Welcome to the Behavioral Sink
In my book "Mere Animals" I give a LOT of grief to the Japanese and their lack of personal connection to their society and to other people in their society. But Japan is hardly the only nation suffering from this killer sickness. Just today I found this delightful little video on the Internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03VmgQV9WuI
It turns out that the same type of psychological malaise is affecting billions of people all across the globe, all of whom have one thing in common; to a varying degree their traditional societies have been replaced by a mixed society that includes parts of the American nuclear society. I call this the "American nuclear society" because it's really based on the psychological, social, and postmodernist beliefs that have all cropped up since 1900.
What's becoming clear is that all of these popular or ideological sets of ideas that we've created are both the symptom and cause of the "behavioral sink" in which we find ourselves today. The behavioral sink was created as an explanation for the self-destruction of populations of mice that were allowed to live in a utopia of plentiful food and water but limited in space conducted by John B. Calhoun from the 1940's all the way into the early 1970's. As far as I can tell these experiments are among the most solid and universally repeatable exercises you can do in the social sciences. If you are not aware and do not know what the behavioral sink is I believe this article will explain it to you adequately enough to allow you to understand my viewpoint on it:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
My only problem with Mr. Calvin's work is the assumption he made that the major psychological pressure placed on the colonies of mice were created by their overcrowding. I think that it is more correct to say that the overcrowding had an amplifying effect on the behavior of the mice rather than being it's main cause. I wish to put forward a different theory for you; that it was the easy abundance of the food and water that made space for all of the individual psychological failures that added up to the social dysfunctions that actually caused the destruction of the entire colony.
Here's what I believe happens: we humans fail to recognize the strong connection between our psychological health and our bodies. In the jungle, in the wild, even in times and places where the food supplies are abundant, it still has to be gathered or hunted for. This requires work, a lot of time and energy. So I see the biggest artificial intrusion on the psychology of the mice as being they no longer had to forage. This is not a natural environment for any creature on earth, long before there is the slightest bit of overcrowding.
Not having to work to at least gather the food and water gave the mice an unnatural amount of free time. Now, instead of having maybe a couple of hours a day of psychological downtime when they're not involved in the activities necessary to survive and procreate, now suddenly they end up with six or eight or even maybe ten hours of free time. The brains of those mice did not know what to do with the incredible amount of free time suddenly afforded them the navel gaze. So what do the mice sit around and think about? Well it turns out is pretty much the same things as humans think about; sex and enemies and friendship and competitors.
Mice are at the bottom of the food chain, so they're used to looking around for threats and danger and competitors. But when you have too much time to sit around your mind starts playing tricks on you. Back in the days of the old black-and-white movies this idea of being caught up in your own psychological inner world too much formed the premise behind some of the greatest movies of all time. From All About Eve to Mutiny on the Bounty, this theme was a power example of our human weakness. I remember being deeply affected watching Humphrey Bogart's astounding performance in his testimony scene as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and have never forgotten it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUZ0Nv7UH4
And so we come to what I believe to be the crux of the matter, that having to not necessarily struggle but not having to put considerable time and energy into survival shorts circuits our mind. Like every other animal having to focus on important activity most of the time is the natural state of our pshychology and the way it is meant to work. It's not abundance that causes the issue and it is certainly not crowding, as cities have been around for tens of thousands of years. It's the leisure time. It's the ability to set and focus on oneself to the exclusion of the rest of the world for long periods that makes space for the vast majority of the psychological issues we have today. When you don't have anything to do but sit around and think and you're not disciplined or any good at it then it's only a matter of time before the first few dark thoughts appear. And since just like mice there are a lot of animals in the world that could harm us, our minds do exactly what the mice is minds do; We focus on the dark side, on potential threats. Given too much free time, the mice start to think wrongly about sex and enemies and friendship and competitors.
But just like the mice were no longer looking for these things in a natural environment. Were living in an unnatural environment, especially today. We've twisted the natural function of Western civilization's focus on the individual from the vitally important function of the freedom to act to a crippling focus only on our own individual selves, thinking only of our own selfish rights and desires. Couple this with the fact that the natural bent of capitalism is to please its customers in the provision of goods and services, it has created such a broad market that there is always someone willing to cater to your perversions. Coupled with the instantaneous gratification and communication available through the Internet and you have the makings of a perfect storm. And believe it or not we end up with the exact set of psychological problems the mice display.
We have the dropouts and the punks, we have the "beautiful ones" who end up being antisocial or unwilling to engage with others personally or who become MGTOW or feminists. We have public hypersexuality combined with personal sexlessness and eventual population collapse. We have the same weakening then ending of the bonds between mating pairs and the bonds between females and their offspring. We have so far only limited bands of people that are willing to be murderous but it is easy to see how given our current mindset a specific series of events could lead to a massive conflagration into open violence.
So welcome to the Behavioral Sink, the great disease that is taken over all of the westernized countries. It's like a giant mental kudzu vine that has swallowed up whole societies and nations. From Austria to Australia, from Germany to South Korea, we see the very exact same set of social and psychological issues crop up over and over and over again. They may play out differently, but they are terrifyingly recognizable. Yes, the behavioral sink is real, but crowding is not the cause, our mental weaknesses in the face of abundance is.
Fortunately, there is an easy yet completely impossible fix for this. All we need is a little discipline. All we need is enough social and personal discipline to tell each other and tell ourselves that the prancing of our own psychological problems through the streets like a parade of ponies is the only issue we have. Fixing every society that is fallen under the spell of this is no harder and no easier than simply getting everybody to think straight.
Ah, but that's the rub, isn't it? It's one thing to point at the failures of others and agree we should take away their toys, but it's a whole different subject when they come for yours isn't it? Discipline on a social scale is only created through agreement and that means this problem must be acknowledged by the vast majority as not just a matter of politics or entertainment but a likely civilization ending mental virus that is causing not just decline but decay.
And at least for my audience, we almost all live here in these countries and we should be able to see this pattern very easily for our own selves. And if we can see it and acknowledge it we can find strategies and solutions that will help inoculate us from its damage. In Hungary, the government is considering giving women massive tax write offs if they're willing to have children. This could be a great policy if it actually said that the tax write off is limited to two-parent families only. Every day, doctors and lawyers and accountants and millions of other people are paid at their jobs to be good at thinking. Imagine how easily we could fix this if we could just find ways to socially and financially reward people for good thinking and activity in their private and public lives. The correct answer is always to do good and get others to do good as well.
Welcome to the behavioral sink. It sucks. So let's fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03VmgQV9WuI
It turns out that the same type of psychological malaise is affecting billions of people all across the globe, all of whom have one thing in common; to a varying degree their traditional societies have been replaced by a mixed society that includes parts of the American nuclear society. I call this the "American nuclear society" because it's really based on the psychological, social, and postmodernist beliefs that have all cropped up since 1900.
What's becoming clear is that all of these popular or ideological sets of ideas that we've created are both the symptom and cause of the "behavioral sink" in which we find ourselves today. The behavioral sink was created as an explanation for the self-destruction of populations of mice that were allowed to live in a utopia of plentiful food and water but limited in space conducted by John B. Calhoun from the 1940's all the way into the early 1970's. As far as I can tell these experiments are among the most solid and universally repeatable exercises you can do in the social sciences. If you are not aware and do not know what the behavioral sink is I believe this article will explain it to you adequately enough to allow you to understand my viewpoint on it:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
My only problem with Mr. Calvin's work is the assumption he made that the major psychological pressure placed on the colonies of mice were created by their overcrowding. I think that it is more correct to say that the overcrowding had an amplifying effect on the behavior of the mice rather than being it's main cause. I wish to put forward a different theory for you; that it was the easy abundance of the food and water that made space for all of the individual psychological failures that added up to the social dysfunctions that actually caused the destruction of the entire colony.
Here's what I believe happens: we humans fail to recognize the strong connection between our psychological health and our bodies. In the jungle, in the wild, even in times and places where the food supplies are abundant, it still has to be gathered or hunted for. This requires work, a lot of time and energy. So I see the biggest artificial intrusion on the psychology of the mice as being they no longer had to forage. This is not a natural environment for any creature on earth, long before there is the slightest bit of overcrowding.
Not having to work to at least gather the food and water gave the mice an unnatural amount of free time. Now, instead of having maybe a couple of hours a day of psychological downtime when they're not involved in the activities necessary to survive and procreate, now suddenly they end up with six or eight or even maybe ten hours of free time. The brains of those mice did not know what to do with the incredible amount of free time suddenly afforded them the navel gaze. So what do the mice sit around and think about? Well it turns out is pretty much the same things as humans think about; sex and enemies and friendship and competitors.
Mice are at the bottom of the food chain, so they're used to looking around for threats and danger and competitors. But when you have too much time to sit around your mind starts playing tricks on you. Back in the days of the old black-and-white movies this idea of being caught up in your own psychological inner world too much formed the premise behind some of the greatest movies of all time. From All About Eve to Mutiny on the Bounty, this theme was a power example of our human weakness. I remember being deeply affected watching Humphrey Bogart's astounding performance in his testimony scene as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and have never forgotten it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUZ0Nv7UH4
And so we come to what I believe to be the crux of the matter, that having to not necessarily struggle but not having to put considerable time and energy into survival shorts circuits our mind. Like every other animal having to focus on important activity most of the time is the natural state of our pshychology and the way it is meant to work. It's not abundance that causes the issue and it is certainly not crowding, as cities have been around for tens of thousands of years. It's the leisure time. It's the ability to set and focus on oneself to the exclusion of the rest of the world for long periods that makes space for the vast majority of the psychological issues we have today. When you don't have anything to do but sit around and think and you're not disciplined or any good at it then it's only a matter of time before the first few dark thoughts appear. And since just like mice there are a lot of animals in the world that could harm us, our minds do exactly what the mice is minds do; We focus on the dark side, on potential threats. Given too much free time, the mice start to think wrongly about sex and enemies and friendship and competitors.
But just like the mice were no longer looking for these things in a natural environment. Were living in an unnatural environment, especially today. We've twisted the natural function of Western civilization's focus on the individual from the vitally important function of the freedom to act to a crippling focus only on our own individual selves, thinking only of our own selfish rights and desires. Couple this with the fact that the natural bent of capitalism is to please its customers in the provision of goods and services, it has created such a broad market that there is always someone willing to cater to your perversions. Coupled with the instantaneous gratification and communication available through the Internet and you have the makings of a perfect storm. And believe it or not we end up with the exact set of psychological problems the mice display.
We have the dropouts and the punks, we have the "beautiful ones" who end up being antisocial or unwilling to engage with others personally or who become MGTOW or feminists. We have public hypersexuality combined with personal sexlessness and eventual population collapse. We have the same weakening then ending of the bonds between mating pairs and the bonds between females and their offspring. We have so far only limited bands of people that are willing to be murderous but it is easy to see how given our current mindset a specific series of events could lead to a massive conflagration into open violence.
So welcome to the Behavioral Sink, the great disease that is taken over all of the westernized countries. It's like a giant mental kudzu vine that has swallowed up whole societies and nations. From Austria to Australia, from Germany to South Korea, we see the very exact same set of social and psychological issues crop up over and over and over again. They may play out differently, but they are terrifyingly recognizable. Yes, the behavioral sink is real, but crowding is not the cause, our mental weaknesses in the face of abundance is.
Fortunately, there is an easy yet completely impossible fix for this. All we need is a little discipline. All we need is enough social and personal discipline to tell each other and tell ourselves that the prancing of our own psychological problems through the streets like a parade of ponies is the only issue we have. Fixing every society that is fallen under the spell of this is no harder and no easier than simply getting everybody to think straight.
Ah, but that's the rub, isn't it? It's one thing to point at the failures of others and agree we should take away their toys, but it's a whole different subject when they come for yours isn't it? Discipline on a social scale is only created through agreement and that means this problem must be acknowledged by the vast majority as not just a matter of politics or entertainment but a likely civilization ending mental virus that is causing not just decline but decay.
And at least for my audience, we almost all live here in these countries and we should be able to see this pattern very easily for our own selves. And if we can see it and acknowledge it we can find strategies and solutions that will help inoculate us from its damage. In Hungary, the government is considering giving women massive tax write offs if they're willing to have children. This could be a great policy if it actually said that the tax write off is limited to two-parent families only. Every day, doctors and lawyers and accountants and millions of other people are paid at their jobs to be good at thinking. Imagine how easily we could fix this if we could just find ways to socially and financially reward people for good thinking and activity in their private and public lives. The correct answer is always to do good and get others to do good as well.
Welcome to the behavioral sink. It sucks. So let's fix it.
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