Why Humanity is Going More Insane and the Population is Collapsing
People have worried about population growth because of the depletion of resources. It turns out that population growth was something to worry about, but not because of the depletion of resources, because of the social, mental, and spiritual collapse that goes with it.
In 1751 Benjamin Franklin wrote 'Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.' about population growth in the American colonies. The population grows fast when the resources are available. This helped inspire Thomas Malthus to write 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' in 1798. Essentially, populations of animals grow to the extent they can according to the resources available. As the supply and demand of things like food and space equalize then larger amounts of strife and struggle keep the population from expanding. Sometimes there can be a major increase that wipes out the resources, which then wipes out the population, but more often there's an approximate balance. This helped inspire Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in their theories of evolution through the competition for resources which later came to include natural selection, kin selection, group selection, sexual selection, and offspring selection.
Because humans are able to adapt our environment and invent technology we've been able to continue to expand the population by creating more and more resources. Hunting and gathering societies can only be small, farming and herding societies can be larger, industrial societies can be even larger. People have focused on the resources in these societies. Obviously the social structures change quite a bit as well. You can't govern an industrial society like a hunter society, or the reverse, it just won't work. Technology, population, and social structure evolve together.
The last few generations have seen an increase in the movement to stop population growth because of fear that it will continue to infinity. For instance, there is a famous prediction from 1960 titled 'Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026'. As we approach this date it's now obvious that human birthrates are falling around the world, with some populations even going into collapse. Humans are still slowly increasing, but it looks like that's going to peak and then we'll start heading the other way, down. This is the path that was predicted by John B. Calhoun, based on his population studies of rats in ideal environments with all of the resources they needed.
Calhoun called them rat universes. He would start with a small number of rats with all of the space, food, water, and bedding they need to grow to a large population. But the population numbers never reached as high as they should. It would peak and then start heading down. Changes would occur from generation to generation. The rats would gain too much weight or lose too much weight from over and under eating. The males would stop being territorial. The females would abandon or kill their young. The rats would do self harm. The rats would breed at later and later ages, and breed less. They didn't socially interact properly, becoming anti-social. They would groom themselves continuously, focused on the self and not others. Calhoun called these various changes behavioral sink. Eventually the overall population would get so old that they couldn't breed, and the entire population would eventually go extinct.
Calhoun tried to figure out what was happening and why over decades of research. At one point he called it universal autism because the rats lose the ability to properly interact with their social and physical environment. At one point he called it universal psychosis.
The researches video taped these rat universes from the top so that they could count the social interactions and watch the behavior. Calhoun made a lot of calculations of this social interaction. He came to an interesting conclusion. The rats had all of these mental, emotional, and social issues because they lacked a meaningful social role. Rats are much like humans, which is part of why they are used for biological and psychological research. They are social like humans and have social needs like humans, and it turns out they have our spiritual needs as well. In 1957 Curt Richter showed in his paper 'On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man' that rats have a need for hope. Calhoun shows that rats have a need for meaning, and more specifically a meaningful social role.
Obviously humans, especially in the developed countries, are going through this same process of behavioral sink. We can see it in the weight gain and loss from eating disorders, self-harm and suicide, depression and anxiety, women wanting to be men and men wanting to be women, child abandonment and abortion, etc.
This has noticeably increased with the internet and social media. When you have 8 billion people on the planet it's easy to be replaced. It's really easy to be replaced on the internet. It's getting even easier to be replaced by artificial intelligence, so now it's not even necessary for a person to be better and/or cheaper than you, it's a computer. It's easy to realize you're not needed. Imagine the difference between this and a hunter gatherer society. If you don't do your job of hunting an animal, or gathering plants, or building a hut, or making a fire, or sharpening a spear, or guarding the camp, then you could die, your family could die, your tribe could die. What you are doing is important, and you are important. You have a meaningful social role. Not so much is a massive society with fast transportation and instant communication.
On an individual level the solution is fairly simple. Make real friends in the real world and do real things that really matter. Video games and television are the exact opposite of this, fake friends in a fake world doing fake things that really don't matter. They allow us to trick ourselves into thinking we have meaning in our lives, but it is a trick, and deep down people feel that.
I read these studies years ago. Once you know this answer it's amazing to be watching it happen. In that way it's a privilege to watch universal autism and psychosis grow as behavioral sink increases from one generation to the next. You can understand history as you're watching it unfold.
Reference List
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