VIDEO: Why No Civil War Yet?

Rudyard Lynch, AKA Whatifalthist, has a new video out analyzing why we are not yet in a civil war (although it is not clear to me whether Lynch is discussing a true civil war between competing groups of elites or something more like a peasant uprising). 

    Lynch had predicted based on models like the Fourth Turning that we would have already entered a civil war by 2025 and yet we appear to have (so far) avoided one. He doesn't necessarily believe that we have avoided it altogether but that there was another powerful factor at play: the behavioral sink that was documented in the Mouse Utopia experiments. Essentially that we have become too apathetic, too comfortable. He blames much of this malaise on screen addiction.

    Nevertheless, he believes that we have made it through most of the stages of Mouse Utopia save the final, violent stage. I think we have reached that stage. I was just reading the other day an article that mentioned that research by the FBI of the worst, most violent federal prisoners showed one commonality: that early in their criminal careers they had been caught but the case dealt with in such a way that they felt that they had gotten away with their crime. Well that is what we seeing with the soft-on-crime policies by Soros backed prosecutors--even for violent crimes. Combine that with the mentality behind the street takeovers and flash-mob style robbery gangs and we could quickly find ourselves in the final stage of Mouse Utopia. 

    As a brief background on Mouse Utopia, from Science History's article "Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?":

    Calhoun’s most famous utopia, number 25, began in July 1968, when he introduced eight albino mice into the 4½-foot cube. Following an adjustment period, the first pups were born 3½ months later, and the population doubled every 55 days afterward. Eventually this torrid growth slowed, but the population continued to climb, peaking at 2,200 mice during the 19th month.

    That robust growth masked some serious problems, however. In the wild, infant mortality among mice is high, as most juveniles get eaten by predators or perish of disease or cold. In mouse utopia, juveniles rarely died. As a result, there were far more youngsters than normal, which introduced several difficulties.

    Rodents have social hierarchies, with dominant alpha males controlling harems of females. Alphas establish dominance by fighting—wrestling and biting any challengers. Normally a mouse that loses a fight will scurry off to some distant nook to start over elsewhere.

    But in mouse utopia, the losing mice couldn’t escape. Calhoun called them “dropouts.” And because so few juveniles died, huge hordes of dropouts would gather in the center of the pen. They were full of cuts and ugly scars, and every so often huge brawls would break out—vicious free-for-alls of biting and clawing that served no obvious purpose. It was just senseless violence. (In earlier utopias involving rats, some dropouts turned to cannibalism.)

    Alpha males struggled, too. They kept their harems in private apartments, which they had to defend from challengers. But given how many mice survived to adulthood, there were always a dozen hotshots ready to fight. The alphas soon grew exhausted, and some stopped defending their apartments altogether.

    As a result, apartments with nursing females were regularly invaded by rogue males. The mothers fought back, but often to the detriment of their young. Many stressed-out mothers booted their pups from the nest early, before the pups were ready. A few even attacked their own young amid the violence or abandoned them while fleeing to different apartments, leaving the pups to die of neglect.

    Eventually other deviant behavior emerged. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments—unusual behavior among mice. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day—preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.

    Intriguingly, Calhoun had noticed in earlier utopias that such maladjusted behavior could spread like a contagion from mouse to mouse. He dubbed this phenomenon “the behavioral sink.”

    Between the lack of sex, which lowered the birth rate, and inability to raise pups properly, which sharply increased infant mortality, the population of Universe 25 began to plummet. By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether. Older mice lingered for a while—hiding like hermits or grooming all day—but eventually they died out as well. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct. 

VIDEO: "things are very bad now...."
Whatifalthist (52 min.)

     I think one variable that Lynch had not sufficiently considered that may be delaying matters--and wasn't considered by the social scientists on which he relied--is the impact of the police state. We are constantly surveilled. A popular rebellion is impossible. Heck, even the election of a populist president in 2016 was harshly punished and completely crushed in 2020. The January 6 protesters were not arrested and imprisoned because they took a self-guided tour through the Capital Building, but as an example to the rest of us in fly over country--not too dissimilar to the Medieval practice of displaying the bodies of criminals in gibbets. 

    The U.S. went through a severe crises in the late 19th and early 20th century with violent protests and even armed conflict breaking out over income inequality and popular immiseration (largely driven by mass immigration) and frequent terrorist attacks by anarchists. This was tamped down using a combination of military force, shutting the door to mass immigration, and generally increased prosperity. But then the Great Depression hit and the elites were scared once again by the food riots and the Bonus Army that marched on Washington D.C. Again, military force was used to put down armed rebellion and labor reforms and a limited social safety net were instituted. But never again were the elites going to be subject to fear of a possible rebellion. The National Firearms Act was passed. The institutions formed to fight organized crime during Prohibition were turned against the people. The institutions formed to regulate life during WWII were largely maintained afterward. Then came the Cold War, the Drug War, and ever more pervasive surveillance to the point that we now constantly carry around surveillance devices (our smart phones), watch entertainment on surveillance devices (our smart TVs and/or computers), live in neighborhoods where almost every house has external surveillance devices (Ring doorbells and similar), shop in stores that use cameras and AI to track what we buy (as if the loyalty cards were not enough), drive around in vehicles wired to listen to us, watch us, and track our movements as we pass through intersections bristling with cameras and license plate readers. 

    And that's why, while watching the beginning of a PBS television mystery program this past weekend on Amazon Prime, my son could turn to me and express his wish to see the extended animation in the original introduction to Mystery! and, unprompted, YouTube had several recommendations for me showing the original introduction when I next opened the app.