So I honestly think we are completely fucked. As a civilization, I mean.
Quick reminder on Calhouns mouse utopia: He had a big pen with lots of food and water and little hidey holes and bedding and everything a group of mice need to live and thrive. Unlimited amounts for practical purposes, in all categories save one: Space. He dumped a seed population into the cage, even numbers of males and females, and sat back and watched what happened.
In the beginning there was steady population growth, but after a while it slowed down. Then it stopped. And then it reversed. They were no longer reproducing, and even after the population started dropping they didn't start doing it again. Somehow their reproductive instinct had apparently been shut off.
He observed unusual behavior as the experiment progressed. Mothers didn't take care of their young, sometimes abandoning them or at times even killing them. Some of the mice which he called the beautiful ones dropped out entirely of rodent society, staying away from the herd and spending their time grooming and sleeping. There was increased violence, both in rate and severity. All of this is stuff we see in current human societies, especially in the west but also in most of the rest of the world.
This is too close to how Rome fell to be mere coincidence. They expanded rapidly, became decadent, reproduction slowed down and they crumbled from the inside. Rome had a population of over a million people, and in just a year or so they were down to 20000.
It happened again in the 20th century. Stalin killed 50 million of his own people, Mao even more, in Cambodia a third of the population was murdered. And 20 other cases around the world.
And it is happening again. Only this time it is not just one country or a larger region in the world. It's damn near global.
My interpretation is that there is something in the mammalian subconscious that is constantly scanning for population density. Too many, and it slows down.
Way too many and it stops. This makes sense evolutionarily, any species that multiplies too much will end up starving due to lack of food, especially predators. All the methods we use to lower our numbers, from low reproduction to lack of proper childcare to physical violence and mass genocides are just expressions of an innate desire to get rid of some of the other members of our specie.
And if this is the case, then things will continue to get worse until our numbers are lowered, one way or another.
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