Lemmings Don’t; Humans Do

“Everybody knows” that lemmings occasionally commit mass suicide. Only, this is a manufactured myth.

These little animals live in the cold places of the Northern Hemisphere, where life can be tough. Like other rodents, they are very good at breeding, and their numbers can exceed the carrying capacity of their local environment. Then they do what many other species do: disperse to find new feeding grounds. And yes, some will die, sometimes in large numbers, but the mass suicide jumping over a cliff into the sea is, believe it or not, a Disney invention. It is fiction.

However, it is true in another way, which affects all mammals (including lemmings) and perhaps all animals. It certainly affects humans.

I will now describe the ways humanity is working at reducing its numbers, explain the mechanism behind it, then show where we need to look for hope.

Insanity rules Earth. I envy psychopaths who lack empathy—it would be such a relief not to suffer horror at all the suffering.

• There is armed conflict in 120 nations. In addition, the news gleefully keeps us up to date on irrational murders—assassinations, school shootings, murderers barging into places of worship. Domestic violence, state terrorism against refugees, homelessness being criminalized… savagery rules.
  Statistics are numbers that hide individual pain. I was born while the bombs were falling, and this trauma has affected me for the rest of my life. What is happening in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the violence behind closed doors, all my other examples are personal tragedies that spread into society.
• Then there is the opposite: depression and its cousin, anxiety. About a third of Americans can expect to suffer a major depressive episode, and this rate is rising.
  The same is true for diagnosable anxiety disorders.
  Suicide rates are rising, especially among young people.
  Personality disorders are also on the rise, which is even more troubling because of the way they disrupt society.
• Globally, birth rates are falling, and in many countries are below replacement level.

Finally, there is a group of physical disorders, all of which are increasing in prevalence:

• cancer;
• high blood pressure with its complications of strokes and heart attacks;
• allergies and asthma;
• nasty skin conditions.

Nowadays, it is polite to ask if a prospective dinner guest needs to avoid gluten.

Guess what. Every one of these problems was predicted by a man who should get a posthumous Nobel Prize. His name was John B. Calhoun, and his joy was playing with rats and mice. You can read his research papers here.

All his experiments followed a basic format. Rodents were placed in spacious quarters suited to their preferred lifestyle, then allowed to breed. At first, this was a normal rodent community—what else?

As numbers built up, an increasing number or residents developed what we think of as “diseases of civilization” or stress-related conditions: skin disorders like eczema, asthma, allergies, digestive ulcers, high blood pressure with resultant strokes and heart attacks, and cancer. Does this list look familiar?

Much of rodent behavior is learned. As population increased, many mothers failed to properly socialize their young, who then didn’t know how to behave as rats (or mice) do. You know, like rodent personality disorders.

The horror struck at the highest population density. Many males and females murdered their own young. Toward the peak, infant mortality was around 96%. Young males formed gangs that carried on wars of mutual genocide.

A great many lost interest in sex, choosing not to have children.

And large numbers simply hid somewhere, stopped eating, failed to defend themselves against attacks, and so died of rodent depression.

Every colony in every experiment had plentiful food and water. Every one of them died out.

Calhoun became a celebrated social activist, but the academic community scorned him for “anthropomorphizing” from rodents to homo stupidens. For example, Ramsden and Adams offered a lengthy and patronizing critique, but… look around our world. We are getting there.

Depression is a rapidly increasing epidemic. Understanding the reasons will allow you the choice of refusing to buy into the craziness, and I hope, turn you into a campaigner for a sane global culture.

For rats, crowding is the other rats they can smell, see and hear. For humans, it’s other people who have negative impacts on us. When a car worker in Detroit or a call center person in New York becomes unemployed because of outsourcing, then the millions in Asia provide crowd pressure. When a Californian knows that terrible droughts and wildfires are nature’s response to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that’s crowding. When we hate and fear people a little different from us, wars and terrorism and cruelty are crowding. When people choose to have fewer children or none at all, this is either or both of economic pressure, or not wanting to bring a lovely new person into a future of increasing horror. Both of these are crowding.

It is interesting that warfare as we know it started with humans forming concentrated groups. Hunter-gatherers necessarily live in small groups that meet from time to time. When animals were domesticated, a nomadic lifestyle meant that a large area was used by a group that could be much more numerous. They needed to be aggressive in order to defend their territory for the use of their animals. This is crowding, despite the apparently open spaces. Agriculture produced much more food, leading to villages, towns, cities—and organized warfare.

The difference is clear when you compare hostilities among traditional people in the New Guinea highlands with Australian Aborigines. The Papuans in New Guinea live in villages, and, according to Tim Flannery, have possibly been farming for longer than anywhere else in the world. Ongoing “payback” is an inherent part of the culture. People from one village raid the neighboring one, killing someone as vengeance for a past act of aggression. Then, the victim village hits back in the same way, on and on. I suppose this can be considered as a population control mechanism, but not one I approve of.

In contrast, Australian Aborigines were hunter-gatherers until very recent times. Each cultural group considered themselves to be carers for, and inherent parts of, a particular area of land, which even today they think of as their mother and their being. Other people could only enter their land with their permission. Conflicts did occur. For example, one Queensland nation had the custom of raiding neighbors. But “warfare” consisted of the two groups shouting insults at each other, then a few spears were thrown. Typically, someone was speared in a leg, and that was the end of it.

We can’t go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but we can learn from the attitudes that went with it.

Chronic emotional distress is the result of other societal forces in addition to humans being Calhoun’s rats, but that is certainly one reason. I give a systematic description in an essay, “How to Change the World.”

This means that being depressed is not your fault, but an unknowing choice of buying into an insane society. You do not have a “chemical imbalance” but are responding to your world.

This needs to be handled at two levels: organized opposition and personal power.

Humanity has been given the blueprint for the good society many times. We could stop being Calhoun’s rats by following the message of all the great religions and philosophies, which has been validated by decades of research in positive psychology. That is, you can work for a survivable world, and one worth surviving in, whether you are an atheist or follow any religion. Here are a few examples:

Immanuel Kant set out a simple test of what is ethical through a mind experiment.

Given the attitudes of people in power, I have chosen vengeance as the example. Which is the better world to live in: one in which there is equal retribution for every real or imagined wrong done to a person, or one ruled by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous saying, “That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind.” Or, as my grandmother taught me, “Every fight starts with you hitting back.”

By applying the principle of universalizability systematically to everything, we arrive at a world optimized to make everyone’s life as good as possible.

Confucius is credited with

• Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.
• Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
• Love others as you’d love yourself, judge others as you’d judge yourself, cherish others as you’d cherish yourself. When you wish for others as you wish for yourself and when you protect others as you’d protect yourself, that’s when you can say it’s true love.

The Buddha has stated that the first “divine attitude” is Metta or lovingkindness. I have a collection of expressions of this concept here. Also, the Dalai Lama famously said, “My religion is kindness.”

Hillel the Elder is one of my favorite people. By all accounts, he had a great sense of humor, and his surviving sayings show him to have been an enlightened spirit. Out of the huge amount of content, he focused in on the essence of Ahavat Chinam, meaning “love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

I am Jewish—my mother was Jewish, and I had a Bar Mitzvah at 13—but I have always found the rest of Leviticus barbaric and repulsive, to the point that I wonder if the Book has been deliberately falsified by an evil scribe. No way would God have told Moses to stone anyone to death, for any reason. This sentence, though, is one pearl this hypothetical swine hasn’t trampled into the mud.

We have no record of anything Jesus had said; only the gospels, written many years after his passing. The first, by Mark, was estimated to be forty years later. One thing we can be certain of is that universal, unconditional love for all was His basic message.

One of Mohammed’s injunctions is, “Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong to them. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and not to do wrong even if they do evil.”

It is important to note that this does not excuse evil. We must fight the acts while forgiving the actors. I don’t know of any better expression than one by Bill, the hero of one of my (as yet unpublished) science fiction novels. An invader crashed Earth 12,000 years ago, the champion of a Universe intent on destroying ours. This invader is probably the evil scribe who falsified Leviticus.

At one time, in an act of revenge, he launched 666 attacks against Bill’s team, managing to kill eleven, including his father-in-law. This was Bill’s response: “This invader into our beautiful Universe is insane. He is the appropriate representative of an insane Universe that feeds on misery. How sick is that? He has my pity. We will stop him, and resist him, and wreck all his plans, but, at the same time, he deserves our compassion. He cannot help being the twisted horror he is. Please join me in forgiving him.”

If we have this attitude, we can break free from being Calhoun’s rats.

At the same time, we also need to handle the personal symptoms of societal insanity.

Through decades of running a counseling psychology practice, I have been of service to a great number of people who have followed me from chronic suffering to “normal,” which is the walking wounded, and for many, from there to inner peace and contentment using the tools of positive psychology. The most powerful of these are forgiveness, gratitude, generosity, and kindness.

One of my cliches is, “The more you give, the more you get, and also, the more you give, the more you grow.” Each major tragedy in my life has resulted in a book, and each book is intended to be of service to its readers.

The theme of Mad in America is to get psychiatry off its drug addiction. Big Pharma is part of the assault of all life on Earth, and we need to fight it personally, and in an organized way. I hope I have described the method.