OF MICE AND MODERN HUMANS

Humans of NIMH

[National Institute of Mental Health]

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows [understands that] he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” ―Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3 (1791)

As a modern human, I am also a “human of NIMH”, not unlike John B. Calhoun’s rat (and mouse) domesticants who became “rats of NIMH.” Calhoun’s studies of rats and mice under high (over)density population conditions was well known in the 1970s until a consensus arose that humans are different (in kind) from rats, and so population overshoot concerns or the effects (“behavioral sink”) observed in other social species did not apply to modern humans (we moderns deeply believe in all certitude that we are exceptional — that is what defines us, we would rather believe than know).

This collective act of willful ignorance is why few humans under age 50 have heard of Calhoun’s work (he was canceled in the 1980s), Garrett Hardin’s work, or that of the MIT Limits to Growth study other than to know that they were all proven wrong, i.e. that concerns for density/civilizational or ecological overshoot apply only to animals, and not humans (all properly educated [modern] human today know this).

The better (evidence based) story is that we are incurring an overshoot debt (Calhounian and Malthusian) that posterity will have to pay. What follows is a subsection of a bigger story, “Critical Mass,” which is a transcript of a documentary film with added context/information added. Calhoun’s concerns for humanity, if you’ve been paying attention for the last 50 years, were not misplaced.

Our denial, however, is misplaced. We are denormalized animals. If forced to recant, then on your way out of Room 101, think (but do not even mumble) Galileo’s apocryphal words, “And yet it moves,” which is not a belief-based claim.

So for more context, consider humanity’s condition of Critical Mass and foresee our near future before or after reading this subsection (which contains 11 bite-sized sub-subsections, so take a few hours/days break as needed — sorry, but it’s complicated and some information is critical, i.e. well beyond ‘good to know’).

A compassionate Rₓevolution for compassionate Rₓevolutionaries.
You can’t join the compassionate Rₓvolution, but you can be a compassionate Rₓevolutionary.
We really need prescriptions for our continued evolution.

In the 1990s an apathetic youth who was cynical and uninterested in economic, political or social causes was known as a slacker. As a recent convert in China notes “the term ‘let it rot’ [bailan] is similar to ‘lying flat’ but conveys a new degree of cynicism”, “new slang terms are being coined to capture young people’s sense of doom and despondency”. Urban youth unemployment in 2022 China was over 18%, so lying flat and letting it rot is adaptive, not a call for revolutionary change.

To consider social movements, perhaps reading/rereading Eric Hoffer’s ‘The True Believer’ is a start. Movements are not ultimately belief-based, however (though expressed as beliefs). The pattern unfolding in China is secondary to China’s still intense ‘996’ work culture (working from 9am-9pm 6 days a week to grow the economy).

Prior to China at present was Japan’s post-WWII reconstruction, a corporate ‘Made in Japan’ work culture. America’s ‘Made in the USA’ work culture, aka ‘the rat race’ was associated with the ‘Great Acceleration’ of about 1950 that led to a counter culture response in the late 1960s to a system making impossible demands on people to produce and consume as in China today.

Counter culture may be ‘just the thing’ needed (if it were actually a paradigm shift in a viable direction), but none have yet been counter enough. We may look at China’s version of a counter/slacker culture and celebrate, but fail to see it as a loss of functional behaviors on a cultural (civilization overshoot?) downslope.

The 5% to 19% GDP growth was China’s normal (2020 was ‘only’ 2.3% but back to an almost normal 8.1% in 2021) that will transition (unintended no doubt) to zero and beyond even if the year it does is unknown. A recognition that the ‘Establishment’ is non-viable does not seem to translate into becoming viable (though contrarians typically imagine a good outcome).

At 9.5%, China’s economy doubled every 7.4 years. In one three year period they used more concrete than the USA had in its entire history.

Just by way of doing the ‘let him declare what he seeth’ thing, we are products of a culture that has replaced the ‘life-driven purpose’ of our ancestors (go forth and hunt/gather/forage as needed to persist) with a ‘purpose-driven life’ as servants, domesticants of overcomplex techno-economies/empires/societies.

We are perhaps not normal humans, but more like B.F. Skinner’s rats in a Skinner box pressing levers. Doing what is needed each day to persist and prosper within carrying capacity limits (that Nature alone defines) as normal and functional K-strategists is what Nature selects for (a 4th law of energetics MPP thing).

In our monetary culture, working for money is selected for by the economy/society (which we misjudge ‘the world’ some would seek to ‘save’). Doing so defines normalized behavior that to normal humans (all but recent ancestors) would appear insane, the starkest madness, as one might imagine wild rats would view the behavior of Skinner’s and Calhoun’s lab rats.

Using a variable schedule of reinforcement, I can get a rat to push a lever for food (energy) until it dies for lack of food/energy. Its last purposeful act, if the energy in the food reward is less than the energy required to keep on pushing the lever, will (before dying of starvation) be to press the lever one more time (as I would).

A rat’s or a human’s capacity to be reinforced while living in a state of nature is not a pathology (does not select for the animal’s demise). Our condition of living in an overcomplex monetary society that selects for a purpose-driven life (to serve it as domesticants) is not different in kind from rats in a Skinner box or Calhoun’s rats of NIMH. The outcome is one those alive today are bearing witness to, even if few understand what they seeth.

Calhoun’s concerns for posterity were derived entirely from listening to what his rats and mice were telling him for over forty years. That almost no one today shares his concerns doesn’t mean they went away because they must be wrong. My concern is that humanity is seriously underestimating the challenge of passing through the foreseeable bottleneck, the Great Selection, sufficiently intact to persist long term as a viable species. And I hope I’m wrong about everything.

Calhoun’s first experiment involved wild Norway rats, presumably full function normal K-strategist rats (not rats of NIMH) who had never been subject to overdensity living and loss of functional behaviors, and thus avoided overdensity population overshoot. Doing so is adaptive and has been selected for (in rats who have been a eusocial species far longer than humans who are not as highly evolved).

Calhoun released five female rats and enough males in a 10,800-square-foot (1000 m2) outdoor pen with predator exclosure and supplied them with illimitable (to them) food and water and such necessities as Calhoun (he wasn’t a rat, so what would he know?) thought to provide. He observed them over a 28-month period starting in 1947 (Calhoun was forced to retire from NIMH in 1984 but continued to study his data until he couldn’t as he had a life-driven purpose to do so).

Per Calhoun’s best guess their population could have theoretically grown to 5,000 rats in the enclosure (based on the density domestic rats tolerate), but didn’t. Their population climaxed at about 200 and then stabilized at around 150. As noted, these were normal Norway rats with culture/behavioral repertoire intact. They did not disperse evenly about the enclosure as individuals, but self-organized into twelve or thirteen colonies of about 12 rats each. The Dunbar number for Norway rats is about 12, and the maximum viable colony density was about 12–13 for the size of area they inhabited. Stress between colonies, conflict/fighting, was evident.

Humans domesticants differ from rats (but not in kind). Our Dunbar number is about 150, the maximum viable band size (though optimal is 20 to 50, 5–85 range). Normal humans, most of our ancestors for the last 375k years (until recently, over the last 75k years), maintained a viable population density and numbers within a biome as fully functional K-strategists. We modern techno-industrialized humans of NIMH are not normal. Normal K-strategists are not like us short-termers.

There is a limit to the number of rats in a viable colony, and a limit to the density of colonies, beyond which the colonies become too close together resulting in increasing stress just as beyond 12 rats/colony, more rats in a colony increases stress to a non-viable level.

Stress (GAS, General Adaptation Syndrome) is the limiter in populations of normal, functional rats and mice, beyond which conflict-based and disease-based mortality, and decreased fertility limit population (not the education and political empowering of female rats). ‘Choosing’ to not have children or marrying a hologram is not normal human behavior as viewed by our ancestors of the past 500 thousand years (or earlier).

Our problem is that we are not normal humans living on the veldt. Clever ape humans of NIMH we are (i.e. modern humans) and our technology and ability to concentrate energy flows (e.g. agriculture, use of horses, canoes) and living in overdensity populations (for a time) has grown in recent millennia. We who are pathogens living the pathogenic life cannot naturally limit what is already long into overshoot (a majority of humans were living unsustainably within an empire, from chiefdom to state level, when our global population exceeded about 35 million 3k-4k years ago).

Nature is unkind. Our condition of overshoot will be corrected. Whether some acquire enough foresight intelligence to manage our way down and manage a planetary commons by molding ‘individual behaviour into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources’ is uncertain and perhaps unthinkable to us humans of NIMH. But at some point some may listen to their inner hominin and realize there really are too many of us and more BAU (business as usual) is going to be the death squared of us, we who are in double overshoot (ecological and civilizational).

At best we may hit what we aim for, e.g. renormalization of our psychosocial form and function to again become viable animals. Overestimating the challenge of civilizational paradigm change may be impossible. Underestimating the challenge may be part of our first death that locks in our (actually posterity’s) death as a species. Life as we know it may be a dispensable distraction. In playing a high-stakes end game, keeping our eyes on the prize of persistence long term may be posterity’s prize.

Of Mice and Humans

John B. Calhoun’s non-mathematical, non-metaphorical (biblical) offering (conclusion) in prose:

For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events [exponential growth phase followed by loss of functional behaviours] should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfilment fall far short of the demand by those [the young] capable of filling roles, and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances [modernity] will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation [of lying flat or letting it rot]. Their most-complex behaviours will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked. Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviours, so does ideational generativity for man. Loss of these respective complex behaviours [condition of post-truth believing minds] means death of the species.

The Chemistry of Collapse

From “The Spirit in the Gene”, Reg Morrison, 1999, pages 130–134.

Many other animals seem to have a hormone-regulated response to environmental stress that switches their metabolism into a more economical mode whenever resources become scarce. Inevitably the energy-hungry processes of reproduction are the first to be targeted. For example, Australia’s kangaroos are able to put the development of their embryos on indefinite hold during drought by means of a unique, hormone-regulated phenomenon known as embryonic diapause. When the drought ends and food becomes readily available once more, the embryo resumes normal development. Wild populations of yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) have shown signs of hormone-regulated fertility decline during periods of social and environmental stress. The telltale hormonal signature of this process, first detected by endocrinologist Sam Wasser of the University of Washington, has also been identified in captive lowland gorillas, and in women. When persistent in women, it typically accounts for up to 10% of infertility and 25% of habitual abortion.

A similar hormonal signature with even more dramatic outcomes has been recognized in other species, notably snowshoe hares, lemmings, voles, rats, mice, and tree shrews. These animals, however, are more likely to become infertile during periods of social rather than environmental stress, and the primary governing factor seems to be population density. When the number of individuals rises to a certain level, a suite of internal factors, all hormone-regulated, appears to cut in, limiting fertility even where food resources remain unrestricted. This process has been shown to lead to a total cessation of reproduction in some cases, and occasionally leads to population extinction, although how this occurs is still poorly understood. The most startling feature of these collapses is that even when numbers had plummeted to the point that density was low and social stress was no longer a problem, instead of fertility rising and death rates falling to allow the population to recover, the decline accelerated.

General Adaptation Syndrome

This curious mechanism, originally called the general adaptation syndrome (GAS) by Hans Seyle, who first noted it in 1936, has since been reported in several wild rodent species, but it is best documented in laboratory rats. In well-fed but extremely dense populations, social stress appears to trigger a broad spectrum of abnormal physiological responses such as glandular malfunction, inhibited sexual maturation, diminished ovulation and implantation, inadequate lactation, increased susceptibility to disease, and a sharp rise in infant mortality. Social responses include increased aggression, infanticide and cannibalism, curtailed reproduction, abandonment of unweaned.

Some researchers have suggested that this general adaptation syndrome may in fact play a far more important role than in availability of food in the regulation of mammal plagues, since a curious feature of most plague collapses in the wild is the continued availability of food and the scarcity of malnourished corpses. The evolutionary value of such a mechanism would be considerable. If a plague species could cull its numbers before it totally exhausted its food resources, then it would avoid the risk of degrading its environment to the point that its extinction was guaranteed. [E.g. as modern humans are poised to do.]

Uninhibited by most of the estrous or seasonal factors that regulate reproduction rates in other mammal species, Homo sapiens seemed, until recently, to exhibit no trace of this syndrome and thus appeared to be biologically defenseless against exponential population growth. Wherever overcrowding coincided with high mortality rates (due to disease and malnutrition), fertility tended to accelerate, as parents tried to ensure against possible future family losses. Consequently, because of cultural factors and a peculiar ability to plan ahead, humans have tended to reproduce faster at precisely those times when the general adaptation syndrome might have been expected to come into play.

The Stress Connection

That appeared to be the case until the 1970s, when the East German scientist Gunter Dorner heard of the work of Selye and others on the physiological effects of social stress in laboratory rats and mice. Dorner had already spent much of his career investigating the role hormones such as estrogen and testosterone play in the development of the fetus, particularly in determining an individual’s sexual orientation. He was especially intrigued by reports that female rats subjected to severe social stress during pregnancy tended to produce male offspring that were attracted only to other male rats. Since he already knew that high stress levels experienced during pregnancy resulted in lower levels of male hormones in the womb, he decided to survey that section of the German population that had been born during and just after World War II to see if he could detect statistical evidence of the link between stress and sexuality in society at large. From the eight hundred homosexuals questioned in the survey, Dorner was able to determine that the homosexual birth rate (i.e., the percentage of homosexuals in the overall population) had indeed fluctuated according to the levels of stress suffered by women during pregnancy. More homosexuals had been born during the years of greatest social stress — during the last months of the conflict and those immediately following the war — than at any other time. In fact, two-thirds of the homosexual men and their mothers reported prebirth levels of stress ranging from “moderate” to “extreme,” and the stated causes included bombing, rape, and extreme anxiety. By contrast, only 10% of the heterosexuals in the control group reported unusual maternal stress during the prenatal period, and the mothers of these individuals reported only moderate prenatal stress.

Such a rise in the homosexual birth rate would of course have virtually no effect on the fertility potential of the German population as a whole, but that such a stress-related reproductive control mechanism existed in Homo sapiens at all was significant. The global fertility decline that developed so unexpectedly during the past two decades clearly suggests that we may, after all, be subject to multitude of subtle, larger fertility controls very like those that control rodent plagues. All the hormonal signatures are there, although it is impossible to discern at this early stage which forms of stress are primarily responsible for decline. Changes in lifestyle, self-administered recreational drugs and food additives, increased exposure to chemical pollutants that imitate or inhibit the body’s sex hormones — any or all of these, plus others as yet undetected, might be the trigger. We will no doubt continue to equate our declining fertility with cultural success and attribute it to the empowerment of women, effective sex-education programs, and the general spread of literacy and better information. But if you switch off the cultural soundtrack and concentrate on the figures and the population graph, it all looks astonishingly like the end of a typical mammal plague — and the beginning of Selye’s general adaptation syndrome.

The Enemy Within

Hormones move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. As the body’s chemical messengers bring about adaptive physiological responses to environmental change. How elegantly appropriate it would be if, in chaotic and fractal fashion, they served precisely the same purpose on a global scale. Even manufactured substances that mimic hormones, a rogue element as far as we are concerned, may effect adaptive physiological changes. These substances, often called “endocrine disrupters,” disturb normal sexual development in a wide variety of vertebrates, including humans, causing lower sperm counts, undeveloped or malformed genitalia, repeated failure of embryo implantation, and a rising incidence of ectopic pregnancies. They occur in a vast range of commercial products — pesticides, plastics, paints, inks, industrial detergents — and are released as breakdown products. The onslaught of such substances was first brought to public attention in 1962 by Rachel Carson in her momentous book Silent Spring. However, she considered only the toxicity of such chemicals and was unaware of their even more serious long-term hormonal consequences.

Most of the known offenders imitate estrogen, and the impact is therefore most noticeable in males. Under the feminizing influence of these estrogen mimics, genes that are responsible for the production of testosterone in males often fail to switch on. Extensive surveys of male fertility carried out in several developed countries (notably Denmark, Scotland, and France) suggest that the average number of sperm in the ejaculate of a normal man appears to have fallen by up to 50% during the past fifty years. Although the method of analysis used in the surveys was widely criticized, similar sperm count reductions and increasing signs of sexual dysfunction have been detected in several other vertebrates, especially rats, alligators, and birds, and these too seem to have been caused by exposure to artificially produced hormone mimics. The matter was finally put beyond reasonable doubt in January 1997 when a Finnish team compared testicular tissue (taken during postmortem examinations) from men who died suddenly either in 1981 or 1991. In that ten-year period the numbers of men who had normal testicular tissue and healthy sperm production had fallen by more than 50%. As increasing numbers of artificial endocrine become interwoven with whatever endogenous fertility inhibitors constitute the human version of the general adaptation syndrome, it seems likely that the current fertility decline will gradually accelerate.

Driven by such subtle and complex chemistry, our ultimate population decline is likely to remain both inexplicable and beyond remedy. We will see a gradual increase in the incident of biological social dysfunction, as well as rising levels of unproductive sexual behavior, such as homosexuality, lesbianism, and pedophilia, and an increasing heterosexual tendency to postpone or avoid parenthood. The natural fertility brakes are likely to become even more pervasive and pronounced as population pressure increases, social cohesion decays, and environmental degradation mounts.

Although the global fertility rate is now showing signs of significant decline, judging by the current rate of industrialization, our energy consumption will multiply by a factor of 2.5 by the year 2050. The technological factor of the I=PAT equation (Impact = Population x Activity x Technology) thereby promises to compensate for most of the decline in population growth. In other words, as far as the biosphere is concerned, it is almost as though human fertility were not declining at all, suggesting that something other than simple math is manipulating the equation to achieve this convenient end. To lay the blame on human culture is circular reasoning and provides no answer, so we are left facing the intriguing alternative that our predicament betrays the presence of some form of evolutionary genetic management system, mechanism that has automatically locked us into a cultural development that guarantees disaster; perhaps even a Gaian mechanism like the one proposed by Vernadsky, Lovelock, and Margulis.

We Humans of NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health)

In his most famous experiment in the series, “Universe 25”, population peaked at 2,200 mice. The normal behavior of Phase A was soon followed by increasing pathological behaviors that emerge in Phase B and C, and to fail the complex society in Phase D, ending when the last mouse died of old age.

The mice increasingly exhibited a variety of abnormal sexual and aggressive behaviors as well as other self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors (conjecture: if the mice had access to recreational drugs, they would have used them — they would have played video games and spent nine hours a day on their smartphones if they could, and if the male “beautiful ones” had access to nail salons, they would have patronized them). By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction as their ability to successfully rear their young failed. Mouse generation time is 70 days, so decline began in generation 8.6 of the mice of NIMH experiment.

If the Industrial Revolution began in the period between 1760 and 1830 in European and American societies, then we are generation [(2019–1795)/25.5] 8.8 of our industrial society experiment. If industrial society were following the above pattern, then when did Phase C begin? Judging from the roar and conspicuous consumption, acceptance of unearned wealth beyond the dreams of avaricious as evidence of superiority and justification of privilege, then about the 1920s. Dickens and Conrad, among others, detailed the rise of our behavioral sink that may climax in the 21st century. The take-home message is that we may not be different in kind from other organisms (e.g. Dunbar’s number for rats is 12, not 150, so we differ, but not in kind), nor is our complex system different in kind from other complex systems that select for an endgame (e.g. cancer).

“For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity’s grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large….” — Edward O. Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life 2016

Crazy

On the subject of Self as social construct, as belief-based concept/entity: Christopher Thomas Knight, also known as the North Pond Hermit, lived without significant human contact for 27 years between 1986 and 2013 in Maine.

He found contentment in solitude. He noted, “I did examine myself; it’s complicated. Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing — when I applied my increased perception [mindfulness?] to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. Years were meaningless. I measured time by the season and moon. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I never felt lonely. My desires dropped away. I didn’t long for anything. I didn’t even have a name [he didn’t know what he looked like as he had no mirror; couldn’t lie, pretend, or deny; had no religious or political beliefs; didn’t know the name of the pond he lived by…]. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

Free to follow the dictates of necessity, of his life-driven purpose. Freedom is total determinism, obedience to the nature of things, choiceless awareness, liberation from the dictates of belief-based storytelling including that of Self and Other. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” — Garrett Hardin, 1968, in “Tragedy of the Commons,” the idea attributed to Hegel. And who’s crazy?

Per the journalist (Finkel) who interviewed Knight, “Sometimes, when I’m driving in my car with my three kids fighting in the back and I’m late for an appointment, stuck in traffic and the radio is blaring bad news, a thought runs right through my heart and soul: It’s not Knight who’s crazy, it’s the rest of us. Maybe the operative question isn’t why Chris left society, but why the rest of us don’t.”

If Knight is viewed as a sovereign individual, and 195 nation-states proclaim their sovereignty, then I would note that all are living a life of dependence on modern techno-industrial production and consumption. Knight could never spend money, and so did not value it. He was not by nature a thief and never justified his behavior by telling a story that he was not behaving badly.

But 195 nation-states are stealing from posterity and justifying it (thank you system serving intelligentsia). Knight stole what he needed to to survive. And 8 billion others do the same, except they take as much as they can and steal the rest. If all modern humans left the North Pond region, Knight would have had no propane bottles to steal nor food to eat. But with no people to discover his hide-away, he could have burned wood and made as much smoke as burning wood can sometimes make. He could have learned to fish, gather, and without humans in the area, like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, wildlife would soon become abundant. If some humans came to live in the area as hunter-gatherers, they would perhaps tolerate Knight’s existence, or view him as a competitor and kill him.

Why do we live like rats in a Skinner Box? Oh, because that’s what is selected for. Can the rules of the game, the contingencies of reinforcement, be changed? Perhaps if we stop listening to our self-serving stories (and those of all other self-serving storytellers), and listen to Nature instead, then we will change if we learn to listen to Mother (the Gaian system).

To follow the dictates of necessity as defined by Nature is “the life-driven purpose” our ancestors knew. Modern complex societies (exceeding Dunbar’s Number) of the last ten thousand years, select for “the purpose-driven life” where purpose is defined by society via belief-based storytelling to generate behavior that serves it (the hierarchical control system and its technology that develops), turning humans into humans of NIMH such that in today’s industrialized complex societies a quarter of the population will suffer from mental illness (per WHO) at some period of their lives if not the whole of it. A chronically over-active stress response induced by population density stress, the “diseases of civilization”, could be causative.

Rats in a Skinner Box also live the purpose-driven life defined by the set and setting that define the “rules of the game”. Those defining the criteria that determine mental illness must exclude themselves, and as dysfunction becomes more common, pathologies are normalized such that at the height of a humans of NIMH society where all are dysfunctional, most will be assessed as “normal” as population norms will define “normal” even if none are normal compared to “wild” humans (hunter-gatherer ancestors) not living the koyaanisqatsi life [conjecture: vastly exceed Dunbar’s number and expect death2 in 8 to 12 generations of steady growth, whether of mice or men].

The believing mind, insanity squared, has been normalized. The process of denormalizing humans began about 55 thousands years ago with the Great Expansion out of Africa that led to a pulsing dynamic of empire-building. All prior complex societies rose, fell, or “faded away” with maybe one exception. A managed ecolate educational system could have a different outcome in a managed commons.

None of the rats of NIMH at maximum population were normal with respect to normal adaptive life-driven behaviors of wild rats. None of the eighth generation mice of NIMH were able to renormalize when removed from the high density population they were born and raised in any more than an eighth generation urbanized human could live in a hunter-gatherer society with or without a smartphone. We true believers, we denizens of industrial society wouldn’t recognize what is “normal” if we were tossed into the midst of it.

Existential Concerns for Humanity and the Biosphere

Malthusian: Complex systems can select for their own failure via unmanaged pathological dynamics, (e.g. cancer, unmanaged commons, conquest culture, empire building). Any shortage of needed (or perceived as needed) energy or material resources (air, water, food, clothing, shelter, security, love and belonging, trust, role fulfillment, a place to stand — physical and memetic, and industrial energy/material inputs into the global economy that almost all now depend, for a time, on) creates conflict (human-human and human-environment).

Conflict consumes (reduces) energy and material resources that increase shortages (and the longage of demand), which increases conflict in a downward spiral to dissolution. Energy, the precondition for the flow of all other resources, cannot (other than short term) be created at will by clever apes. Nor will the Second Law (or 4th or 5th) go away by a consensus (belief-based certitude) that it does not apply to humans, who differ in kind from all other animals, as we decouple from Nature (an externality).

Calhounian: In proportion to the degree that the social group size exceeds the optimum [in humans 20–60 or < Dunbar’s number of about 150 maximum. See Dyads: A Social Complexity Number.], dysfunctional behaviors increase from generation to generation as inappropriate species-specific activities increase such that “normal” individuals are no longer capable of executing the more complex behaviors compatible with species survival leading to a behavioral sink and death squared.

Only conflict and disruption of societal organization can follow. Individuals born under pathological biosociopolitical circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked.

Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviors, so does memetic generativity for humans. Loss of these respective complex behaviors, including complex verbal behavior in humans (e.g. nearly universal post-truth denialism and belief in stories), means death of the species.

Whether the first death would mean a second death for all humans, or whether in perhaps 500 years of environmental and behavioral restoration (that will, a millennium or so later, come to be called dark age) is uncertain. That there will be humans in a post-hu-mans of NIMH world cannot be determined at this time, nor whether if extinction is sidestepped, that the remnant population has any viable, long-term future.

Ecological Trauma and Common Addiction
Rex Weyler, June 12, 2019

Although modest and physically challenging, primal life offered certain benefits and shaped our nature. Early humans, like all animals, matured in stable communities with relatively secure food supplies. For millennia, families remained intact and children grew up watching parents work, surrounded by … the “more than human world” — the ultimate parent — learning lessons from the wild world, from creatures, and from landscapes.

These ecosystem comforts nourished us for 99.99 percent of our ancestral development. Then, only a few thousand years ago, some humans began living in [overdensity] urban environments, relying on remote agriculture, specialist skills, and the wiles of moneychangers [while forfeiting normal adaptive ‘wild’ behaviors to persist within a pathogenic monetary culture — for a time]. Within the last few hundred years, industrial culture has widened this separation from nature, divided families, and destroyed communities, creating alienated individuals clinging to scarce jobs and rewarded with packaged food and entertainment, like the “bread and circuses” that Roman emperors bestowed upon disenfranchised peasants.

In spite of our civilized ways, human psychology remains linked to our primal origins. We suffer the trauma of witnessing ecological abuse, watching our comforting wild home being destroyed, our relatives — owls, tigers,. gorillas — eradicated, and Earth diminished… “Beneath the veneer of civilization … lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human.” ‘ [i.e. no longer humans of NIMH in maybe 8–12 generations.]

[So, ‘go forth under the open sky, and list to Nature’s teachings…’ and ‘seek out the condition now that will come anyway’ for verily ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the world’. Oh, and there are no political solutions.]

Population Density Stress Is Killing Us Now!
Gregg Miklashek, November 14, 2019

The following from STRESS R US: A 600+ page essay on what’s killing us. why, and what we can do about it, 2017, the ‘life’s work’ of Gregg Miklashek, neuro-psychiatrist and only human of NIMH I know of who has both Malthusian and Calhounian concerns.

1. Our ancient stress response is chronically over-active ( COASTER ), which we came to see as a major component of “population density stress”, due to our built-world filled with population density stressors, our separation from Nature by the “built” world, and the loss of our ancestral Hunter-gatherer clan social structures. It is the chief contributing cause of nearly all current human illness.
2. In animal models, a chronically overactive stress response (COASTER) appears to prevent overpopulation and “overshoot” of carrying capacity, as a result of disease promotion, reduced reproduction, and, finally, “the kill-switch”.
3. Were it not for modern medical interventions, improved sanitation, waste management, water purification, and unsustainable natural resource extraction, the vast majority of us humans alive today would have been eliminated from our bursting populations many times over.
4. We have been supporting our huge human populations by unsustainable, nonrenewable natural resource extraction for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and are reaching the point of totally exhausting earth’s ability to keep us alive.
5. We cannot possibly morally or religiously justify our monopoly of earth’s resources to the exclusion of all other life-forms on the planet — the 6th mass extinction of all other life on earth.
6. We are by nature highly social, nearly genetically identical clan social animals. The human population on Earth was stable at about 4–6–10 ( by varied estimates ) million when we thrived as clan-living hunter-gatherers. Clan living and the migratory lifeways necessitated constant contact with, and protection of, each-others’ children and
   we kept our families small. We have lost this control today.
7. Only we humans, by individual action, can limit our family size to an average of one child, thus reducing world population size to 2.5 billion by 2100, and reduce our personal excessive consumption of natural resources. Recycle, join a resource sharing clan social group, reuse, buy local, support local organic agriculture; avoid all unnecessary petrochemical, plastic, electrical, and water use, etc., restoring balance to the ecosystem.

It is not already too late but immediate action is mandatory, if catastrophe is to be avoided. Population density stress is already killing us off, as Mother Nature intends when a species is overpopulated. It’s only a matter of time before we’re next to be eliminated by COASTER.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/3/23

“…the major contributors to social stress in cities are social density and social isolation, especially if they come with a low sense of environmental mastery in the individual, i.e. feeling capable of influencing the environment according to one’s own needs. Both variants of social stress — density and isolation — are well characterized health challenges: Social density can mean a constant threat for the social order we live in. Overcrowding can induce stress and illness in species ranging from insects to rodents to primates, including humans. And social isolation is associated with increased premature mortality — with a stronger effect than smoking, alcohol abuse or obesity.” — Stress in the City

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Stress is the unspecific physiological and psychological reaction to perceived threats to our physical, psychological or social integrity. And urban living can be threatening if you don’t have enough space of your own, if you experience insufficient security, or live under unstable economic conditions. Stress increases with the anticipation of adverse situations and the fear of not having the adequate resources to respond to them.

Living in an urban environment has long been known to be a risk factor for psychiatric diseases, such as major depression or schizophrenia. It is is true even though infrastructure, socioeconomic conditions, nutrition and health care services are clearly better in cities than in rural areas. Higher stress exposure and higher stress vulnerability seem to play a crucial role. Social stress may be the most important factor for the increased risk of mental disorders in urban areas. It may be experienced as social evaluative threat, or as chronic social stress, both of which are likely to occur as a direct consequence of high population densities in cities. As for the impact on mental health, social stress seems to outweigh other urban stressors such as pollution or noise. Living in crowded areas is associated with increased social stress, since the environment becomes less controllable for the individual. Social disparities also become much more prominent in cities and can impose stress on the individual. Further, disturbance of chronobiological rhythms is more frequent in cities than in rural areas and has a negative influence on mental health and beyond. A recent meta-analysis showed that urban dwellers have a 20 per cent higher risk of developing anxiety disorders, and a 40 per cent higher risk of developing mood disorders.” — URBAN LIVING AND MENTAL HEALTH.

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For involuntary change, join MHEM. The belief that you are a free agent, with free will to choose your future (or get modern humans to choose their future), is error floating on a sea of ignorance in a thick fog of illusion.

The Modern Human Extinction Movement

[Note: MHEM includes members who celebrate Modern human life and favor the extinction of all life on the planet that humans do not value. A minority faction views the condition of being a Modern human the way AA members view the condition of being an alcoholic — i.e. non-viable. The author is obviously one of the “Or-nots” who seek to “just say no” to the Anthropocene.]