Everybody loves a dream sequence ending! Oh wait, I mean, NOBODY loves a dream sequence ending. They're the worst. But I did one anyway. You'll learn to trust again someday, or so we can all hope!
So, yeah, Agent Six awakens in a strange room, with strange guard ladies and strange chicks lezzing out in front of him. What are we to make of all this? Stay tuned to find out! OR ELSE!!!!
The ultimate goal of our technological advancement, by some estimations at least, is the creation of a world without want. All of our needs will be taken care of, there will be no war or disease. We will live in a paradise of leisure and prosperity. But is human society capable of surviving such abundance?
In 1972, ethologist John B. Calhoun performed a massive behavioral experiment on mice. Titled “Universe 25,” this latest in a series of experiments saw him constructing a giant mouse “paradise” capable of holding over 3,000 mice comfortably. Calhoun would provide the mice with an endless supply of food and water, and protection from predators and diseases, and see what happens under such ideal conditions. What he saw, was terrifying.
It started out well enough. With the initial breeding population of eight mice swelling to a population of 2,200 within two years. But at some point, all social cohesion broke down within Calhoun's mouse utopia. Male mice, with no territory to fight over and with all their needs taken care of, engaged in indiscriminate violence. They would attack other mice for no apparent reason, and formed mouse “gangs” to fight other mouse gangs. Females showed diminished attention to their young, in some cases abandoning them altogether. The end stage of Universe 25 was pure dystopia, characterized by sexual aggression (homosexual and hetero), cannibalism, and infanticide. Some mice clumped together in insular social cliques, while others became isolated and ceased interacting with other mice altogether. Though the colony would go on for several more years, these were marked by steady population decline and dwindling birth rates until eventually the last mouse died.
I've seen the results of this experiment attributed to everything from overpopulation to unequal distribution of resources, but these strike me as inadequate explanations. The colony was capable of housing at least a thousand more mice than it held at its peak population level, and there was no shortage of food and water. Even more telling is the fate of the so-called “Beautiful Ones,” the mice who retreated from the rest of society and spent their days listlessly grooming themselves, never bothering to interact or mate with the other mice. Towards the end, Calhoun gathered a breeding group of these “Beautiful Ones” and placed them in a new colony with the hopes that they would establish new social connections and start breeding again. It didn't happen. They just went on ignoring each other, and never mated. They just ate, slept, and groomed themselves indolently until they died. Likewise, even when the population of Universe 25 dipped well below levels at which it had previously been healthy and fecund, the population continued to decline. None of the survivor mice ever reestablished their civilization. They clawed, raped, and groomed themselves into extinction. They didn't die due to resource exhaustion; they died from societal collapse.
In future experiments, Calhoun was able to extend the life of his mouse populations by introducing tasks and challenges that the mice needed to overcome.
It's hard to say just to what extent Calhoun's experiments apply to us today. Clearly, despite having more of our resource and health needs met than ever before, we still struggle with epidemic levels of depression, drug abuse, and suicide in Western society. But what about the future technological utopias postulated by science fiction? Would people actually be happy in such societies, or would they feel like they have no purpose? Would such an age of plenty lead to societal collapse? I can envision it going a number of directions. On the positive end, you could have a scenario like we see in Star Trek, where people in a near-post-scarcity civilization embark on massive undertakings and journeys of discovery just to feel fulfilled and grow as human beings. On the other hand, you could have people dividing themselves up into factions and waging war against each other for the sheer sake of it. When I imagine this type of dystopia, I always think of Kim Stanley Robinson's '2312,' in which a lone weirdo directs millions of tiny space rocks from across the solar system to coalesce into city-destroying asteroids, apparently because he was bored and needed something to do.
Okay, that's enough from me today. See ya later folks!
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