The Beautiful Ones

In 1972, an animal behaviorist named John Calhoun created a utopia. This utopia was built for mice, and it consisted of a giant box wherein there were splendid living structures, plenty of bedding, and limitless food. On the bottom were the “main squares” where the mice could congregate, and ramps led up to a higher level of mouse “apartments," pristine and luxurious. Calhoun called this utopia Universe 25, since he had created twenty-four mouse worlds before. The initial cohort that moved in was just eight mice — four males and four females — and they were let loose to roam this perfect mouse word and do as they pleased.

By Day 560 of Calhoun’s experiment, the mouse population in Universe 25 peaked at 2,200, and it collapsed from there into a dystopian nightmare. Within a few months, the population had crashed toward extinction. By the time of the peak, most of the mice were spending every single moment surrounded by hundreds of other mice. They packed the main squares of the ground level to wait for the frequent deliveries of food. They behaved erratically, and attacked each other at random. Some would freeze in one place and shake incessantly for hours. Females would give birth to their litters in the middle of the crowd, if they were even able to carry their pregnancies to term — most of them didn’t. The babies that did come were often abandoned. Their mothers would move their litters away from danger, and in doing so would often leave half the babies behind or drop one during the journey and just forget about it.

While this unfolded on the main level, the more secluded “apartment” areas were occupied by mice that Calhoun called the “Beautiful Ones.” Male mice stood guard on the platform access points, and inside groups of healthy females and a few select males lived a strange life away from the chaos. They were safe and physically healthy, yes, but they also didn’t really do anything. They didn’t fight with each other, nor did they breed. Their days were spent eating and sleeping and grooming each other. As the main squares below descended into madness, the “Beautiful Ones” avoided the violence, but they also became completely removed from normal mouse behaviors. They didn’t care for babies, and they didn’t even have sex. They just groomed and ate and slept until they died.

The 1960s and 70s were a heyday for the Malthusians. The number of people in the world was booming in the wake of the Second World War. There was a deluge of papers and books warning of the dangers of overpopulation — Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was among the most famous of these — most of them focusing on issues of food supply. They foresaw catastrophic famines and wars as a result of the surge in the immediate future. Ehrlich thought it would happen by the 1980s. The Malthusians were swatted away, however, in the latter part of the 20th Century. This is mostly because of a simple yet momentous technological innovation they didn’t foresee — nitrogen-based fertilizers. Dubbed the “Green Revolution,” farmland became able to produce much more food per acre per year. Food became plentiful. Third world populations exploded, especially in Africa and the Middle East.

But food supply wasn’t an issue in Universe 25 either. The mice could eat all day long if they wanted. So others looked at overcrowding as the primary reason for the mouse society’s collapse. Concerns about urban crowding and spiking crime rates were on the rise when Calhoun’s results were published, and so many keyed in on the slew of violent and antinatalist changes in the mice that were dubbed the “Behavioral Sink.”

Some on the Left pointed to the hoarding of living space by the Beautiful Ones, and claimed that what doomed Universe 25 was unfair distribution. The primrose paths to the fancy upper level apartments were easily guarded, and the more aggressive males were able to set a brutal cap on how many mice took up that space, dooming the squares below to squalor.

Whatever the reasons for what happened in Universe 25, it’s clear that the mice had become detached from their nature by unnatural conditions. Mice did not evolve physically or behaviorally for a contained world with limitless material resources. They knew instinctually that this was wrong, that they were aliens in this reality, and so they self-destructed.

Perhaps the Malthusians were right, in ways different than they expected. The impact of there being too many of us around can go beyond food or resources or whatever else you could theoretically provide in a “utopia,” especially when thrown together in tight quarters. Finite planet, as the environmentalists says. Limited space. Yes indeed. Physically, psychotically, perhaps spiritually.

Even the Beautiful Ones just fed and slept and groomed themselves into oblivion.