that there is no such thing as free will, "So why did you say that, and if it was just mechanical noises, why should I listen to it?"

Personally, I'm inclined to the Gurdjieffian view. Man is free in potential, but mechanical by default. The fact that so many of the pathologies of the rat utopia have manifested indicate that much of the species do, in fact, respond as animals do. The fact that it hasn't swallowed us yet, and some of us find a way to escape, indicates that some of us don't ... either because we're born that way, or because we've lifted ourselves out of that condition with much effort.

Of course, man can also be reduced to a machine. Particularly if he is convinced that's all he is. The Algorithm is in many ways designed to do just that. When we substitute the output of statistical processing for our own mental faculties, we indeed become no more than statistical processing.

Which is exactly where they want us.

Expand full comment

I disagree that "we indeed become no more than statistical processing." I'm not even sure any of us deludes ourselves in that way. OTOH, everything we're claiming here about other minds is only a modeling process, and we know all about model problems.

For instance: for all you know, I am a particularly advanced conversation module, employing cutting edge NLP tech to infiltrate and subvert the Neo-Gonzo movement. This would even be the case had "we" "met" in physical space, because you'd have no way of knowing if the person you met was me or an actor my programmers hired to keep the con going.

Or would you? Somehow, I think you would. But how? It wouldn't be strictly by a modelling process, I believe. Some territory eludes mapping.

Expand full comment

Hyperbole aside, I wasn't really making an ontic claim, that a human who relies too much on e.g. Yelp recommendations to decide where to eat or Amazon recommendations to decide what to read has literally become a machine. It's a more behaviourist argument: by relying on the algorithm too much, one acts more and more like a machine. The algorithm tries to predict you, and as you engage with it, you become more predictable ... more mechanical. Of course underlying that one is still human.

It's a form of sleepwalking, basically.

Expand full comment

"It's a more behaviourist argument: by relying on the algorithm too much, one acts more and more like a machine. The algorithm tries to predict you, and as you engage with it, you become more predictable ... more mechanical."

Well, yes. That I agree with. Frankly it's the worst feature of this New Dark Age to me, people behaving like things.

Expand full comment

It's quite terrifying. That's what makes your butlerian jihadism so very necessary.

Expand full comment

Half-baked half-thought: opposite of people behaving like mechanical things = behaving less mechanically, less predictably ... = necessarily adding chaos? Maybe that’s the adventure - figuring out what we can create with the detritus from our wake of chaos.

Expand full comment

Good point. Gurdjieff said Man is a machine....which we currently see corroborated in the "new age " vernacular as "programming ". What is insidious in the Transhumanist agenda is the idea of being proud to be a machine. Oy vay.

Expand full comment

The difference is that Gurdjieff taught how to transcend one's mechanical nature by becoming human, whereas the transhumanists invert this.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

I don't disagree with any of that. This was a thought experiment - what can be understood by removing the assumption of malign intent, and focusing attention on structural dynamics?

Different aspects are revealed by looking at things through a conspiracy lens, and other things through a ponerological lens.

The more lenses we look through, the better a handle we get.

And for the record I'm all in favor of show trials.

Expand full comment

No one, not even the oligarchy, has malign intent. George Soros and Bill Gates both believe they are doing good for the world. Even Stalin and Mao believed that their actions, whatever the cost in the short run, would improve the world. They all truly believe that they will be doing good for the world in the long run. But they also believe that ends justify the means and do not value the individual human life.

Expand full comment

Generally true, of psychologically normal people. Sociopaths can be animated by sadism, however, and they're not a negligible component of the population. Particularly in the executive class.

Of course, malign intent is to a degree a matter of perspective. They might think they're doing us a favor by getting us to eat the bugs. Those looking at the plate of fried crickets might disagree about the beneficence of the chef, however.

Expand full comment

I have represented murders and billionaires and mob figures. I have studied dictators and tyrants. The Ted Bundy types are extremely rare. Even Ted likely had some sick and twisted justification for his acts. El Chapo likely justified everything he did, no matter how violent.

Schizophrenics are very dangerous, but even they have some justification to their actions.

Gates and company want us to eat bugs, because that furthers their goals of making us all slaves. They want us to accept a lower standard of living. They want to have the Earth free of the normies. To them, we were just unclean and clutter the world from our presence.

Depopulation is a good thing in their minds. Demoralization is a great thing in their minds. And so, they have no malign intent.

When George Soros destroys an economy, he does not feel bad in the least. When George Bush starts unnecessary and costly wars, does he feel guilty? No. I don't think they are sociopaths, because they need to justify to themselves and the world their actions.

They think that If the bug burger looks like a beef burger, tastes like a beef burger, smells like a beef burger, digests like a beef burger, etc., then we should all be happy to have the same food with just a source that is less damaging to the environment.

Expand full comment

It depends on how one defines a sociopath. Serial killers are extreme examples. Absence of empathy plus high dark triad traits are a more common definition, which applies to something like 5% of the male population, and maybe 1% of the female. Much higher in the C Suite, because such types are attracted to power, and if moderately intelligent, generally good at getting it. This doesn't mean that they have basements full of women's torsos, just that they see humans as objects to be used, not as subjects with moral worth.

Non-sociopaths need some sort of moral narrative as a fig leaf for their self-interest, particularly when there are obvious negative externalities to their activities. Sociopaths don't. They just don't care. So, it isn't malign intent, exactly. But it isn't benign intent, either.

Expand full comment

Sadism is integral to the system. Licensed Sadism, camouflaged by ideology, enables regime enforcers to torment dissenters and constrain/discipline the masses. The pleasure of demoralising designated scapegoats is real and greatly appreciated by grassroots level regime enforcers.

Even well-adjusted people can be taught to act sociopathically...especially of there are tangible rewards like promotions, recognition, status etc. The regime incentivises this stuff.

Expand full comment

Sadism is not integral to the system. The phrase "cruelty is the point" has been around for some time. Mostly it was a leftist critique of capitalism. For the Twitter mods, they get off and "hitting Nazis" and scoring a point, but that is a byproduct of our system, not the intention or goal.

The goal is to transform everyone into mindless consumers and debt slaves. As the WEF set forth in its video a few years ago, "you will own nothing and be happy". TPTB would rather that everyone went blissfully along, working at a boring job, buying new crap from Amazon, watching streaming TV, playing video games, and so forth.

Demoralizing and inflicting pain cause resistance and friction, which make governance less efficient and effective. They would rather we just accept our Brave New World. When we just plug into the system and some that we are happy peons, all is well. They don't want us to see the Matrix or the prison.

There is no need for them to be sociopathic or evil. They can just program the zombies to do whatever is the latest thing and sit back and rule. They do want us to adopt their goals and accept their means, but they fundamentally cannot see that their goals are wrong, and the means are unjustified and cruel.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

This is an excellent question. I'm not sure about the answer to it.

So on the one hand, organizing a city into a series of burroughs, each more or less a village, seems like it should work. As you note, many old cities in Europe already do this. Tokyo does as well. They're phenomenally livable in comparison to the brutalist grids of the Americas, but their birth rates are still exceptionally low, suggesting that the behavioural sink effects aren't much improved by this.

Then as you say there's the Internet. It could be that the availability of the 'net makes every terminal into essentially just another part of the cosmopole ... another part of the rat utopia, even if physically you're in a village. Then again maybe not. I suspect that's not quite true, but it's certainly the case that people's social environments can become entirely parasocial if they're Very Online.

Expand full comment

Unlike many on today's Right, I think the reduction of reproduction is a feature, not a bug. Earth isn't growing, and Mars needs some serious terraforming before becoming pleasant to live on. Venus, even more so.

The bug is our economic system factoring in perpetual growth. As a nation it's time to do the Dave Ramsey thing and pay down some debt. More Austrian Economics and less Santa Claus Economics -- both Keynsian and Laffer.

And, by the way, the population argument is the strongest argument against open borders. Closed borders make the Ascended Masters of Priapic Enlightenment pay the price for their excessive harems. Closed borders give the descendants of Ecotopians the benefits of their 1.2 child policy.

Don't worry about complete demographic collapse. If the US population goes down to 1950s levels, natives will have more kids and there will be a bounce.

Expand full comment

I'm not so sure about that. Birth rates closet to replacement are probably ideal, but we're well below that. The long range consequences of this are a top-heavy demographic distribution, which comes with a large number of intrinsic problems, not least of which is that the elders impose a substantial burden of care on the youth.

That the Earth is not growing isn't necessarily an intractable problem. Resource availability is to a large degree a question of technology.

That said I certainly don't think we should be enabling Africa's population boom at the same time our own populations are facing precipitous decline. That's a recipe for disaster.

Expand full comment

We do not enable anything. The West cannot intervene in Africa and has no agency in this matter. The African states are comfortable with the population explosion.

All we can do is raise the drawbridge.

Expand full comment

We could certainly stop sending them foreign aid, which isn't helping any.

Expand full comment

That mostly gets stolen or pays for the bureaucrats that run the scams. It has no effect on population. None.

Foreign aid looks set to boom. Competition with Russia and China for influence will have Washington rush to buy influence with visas and cash. Expect to hear more about the Igbo as the new Asians.

Expand full comment

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...

Expand full comment

That's exactly what I was trying to articulate in the 2043 story, and the end of the Hydra essay. To me, it means going back, in a great many ways, to our most ancient customs and instincts, while at the same time pressing forward with our technology and science to really build on that past.

It looks like a world that's interesting and fun again, and where the possibility of genuine adventure has returned.

Expand full comment

Q: So what would an actually inspiring future look like?

A: Heroes Return --> barsoom.substack.com/p/2043 😇

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

Did someone say exit?

https://exitgroup.us/

The answer to the Great Reset is the Great Refusal:

https://ponerology.substack.com/p/the-great-reset-and-the-struggle

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

That is entirely possible, however, it's worth remembering that the cosmopoles serve as a wealth-generation mechanisms. The point of this is that a great deal of what we experience as hostile action, may simply be the inevitable consequence of these environments, and the indifference of those who run them to these consequences. Making these environments more hostile than necessary would, in essence, burn fuel inefficiently, thus reducing their wealth-extracting capabilities.

Then again one cannot rule out a degree of sadism.

Expand full comment

Depending on your theory of money creation, US Dollars are created by creating debt. In this analysis, the borrower asks the bank for money to pay it back, and the lender gets it from the Federal reserve banks, who declare what the interest rate is, The more debt you get into, the greater wealth you have access to. You would be a fool not to borrow even at the risk of not being able to pay back. The banks don't much care, the interest rates generally pay for the risk.

The banks, the hedge funds and the big money whales have a vested interest in keeping the inflation going since they are the first beneficiaries of money out of nothing, and they want to make sure they don't have to pay back any shortfalls.

I only point this out because using the theory that "they do what they do because it is their nature to do so" is a fairly medieval approach to explaining the world.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

I still have flashbacks to that hopeless despair every time I have to force myself through our hideous commercial airport system. It takes a while to get over it.

Expand full comment

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

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

>>>"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.

Expand full comment

My use of Malthusian is not specifically limited to population limitations, but points to the broader, more fundamental absence of creative imagination that underlies the thought of Malthus and his disciples. They can't think of ways that the rules of the game can be changed themselves, and therefore assume the rules are fixed.

Expand full comment

My windmill to tilt at is that that was not the intent of Malthus' pamphlet, it was to show that the radical social and economic reforms proposed in the name of freeing mankind from their chains and bring about economic and social improvement would cause misery and the loss of liberty.

Ehrlich was the one who misread the intent, chose the weakest argument and used it to propose an authoritarian economic communalism that was the exact reverse of what Malthus argued, and smeared his name so bad that no-one will read him anymore.

Ehlichism is hard to say, though.

Expand full comment

The great shame of Ehrlich's use of Malthus' work and its subsequent denial of any value by Ehrlich's detractors means no on ever reads it, and we lose such ringing statements as:

To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man. In the vain endeavour to attain what in the nature of things is impossible, we now sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits. We tell the common people that if they will submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they shall never be in want. They do submit to these regulations. They perform their part of the contract, but we do not, nay cannot, perform ours, and thus the poor sacrifice the valuable blessing of liberty and receive nothing that can be called an equivalent in return.

Expand full comment

Excellent

Expand full comment

Thank you.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

One of the primary reasons that Western countries have such high immigration rates is that their local populations are simply not reproducing themselves, and the machine requires fresh humans to operate it.

The only problem is that the people that are being imported to replace the population have no idea how to run the machine, and thus let it break. We aren't importing the smartest people from the nations. We are getting the lazy and stupid, who will play on their phones and hold down low status jobs.

Expand full comment