Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

“Then who is vice president, Jerry Lewis?” – Back to the Future

John B. Calhoun.  Not C.  B.

It’s rare when a real-life series of experiments showing a possible dystopian future for humanity captures the popular imagination.  It’s rarer still when it becomes the basis for a Newbery© award-winning book for children.  To get to the full trifecta of weird?  That novel was the basis for an animated movie that has a 96% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes®.

The experiment was John B. Calhoun’s Universe series which he did primarily for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which we’ll cover in much more detail below.  The book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  The movie?  The animated 1982 flick The Secret of NIMH.

Sure, you can turn a science experiment into a children’s movie, but try to go the other way JUST ONCE and you’ve committed Crimes Against Humanity.  Again.  Stupid International Criminal Court.

Yeah, it’s weird.  The only way it could get weirder is if Dr. John B. Calhoun had been visited during his rodent experiments by a time travelling Vice President John C. Calhoun to warn him about the impending Civil War . . . in 1865.  But from now on in this post, anytime the name Calhoun is used, it’s in reference to the scientist.  If I want to refer to Andrew Jackson’s Vice President?  We’ll just call him “Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.”

The hair says psycho, but the eyes also say psycho.  Oh, wait, this is Vice President John C. Calhoun Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.

It’s strange when a scientist has less extreme hair than a Vice President, but not every scientist can be Doc Brown.  But Doc Calhoun didn’t invent time travel – he studied mice and rats.  What he set up was an artificial environment where there was no pressure to find food or water, and plenty of room for thousands of rodents.  In one experiment, Universe 25, Calhoun estimated that there was plenty of room for 3,840 mice to nest and live.  Imagine how many Pizza Rolls® you could make out of that 3,840 mice!

Calhoun created this mice paradise, and tossed in four lady-mice and four bro-mice.  They quickly paired off and started breeding.  After the first batch of mice-babies hatched from the mouse eggs, the population doubled every 55 days.  At day 315, the rate of growth dropped – the population “only” doubled every 145 days, and at day 315, things started to get . . . strange.

Spoiler Alert!  He dies in 1850 as Secretary of State.

Dominant male mice had previously protected their harem of mice-ladies.  But when there were 600 mice?  It became difficult.  The mice-ladies had to fend for themselves.  The female mice became aggressive in self-defense.  They became solitary, and lashed out at their own young, often injuring them.  It was as if the higher population density was somehow more difficult to cope with without a male protecting them.

As the social structure dissolved, it led to violent, aimless females who didn’t know how to raise their young.  The male mice (that weren’t dominant) at this point became passive, and wouldn’t defend themselves when attacked.  Females that were outcasts and not reproducing just hid as far away from the main population as possible.  The outcast females would have gotten themselves a dozen cats and endless chardonnay, but, you know, they were mice.

Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

Wikipedia describes what happened next in the following chilling phrase.  “The last surviving birth was on day 600 . . . .”  Rather than the 3840 mice Calhoun calculated could cohabitate in the Universe, the maximum population hit 2200 at day 600.

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

After in an earlier Universe experiment at this stage, Calhoun observed that the (non-dominant) male rodents split into three groups, which he attributed to them being forced out of the nest while still young:

• Group 1 – Pansexuals – These would mate with anything at any age at any time.
• Group 2 – The Beautiful Ones – These mice were fat, sleek, healthy, but wouldn’t interact, and were ignored. Since they didn’t fight, they weren’t scared.  Like Justin Bieber, they spent most of their time just grooming themselves.
• Group 3 – Again, this group was pansexual, but they were violent, and would mate at all costs with anything, and would cannibalize the corpses of the young, even though there was plentiful food. I had been unaware that rodents had their own Congress.

But the end state was always the same:  an entire generation rejected by mothers, unable to exhibit normal behavior, ceased to reproduce.  Those few offspring that were born in this phase of the experiment were born to mothers that ceased to have maternal instincts.

Dr. Calhoun published his findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1973.  He had a catchy, upbeat title for his article:  Death Squared.  I think that it would be fair to say that he was creeped out by what he found during his experiments.  It’s not usual for a physician and scientist to quote that cheeriest of all Bible books, Revelation, but Calhoun did so multiple times in the article.

Thankfully, people aren’t mice, right?  Here’s a snippet from Death Squared containing Dr. Calhoun’s conclusions:

For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to a species extinction.  If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow.  Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation.  Their most complex behavior 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 ideational generativity for man.  Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species.

“Death of the species” means us, you and me.  And Universe 25 explains in vivid detail the horror of welfare, of plenty devoid of purpose, of societal breakdown brought about by parental neglect.  I wonder if there’s a graph that shows that welfare is horrible and leads to Universe 25, but with people?  There is:

Amazing how we conduct an experiment on mice and worry about the ethical consequences, and then do the same thing with people just to get re-elected.  Thankfully, Universe 25 showed that Brave Single Mothers® are just as good as an intact family.  Oh, it showed the opposite?  Never mind.

Why does Jihadi John® leave London to go fight with ISIS™?  Because free food, poor upbringing, and crowded conditions without fathers and with abusive mothers don’t make good men; those conditions make monsters.  Men want to be tested.  They want challenges.  They want purpose, and if they can’t find a good one and have no moral backing, they’ll make a bad one.  Cheetos® and Red Bull© and X-Box™ or blood and steel and difficulty?

Blood and steel and difficulty.  It will win every time.

We have to have purpose, and mothers to nurture us, and fathers to teach us what is right and what is wrong.  And the city is maybe not the best place to live, unless you enjoy alienation.  And the extinction of humanity.

Or maybe we could just get some Ruffles™ instead of the Cheetos®.  I’m sure that will solve the problem, and we can just go get that at the store.

Photo of John B. Calhoun By Cat Calhoun – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.