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Mouse Utopia And Anarchism


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I picked up on the Mouse Utopia / Calhoun Experiment from the MGTOW crowd. Fascinating to say the least. Anyway, it got me thinking about potential applications to voluntarist/anarchist societies of the future. Specifically, would this apparent "in-built" population control lead to the inevitable collapse of even the most philosophically-sound societies we might build. So I thought I'd throw it up here for some thoughts. 

 

Personally, I find the experiment to be somewhat flawed, given the constant intervention of humans in the mouse environment. If you watch the documentaries rather than read the written records, you will see researchers repeatedly handling the subjects, walking around in the larger rat environments of later experiments, disturbing nests, etc (it was the sixties, after all). In that sense, it seems similar to irrational religious and/or statist societies, with their deities as "higher powers" intervening, or the state acting as universal provider. As such, it seems a problem that will collapse such societies, rather than anarchist societies, as anarchist societies will always subject people to self-responsibility, and the ongoing motivation to strive.

 

However, technology is an issue, given the potential ability of an anarcho-capitalist society to create a situation of universal basic-provision. And on that note, is Zietgiest doomed to mouse utopia?  

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