Hell Is Other People

Apone

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I found this article and thought it was absolutely fascinating, I guess because all of these things are very very noticeable within the human world:

http://seeroywrite.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/population-problems-and-mice-and-john-b-calhoun/

Population Problems and Mice and John B. Calhoun
Posted on September 5, 2011
Another subject on the laundry list of things I’m fascinated with is the effects of population (amount, density, growth rate, etc) on human life (happiness, loneliness, romance). For example, people in large cities have more difficulty in finding a spouse than people in smaller or less dense places. Why? Increased choice also means increased comparisons (and presumably, competition), making it more difficult to make the final “this is the best person in the world for me” decision as in a city one is, for example, looking for the best (fit) out of a million instead of the best out of one thousand.

Another interesting phenomenon is Dunbar’s number, the idea that the maximum amount of people that we are able to maintain regular stable relationships with at any given time is between 100 and 230 people (the wikipedia says 150 is the generally accepted approximation). This number/theory is important to consider, especially in the Facebook era. Dunbar himself has said that preliminary research is showing that the 150 number seen in non-digital life is the same number seen in digital life.

Moving onward!

The Daily Dish brought up an article about mice and population today. It is very cool. It’s an old study (from the late 70s) by John B. Calhoun: CABINET // The Behavioral Sink

Here’s the premise: instead of looking at population growth in terms of strain on resources, let’s look at what happens when all “strains” are controlled except for one: space

The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square… Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels–call them stairwells–soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.

Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce.

Such a cool idea.

In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain–not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.

Anarchy! Except with unlimited food and cleaning and no natural disasters or weather problems. So how did the downfall begin?

Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles.

Plenty of ways to extrapolate that to modern living. It’s a stretch, but not a huge one, as we’ll soon see…

Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers.

Ok, starting to get a bit creepy.

Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought–they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

Wild

There would be no recovery, not even after numbers had dwindled back to those of the heady early days of the Universe. The mice had lost the capacity to rebuild their numbers–many of the mice that could still conceive, such as the “beautiful ones” and their secluded singleton female counterparts, had lost the social ability to do so. In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long before their death–a “first death,” as Calhoun put it, ruining their spirit and their society as thoroughly as the later “second death” of the physical body.

Well now I’m just plain scared.

This formula might apply to rats and mice–but could the same happen to humankind? For Calhoun, there was little question about it.

Oh, great.

And that lesson found a ready audience. “Population Density and Social Pathology” was, for an academic paper, a smash hit, being cited up to 150 times a year. Particularly effective was Calhoun’s name for the point past which the slide into breakdown becomes irretrievable: the “behavioral sink.” “The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental,” Calhoun noted drily. The “sink,” a para-pathology of shared hopelessness, drew in pathological behavior and exacerbated its effects. Once the event horizon of the behavioral sink was passed, the end was certain. Pathological behavior would escalate beyond any possibility of control.

More good news!

It’s entirely possible that without several social programs in the US we would be much closer to Calhoun’s predicted doom and gloom. For example, “The 1930 census…found 58 percent of men over 65 still in the workforce; in contrast, by 2002, the figure was 18 percent.” (NYT article from 2005) Imagine combining today’s employment woes with a US in which 3 times as many seniors hold jobs and in which, according to the same article, 30% to 50% of seniors were also being primarily supported by their children, friends or relatives.

Put plainly: more unemployed youth and more people living in close quarters, both factors that Calhoun showed to catalyze social decline. Social Security without a doubt helped slow or divert movement in that direction.

Moving back away from politics and over to science:

The misery of the rodent universes was not uniform–it had contours, and some did better than others. Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell. As for the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative, exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, in order to survive.

More wonderful real-life correlations!

But Calhoun was optimistic about the problem.

Man, he argued, was a positive animal, and creativity and design could solve our problems. He advocated overcoming the limitations of the planet, and as part of a multidisciplinary group called the Space Cadets promoted the colonization of space.

Ok, I was hoping for something better than that.

Three cheers for the inevitable fall of mankind!

Closing words:

The point was that crowding itself could destroy a society before famine even got a chance. In Calhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice.

Scary.
 
Interesting, and disturbingly coincidental. Over the past few weeks, I've been contemplating colonization of other planets as a solution to Earth's problems. It's becoming clear to me that we're quickly outgrowing this planet. Too many people with differing philosophies trying to control scarce resources (and thus, our conduct).
 
Well, the point of the study isn't really that we're going to experience scarcities or that we need to fear our potential/actual controllers, the point is that it's possible that there will eventually be too many people to fill all of our social roles. Following and leading, entering conflicts, consuming and experiencing scarcities is all natural, it's the fact that most of us exist in the first place that's unnatural.

It's scary when you have a majority with nothing relevant to do, and therefore no natural reason to live. You either push them into meaningless jobs and give them some semblance of a purpose, or you economize your business and they're unemployed/on welfare. Either way, it's simply not enough to keep someone sane... and a multitude of options (for sex, employees, mates, etc) means that there's far too many choices available to ever know how to make the right one-- so eventually people just stop making choices.

They slip into narcissism, hypersexuality and then finally asexuality. They forget how to reproduce, or just stop being interested in it. Eventually the irrelevant people will outnumber the relevant, the establishment will break down, the capacity to reproduce will be gone and the entire society will permanently collapse.

Here's the original article:

http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
 
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Well, Calhoun removed the predictable "strains" of overpopulation to see what would happen, and hell if it didn't kill them anyway...through "behavioral sink". While it's evident humans are already showing symptoms of B.S., I think something else will kill us before that. Luckily, we have a way out of our Universe 25.
 
They slip into narcissism, hypersexuality and then finally asexuality. They forget how to reproduce, or just stop being interested in it. Eventually the irrelevant people will outnumber the relevant, the establishment will break down, the capacity to reproduce will be gone and the entire society will permanently collapse.

Sounds like we're going the way of the Panda bear. So what could we do, try to control our birth rates, have ourselves another world war, leave it to chance/nature, or colonize other worlds?
 
A study by the London School of Economics which was created by the Fabian socialists

Students of the university include David Rockefeller (who has also funded it) and George Soros (who has also funded it)

David Rockefeller even wrote a thesis on fabian socialism

So what do the fabian socialists want?

Well Aldous Huxley gave a good insight into their agenda when he wrote a 'Brave new world'

David Rockefeller has spoken about creating a world government and george soros is helping him in that process

These guys also created the Club of Rome think tank which suggests population control.

David Rokefeller was chairman of the council on foreign relations of which Bill Gates is a member. Bill gates's father was a member of eugenicist population control group 'planned parenthood'

Planned parenthood particularly specialised in the abortion of black children.

Bill gates is funding the massed vaccinations of black children across africa and other places at the moment. Some of the people working for him have been shot by the locals for example in Nigeria recently.

This is because not everyone has their head up their ass and some people know that what Bill is doing is poisoning people around the world as part of a population control measure

that's right those super wealthy members of the CFR have got their beady eyes on all that resource rich land in Africa. the only problem is there are people living on that land....still thats nothing a little genocide can't sort out

Where do you get this shit from Apone? Seriously man why do you help these people with their propaganda? Do you really hate humanity that much?

If we are to have population control then why don't we start with those CFR members who not only love to have big families but also love to consume vast resources and own corporations that consume vast resources and are also the driving force behind the ideology of 'consumerism'

Also if they care about people why don't they stop controlling the worlds money through their central banking fiat currency system that is built on debt and end debt slavery. if they realy want to share their love why don't they share some of their wealth

I'll tell you why not, cos they're lying, murdering sons of bitches
 
Admittedly, small-talk is Hell for me. Maybe that's why I have trouble making friends with most.

...my post is off-topic, isn't it?
 
Where do you get this shit from Apone? Seriously man why do you help these people with their propaganda? Do you really hate humanity that much?

[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION]-- I really don't think that you understood the study. To be honest, I don't even think you actually read it-- you just saw that it was about overpopulation and you jumped to your typical conclusions and then steered the topic towards your usual paranoid BS conspiracies. There is nothing about population control in the study… NOTHING. There is nothing about a world government either. It doesn't say that the only solution to this problem is to kill people, or that we need a world government-- it just says that this HAPPENED.

You also seem to have failed to realize that this was an American study that took place in the 1960s. Two doctors from the London School Of Economics published a paper on Calhoun's work 40 years AFTER it took place… but the original study took place in the state of Maryland, USA and was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH--like the movie). I'm sure you'll be able to tie it into some other BS conspiracy though-- because it's pretty obvious that the only 'studies' you're actually willing to believe come from people who don't have any money, don't have any resources, don't have educations, don't actually do any experiments, and cannot be called scientists. Basically, people who just wake up one morning, read two lines out of a newspaper and in a matter of moments flesh out a new conspiracy so that they can sell their books to people like you. Go ahead and post another link to another 'natural health' site that regurgitates reactionary Christian lies… it's never going to be credible OR scientific.

And Calhoun didn't propose population control as a means of avoiding catastrophe, he funded a group called the Space Cadets which strongly believed that humans should be concentrating on going into space, and expanding the boundaries of this world. Just because someone has identified a problem (and overpopulation IS a problem), it doesn't mean that they even HAVE a solution… it just means that they're not afraid to face the fact that this could be a problem.
 
@muir -- I really don't think that you understood the study. To be honest, I don't even think you actually read it--you just saw that it was about overpopulation and you jumped to your typical conclusions and then steered the topic towards your usual paranoid BS conspiracies. There is nothing about population control in the study… NOTHING. There is nothing about a world government either. It doesn't say that the only solution to this problem is to kill people, or that we need a world government-- it just says that this HAPPENED.

You also seem to have failed to realize that this was an American study that took place in the 1960s. Two doctors from the London School Of Economics published a paper on Calhoun's work 40 years AFTER it took place… but the original study took place in the state of Maryland, USA and was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH--like the movie). I'm sure you'll be able to tie it into some other BS conspiracy though-- because it's pretty obvious that the only 'studies' you're actually willing to believe come from people who don't have any money, don't have any resources, don't have educations, don't actually do any experiments, and cannot be called scientists. Basically, people who just wake up one morning, read two lines out of a newspaper and in a matter of moments flesh out a new conspiracy so that they can sell their books to people like you. Go ahead and post another link to another 'natural health' site that regurgitates reactionary Christian lies… it's never going to be credible OR scientific.

And Calhoun didn't propose population control as a means of avoiding catastrophe, he funded a group called the Space Cadets which strongly believed that humans should be concentrating on going into space, and expanding the boundaries of this world. Just because someone has identified a problem (and overpopulation IS a problem), it doesn't mean that they even HAVE a solution… it just means that they're not afraid to face the fact that this could be a problem.

Youre trying to tell me what i have or haven't done!

I read your post

When people want to be sneaky about something they don't announce to you what they are doing. Instead they try to pursuade you to behave how they want you to behave...this is usually done by manipulating them emotionally; that is the essence of propaganda

Propaganda pretty much always plays on peoples unconscious fears and that is what this study by the new world order corporatocracy is doing

They do want to reduce population numbers, its not BS 'conspiracy theories'. All you need to do is research into the people, groups and papers i talk about in my posts and you will see that everything i'm saying is true. each name i give is a gateway to a new avenue of knowledge if you can be bothered to walk through it

You could start with the 1972 'the limits of growth' paper released by the club of rome group

If you just want to insult me without looking into what i'm presenting then you are being lazy; if you just want to publish studies without knowing any context...that is laziness...go and learn the important stuff

Stalin once said about the electoral process: 'it doesn't matter who does the voting, it only matters who does the counting'. This also applies to studies

Big money controls the mainstream media, it controls the publishing houses, it controls the journals, it decides what research gets funded and what research gets published

That is a hard fact about the world the way it currently is but a fact it is
 
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[video=youtube;xywfcEvj53o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xywfcEvj53o&feature=player_embedded#![/video]
 
Stop.
 
aww that experiment is soo sad. those poor mice. it reminded me of the herbivore phenomenon in Japan which u have prob heard of before. it also reminded me of me, and how superfluous i am :P

the fall of man into choas is one of those things that i think many religions have predicted. and to me, the solution, not for all of mankind, but for me, is religion. it's forcing urself to get married and have kids and do the things that humans do. it's forcing oneself to have sex with the opposite sex, and try to have kids and behave a certain way. just to stay sane. i know that answer isnt for everyone. it's just my opinion.
 
Haha I'm glad that I'm a "high social velocity" mouse. I couldn't imagine myself doing well in a small community. That would be my version of Hell...I would probably go crazy.

I can relate to the lack of feeling like I have a meaningful social role in a world like the one we have now, though. It's bothersome.
 
When Calhoun talks about withdrawing, that is interesting to me.
 
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