Mouse Utopia behavioral sink

The verdict that female jurors gave in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial reveals that most women are now in the mouse utopia behavioral sink.

In the mouse utopia, females abandoned their nests or attacked their own pups

Social withdrawal, maternal failure, and reproductive cessation.

We though it was maybe just a few overly noisy Karens. The jury verdict reveals it is most women.

You know the mouse utopia story — mouse population rapidly expanded to two thousand mice, and, despite having plenty of room, food, and nesting material, social pathologies resulted in failure to reproduce, and the population collapsed to zero.

So, what went wrong for the mice, how and why did it go wrong, and how to what extent, and in what ways, does it resemble what is going wrong for us?

The limiting resource that the mouse population hit was not room or territory, it was defensible territories. There were only a limited number of locales with a single defensible entrance where an alpha male mouse could exclude all other adult males, and enforce order and cooperate/cooperate equilibrium in that locale.

Mice born and raised in nests in such a defended and orderly location, mice born and raised in patriarchy, were normal mice, mice with families, mice born in a family, and initially, when population was low, all the mice were born in a family, and then founded families of their own.

As the population grew, it came to pass that there were many more mice than locations that could be defended. So a few male mice that could and would defend a location found themselves with larger and larger harems. Most male mice found themselves with no territory of their own, which drastically limited their mating opportunities, and even the female mice were hard up to find a harem lord willing and able to provide them with a safe environment to give birth and raise their pups.

What ran short was not food or room, but room under patriarchal authority.

Well, the increasing population of male mice with no territory of their own were not happy with this situation, the harems got overwhelmed, and suddenly there was no longer any defended territories, thus no longer any mouse families, just an atomized horde of strangers.

Territory defense collapsed under sheer numbers, and the losers stopped fighting entirely. They just… withdrew. Huddled in groups, ate when food came, never challenged anyone. The females took over the aggression the males abandoned, and in doing so they stopped being mothers. Pups scattered, unraised, untaught. The young never learned how to be mice. They never learned courtship, never learned aggression, never learned anything except how to groom themselves and eat.

Calhoun called them the beautiful ones. And they were, physically. Clean coats, no scars, no wounds from fighting. Serene. They’d eat, groom, sleep, and die. They had no interest in mating. No interest in anything. When the population collapsed to a handful of survivors, they were past saving. The beautiful ones couldn’t be bothered to breed even with paradise empty and waiting for them.

The collapse of property rights is not what happened to us, though something somewhat like that happened in Venezuela, but what does resemble what happened to us is the collapse of patriarchal authority and the patriarchal family. No patriarchal family mean, in practice no families at all, or no real families.

And the collapse of patriarchy among the mice led to social pathologies that much resemble those we are now suffering from.

The word “harem” has two meanings — the most common meaning is a household of two or more wives, but the other meaning is a household, or portion of a household, where all adult males but one are excluded, and an adult female can let down her hair and wear sexy clothes, or no clothes. A harem in the second sense is a location where a man can keep a harem in the first sense.

What the mice needed to be normal was harems in the second sense. The population did not stop growing because there was a limited supply of harems in second sense, because there was still plenty of room and nesting material for additional females and additional nests in each harem. The population collapsed because social change abolished the harems.

Yes, we have a terrible housing shortage, artificially created by building regulation (I speak from experience, having attempted to build a house, and from the experience of people I know who have built houses) and this is undoubtedly severely checking family formation, for us as for the mice. But the real obstacle, what killed off the mice, and what is killing us off, is that patriarchs are no longer able to have their way.