We're in a Behavioral Sink

Can we climb out?

Grandfailure

It’s already been a weird year.

Politicians in Iowa want to make it legal for 14-year-olds to work in meat packing plants. They also want 16-year-olds serving beer at football games. Health experts are debating whether it’s ethical to impregnate braindead women (if she gives consent beforehand!), and whether we should just ask old people to off themselves. The same Yale professor said that whether we like it or not, forced euthanasia will certainly enter the chat over the next couple of decades.

Fun times…

A while back, I read an interesting article about rats that referenced John B. Calhoun’s experiments during the late 1950s. Apparently if you build little utopias for rodents, they still ruin everything. They create voluntary overcrowding scenarios and fight each other to the death, for no real reason. It doesn’t matter how much you give them in terms of food or resources, comfortable controlled temperatures, or sanitary conditions. The rat population always explodes until it reaches a psychological tipping point, then it collapses—violently.

The rats never reach the actual carrying capacity of their environment. They plateau at 50 percent. Calhoun confirmed that with Universe 25, a rat paradise that never even got close to its population limits. It grew to about 2,000 rats and then fell all the way down to 27 before the experiment ended.

It’s especially interesting to look at what happened with mating. Some male rats dominated, but there were still plenty of available females. Instead, the less dominant male rats started attacking each other.

The females literally ran away.

They hid.

Even dominant females started injuring their own young when they were in the presence of dominant males, kicking them out of their nests before they were done weaning. Within a couple of years, the population became completely unproductive in any sense. Their social bonds disintegrated. They became dysfunctional, violent, and withdrawn. A small number of rats survived by cutting their ties. They devoted themselves to sleeping, eating, grooming, and wandering the outer spaces of their paradise. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” They didn’t get sucked into the chaos. Even when the population evened out, the beautiful ones who were physically capable of reproducing and rebuilding no longer seemed to want anything to do with each other. It was basically a rat apocalypse.

Calhoun called it a behavioral sink.

We seem to be living through a behavioral sink right now. Humans are acting just like the rats. Maybe you’ve noticed. Our friends and coworkers are doing some really bizarre things that defy logic. Men are complaining about the dearth of women, and women are basically hiding from male aggression, which now constitutes a daily threat to their lives. Some of the people we know seem to have a death wish. They’re prone to irrational decisions and aggressive behavior, for no clear reason. They say and do the dumbest, meanest things. The mayor of New York of all people just told us to pray away gun violence in schools.

As a society, we’re not okay…

Nobody really talks about Calhoun much now. His writing had a spiritual and religious bent, but in light of what we’re seeing now, I’d say his observations on behavioral sinks warrant some new attention.

I mean, we’re in one.

Society has gone through behavioral sinks before. A few months ago, I got especially interested in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s a prime example. The working class was so miserable and disease-ridden at times, they were literally drinking themselves to death with cheap gin. Even the aristocracy started to grow concerned, because their workforce was collapsing. They depended on a steady inflow of peasants from the countryside to keep everything working. Maybe this set of circumstances sounds familiar.

There’s an unsettling number of parallels between the present day and historical urban life. It’s shot through with behavioral sinks. We’re completely capable of turning things around, but most people seem to be more interested in engaging in dominance displays than cooperating.

It’s everywhere.

Above all, there’s no sense of urgency anymore. Even those of us who care have felt something change recently. Our Overton windows have shifted. A few years ago, we were arguing for living wages and universal income. We were talking about taxing billionaires. Now we have to explain why it’s not a good idea to let teens work in meat packing plants. We have to explain why you should cover your mouth when you sneeze, or wash your hands after using the bathroom.

It’s really something special.

It’s becoming normal to act with zero regard for other people, even if they’re a friend or a family member. You see it more and more, every day. We’ve felt at a loss of words to describe what’s going on.

Well, it’s a behavioral sink.

It sounds depressing, but I find it illuminating.

No, you’re not crazy. You’re not a doomer. You’re not a buzzkill. It’s not just in your head. You’re witnessing something that happens in other animals, and it’s happening to us. We just don’t see it, because humans think they’re special. We humans like to pretend we’re the pinnacle of evolution.

We’re not.

We’re flawed creatures with all kinds of psychological blind spots. Fortunately, we have some really smart people who’ve learned things about how to build a healthy, functional society. We’ve especially learned that often, the devastation and destruction humanity suffers through happens as a result of our own ignorance. We’re smart enough to build utopias for rats, but we’re too arrogant to understand that we’re basically rats on two feet that talk.

You know how the advice crowd likes to tell us all of our problems exist in our heads, and we’re responsible for our own suffering. They’re wrong about that on the individual level, but if you apply that idea to society at large then it makes perfect sense. We really are doing it to ourselves, except we’re doing it by insisting on toxic attitudes and beliefs about how societies should operate. We’ve got it all backward, and it’s all been observed before.

We just have to listen.

As always, the real question isn’t whether bad things will happen or if society will collapse. As Calhoun’s work on behavioral sinks tells us, societies absolutely will collapse if we don’t exercise a little self-awareness and put a check on our own behavior, our desires, and our aggressive impulses.

As it turns out, addressing our behavioral sink will pose far more obstacles than solving any of the physical problems or limits we face. That’s where we start running into real challenges, convincing humans to give up their self-destructive tendencies. Personally, that’s where I start to feel a little despair. We’re capable of working together, but right now we aren’t.

Even if you’re a pessimistic doomer who thinks we don’t stand a chance, I think it’s worth at least having some framework for articulating exactly where and how humanity went wrong. It’s not so difficult to understand. It’s not some mystery. It happens to every other species.

We’ve slipped into a behavioral sink.

Can we climb out?

I don’t know.