During World War II, while the planet was busy shrugging off somewhere up to 70 million people, the elite scientists and physicians of Nazi Germany took advantage of camps full of superfluous human lives by performing human experiments. As an afterthought to his human eugenics endeavors, Hitler had created a scientist’s wet dream. An unlimited source of human test subjects. The accounts of these experiments are horrific, yet the data was invaluable. For many reasons, much care was taken to make sure those records were not lost. The German data is still sited in areas of study such as human endurance and survival.
After the war, the trials in Nuremberg became a cautionary tale for every scientist on the planet. Most took heed and kept their tortures to the animal kingdom. Some, under the blanket of top secret cloaks, did not.
For the most part, after the war and before 1966 and the passage of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act, scientists in the US had carte blanche when it came to animal experimentation. It was not as pristine as human experimentation. One had to torture the animals and then extrapolate the data to the human matrix. The closest we came to human experimentation was in the triage and surgeries of battle front hospitals in the time of war. There was never a shortage of wars.
Those were the halcyon days of scientific research. Animal life was cheap and plentiful. There was no oversight except by the individual scientists and the people in control of the grant money. Scientists were limited only by their own creativity and their lack of empathic connection to the animals they used. PETA would not be created until 1980.
John B. Calhoun was a psychologist and an environmentalist. In 1958-1692 he changed psychology forever when he shoved a bunch of Norway rats into a box, giving them everything they needed for survival except space. Calhoun had created Rat Hell. There was the expected aggression. Murder and cannibalism became the norm, but there were surprise behaviors. He coined the word behavioral sink to describe counter intuitive behavior learned under stress that overrides survival instincts. Think of it as an induced neurosis.
Rats naturally control their birth rate when put into socially stressful situations, so Calhoun switched to mice. In 1963 Calhoun started the Mouse Universe study in which he introduced 4 pairs of mice into a mouse utopia (all needs met without predatorial aggression). As could be expected, the population exploded. It reached 620 by day 315, but between day 315 and day 600 chaos reigned. The the last survivable birth occurred at day 600. After day 600 the population collapsed into extinction. Extinction. Even after the numbers dropped below stress level, the mice never returned to normal behavior.
The individual mice took on different neurosis. There were the aggressive males who fought all the time, there were the females who after a period of infanticide, ceased producing young all together despite the presence of fertile males, (Neat trick, that. We need to figure out how to do that in the human population) and then there were the “beautiful ones”, males who did nothing but eat, drink, sleep, and groom themselves, refusing to fight, refusing to engage in the insane social matrix and content to be antisocial. (Wow. I know some guys just like that.)
From these studies they learned that it was not necessarily the lack of space that induced aberrant behavior. It was the frequency of social interactions. Sometimes a rat just wants to be alone and it really pisses us off when other rats mess with our shiat.
As important as these early studies were, they were still primitive and brutal. Gradually, animal rights activists quashed the blatant torture and abuse. Public grants dried up for experimentation on higher orders of fauna after public outcries. Behind the scenes, the US military was the only one experimenting on humans and the results of those test were so secret it would take half a century for them to come to light and in retrospect seemed comically pointless.
The Mouse Universe studies were not the beginning nor were they the end of the study of social groups under stress. Perhaps Calhoun modeled his Mouse Universe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Wall up a city, throw food in occasionally and then sit back and watch what happens. Psychologists of Calhoun’s generation were fascinated by the behaviors that came out of the extremes of the human condition during the war.
The data from these studies did not go unnoticed. The study of human behavior in enclosed systems was more than an avocation for anyone who wanted to play in the big leagues of money and power. The Rothschild empire has over two hundred and fifty years of experience in economic manipulation. They are the Calhoun’s of the money world, perched above the killing field, looking down, fine tuning their skills to maximize their benefit from the least amount of effort while still maintaining their mouse population on the brink of collapse so that they might return to play another day. They became the role models for the banking systems and the military industrial complex that grew up out of profits of WWII. It was like a beast that sank its tendrils into every corner of the globe. And like all energy systems with a rudimentary sentience, the beast could only thrive if they continued to grow. The need for ‘fresh meat’ grew like a bad cocaine addiction. The third world became their playground. The power players staked out their little Mouse Universes in every country on the planet. Borders became walls to keep the mouse subjects contained. The great social experiment took off and grew out of control.
Now take a leap forward to present day and look around. A rift exists between the upper and lower limits of human society. The wealthy, the powerful, the privileged, the bankers and financial mavens, along with every dictator, despot, president and prime minister alike all have one true agenda. To maintain the status quo. To extract as much as they can from the lower echelons of human civilization to support lifestyles of excess without triggering catastrophic, systemic collapse. They are all expert at creating “behavior sinks” in human populations using disinformation and false scarcity and then exploiting the resulting insanity.
Like all good mice, we submit to the localized rules of whatever Mouse Universe we find ourselves in, adapting to the next extreme set of circumstances induced by the god-like beings who run it. We are hardwired to do so and it is a trait fully exploited by our handlers.
Then there is the Mouse Universe called the United States. Subtle is the hand of the demi-god manipulator who controls this place. The lessons of modern psychology lies at the heart of all mob control. The science of getting people to do what you want them to do, despite all their instincts to the contrary. This is where the big bucks are. Only statisticians have more prestige. Everything, even being human, has been reduced down to numbers. Every head of state, every CEO, every banker, has a back room somewhere full of accountants and actuaries and doctors of psychology who crunch numbers and predict outcomes. They all have the same question. How far can I push it before it breaks?
Take the monetary system. Allan Greenspan admitted in one of his exit interviews that his monetary formula had a “dead baby” factor. How many dead babies does it take to drive a population to react? How far can you push people before they push back? Where do you think he came up with that number?
From careful observation of years of human history, taking special note of every failed policy, every ruined economy, every despotic misstep. The planet is the Uber Mouse Universe.
CEO’s play this game every day. Watch the price of gasoline fluctuate. It is not supply and demand that runs this number. It is the oil companies fine tuning their numbers. It’s the “whatever the market will bear” number. They overstep the bounds of consumer tolerance, more and more of late. Commodities, even those that are considered essential, can become too expensive and consumers learn, adapt and invent alternatives. It is detrimental to your bottom line if you trigger a reaction in your intended victims.
CEO’s and dictators have a lot in common. Every despot worth his salt is a student of history. Every dictator has all the other dictators on speed dial. They watch each other. What policies failed? How much oppression is too much? How heavy can you tax an economy before it collapses? They network, sharing their successes, learning from their failures.
Do you wonder why we do nothing about North Korea, where their despot is insane and the people eat dirt and bark to stay alive? Where is our outrage? If they were animals, we would be up in arms. I wonder if it is because we are all secretly curious about how it will all turn out. There is dearth of compassion for humans who find themselves locked away in a Mouse Universes. We stand back and watch, waiting. Waiting for what? Is it our belief that the true nature and goodness of humans can only shine forth under extreme duress? Or are we just waiting for something, anything to happen. Do we thirst for the pains of change, wishing it upon others instead of ourselves?
Look at the creation of Israel. It does not take a huge leap of the imagination to see that it is a country of walls, not unlike the Warsaw ghetto. Was it not jumping from the frying pan into the fire, going from war torn Europe to a state carved out of other Arab nations where every neighbor hates your guts and wants to kill you? One wonders at the wisdom of the Jews who fled there. Are they just naturally masochistic or is there something more subtle at play here? Is it the zealot’s insanity, to seek the fires of duress in hopes that some imagined god might save us or do we sit on our hands, holding our breath, waiting for the forces against us to trigger a cataclysmic change, preordained and embedded on our genome, that only extreme can bring out, like a tree that can only seed itself in the presence of fire?
Are we not all watching the endeavors of human beings seeking change in the Arab world with high anticipation?
One could believe that this is day 600 in our Mouse Universe and give up to the inevitable extinction. Or one could believe that Calhoun stopped his experiments too soon and that given the right set of circumstances, instead of extinction, one might stumble upon the next step in the evolution of rat society.
The art of survival in times of cataclysmic change is not to fight the forces ranked against you, but to see them as tools to aide you on your way, remembering always to stay focused, not on where you have been or where you are now, but where you wish to be. Then dream the impossible.
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