A World Gone Mad
I am once again sitting in the sedate and peaceful setting of the NYC Cornell Club breakfast room. I find hat hen one travels, one’s view of the world takes on a different perspective. We awake in a different time zone with people we know still asleep and others we used to know less far away. The places around us are either or both more or less familiar and we tend to see the world through slightly different eyes. This morning I am being affected by two things that have entered my consciousness. The first is the attack by ultra-right factions on the capital city of Brazil, Brasilia. Clearly this is a Southern Hemisphere version of the January 6th insurrection and attack on the United States Capital. It was promulgated by the Trump-like act of outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who did not accept his defeat in last fall’s election. While the attack was underway, Bolsonaro had fled to Orlando in order to claim innocence. He even went so far as to mildly denounce the actions in feigned surprise even though he was likely a big part of the organization of those events. The second thing that I found through one of my social media links is an article on human evolution as observed through experiments with mice.
One of the things I like about being in the Eastern Timezone is getting to watch more of Morning Joe on MSNBC. For some reason, I enjoy the combination of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Their go-to global affairs pundit is retired Admiral James Stavridis, who is best known for his time as the Supreme Commander of NATO, a role which has given him lots of airtime on the Ukraine War front. But he reminded us this morning that he also served as the head of the Southern Command as well and therefore is quite familiar with Brazil. When I hear from someone like Stavridis, who is very much a contemporary of mine having left Annapolis just as I left Cornell in 1976, I am reminded of the value of experience in gaining perspective on the events of the world at large. That feels like an appropriate theme this morning as I prepare for a week here in NYC doing expert witness depositions. My expertise is far more narrowly focused and commercially-oriented than his, but I too spent a lot of time in Brazil during my years in my version of a Southern Command during the late 1980’s when Brazil was struggling with its debt crisis and they owed my bank about $1 billion. I have been in Brasilia on many occasions and the scenes there during the riots look all too familiar. Brasilia was one of the first transplanted national capitals of the modern era. Of course, the original of those was Washington DC itself, but Brasilia is somewhat more dramatic since it was placed in the middle of the Amazonian Basin and always feels like a place that is one skipped beat away from returning to the jungle, even now 60 years after its founding. This morning Brasilia is one step closer to returning to its jungle heritage as the forces of nature (in this case, the baser instincts of its minority population) try to dismantle what man and the democratic process has wrought.
While the right-wing forces of anarchy continue to exist and rear their ugly head through acts like this, it is clear that the majority of people have returned to some semblance of reason and understand that destruction is not necessarily the first step to greater prosperity, but is often just the first step to further destruction. People understand that they have only limited time on this earth and they want very much to live in peace and some degree of comfort that comes with prosperity. Anarchists and nihilists want attention and perhaps want to be disrupters to satisfy some personal grievances. There are those with loftier goals, but they are less in evidence in right-wing uprisings. It is fascinating to note that all the things that the Republican Party stood for during its “salad days” of Ronald Reagan have now been almost completely reversed by the modern Republican Party. Disregard for the rule of law is where it began, and then it morphed to extreme distrust of the intelligence services of the government, especially now the FBI after its raid on Mar-a-Lago last summer. And now that Kevin McCarthy has finally ascended to the Speakership of the House of Representatives, his caucus has conceded (-rehabs part of the deal with extremists that it had to make to attain the Speaker’s gavel) that it plans to defund the military and Defense Department. I suppose that is an intentional snub to General Mark Miley and his colleagues for not invoking martial law when asked to overturn the 2020 elections. That announced policy makes the turning of the Republican worm complete and that GOP stands as a completely unrecognizable faction of extremists that are in no way in synch with any significant part of the American population.
The other piece of news to me this morning is not really news, but it did just come to my attention. When I see something intriguing from social media, I tend to Google it to see if there are any reputable sources that speak to the issue at hand. In this case, I cam across a corroborating article in Smithsonian Magazine, which is enough to give me some sense that the discussion point is at least worthy of pondering. The Smithsonian article itself is seven years old and it recounts the results of an experiment done in the 1960s based on creating a utopian environment for mice to see how they would evolve under those conditions. Utopia was defined for that purpose as having limitless space and food, those being the principal drivers of mouse prosperity I suppose. The experiments were conducted by John Calhoun, who was a behavioralist who chose to study the effects of overpopulation and density on animal behavior as a portend for human behavior under similar conditions. His work received significant attention in its day since it laid out a picture of potential human condition in a world driven to overpopulation.
The results of the studies were very unexpected. The environment he created was called Universe 25 and the outcome created what Calhoun termed behavioral sinks in that mice became aggressive and antisocial in the extreme, even under conditions that were thought to be ideal for them. More recent interpretation of the data now suggests that the experiment was flawed in its interpretation of a utopian situation for mice. The view now is less that aggression was brought about due to overpopulation and more due to the manner in which the habitat was created, which tended to isolate the “beautiful” mice that exhibited more congenial behavior. Ultimately, it may have been more of a distribution problem that was being displayed than a raw natural instinct behavior.
What I read into the Universe 25 experiment was that what may look like a resource constraint that leads to Darwinian natural selection can easily be seen as a problem of adverse distribution of resources that are actually more sufficient and could lead to more harmony if dealt with in a more balanced manner. I find that to be a very reasonable analysis of our current world condition. We have the means for a more utopian reality if we can get out of our own way and allow the bigger picture to guide us to a more enlightened place where we more fairly distribute our resources (which may seem scarce, but which technology continues to provide in abundance) and create more harmony rather than let raw greed dominate. The world hasn’t gone mad yet, but is always in danger of going mad if it lets the baser instincts like greed take precedent over the goals of the common good.