John B. Calhoun’s laboratory experiments, conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health and summarized in 1962 in the Scientific American, are a textbook example of how to induce disastrous behavior in a given population.
Calhoun isolated rats in a closed place, protecting them from disease and predators, and fed them. The rats bred rapidly, but Calhoun did not increase the rats’ living space. The rats became violent, committed cannibalism and infanticide. The males became either hypersexual, pansexual or homosexual. Fertility declined and the rat population tended toward extinction. When Calhoun introduced the few surviving rats into the “wild,” they remained asexual, isolated – “socially autistic” – and soon died out.
The experiments were influential, but their lessons were applied only for cases of crowding, be it in chicken farms or, for humans, in prisons, and shedding light on urban violence, and impact on population growth and the environment.
I did not find any follow-up research noting that the “rat tribe” disappeared because it was being taken care of for generations, without having had to make the slightest efforts, just adjusting to the confined space as DNA dictated.
All the commentaries and implications attributed rats’ decline into oblivion to their inability to expand their living spaces – but none either to the fact that they got used to manna from scientific heavens (a case of an eternal-counting-on-Godot “rat welfare state”) or to the lethal combination of such a state with confinement.
Does this experiment shed light on political laboratory-type experiments with people? The facts suggest that to be the case, in different societies, at different times – though people are very good at coming up with new jargons and rationalizations to shed light on the changed human behavior. After all, the ability to invent words, new vocabularies, languages is a main distinguishing features of humans.
In a 2008 research work titled “Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon as a Space of Exception,”, Sari Hanafi, former president of the International Sociological Association, examined in minute detail how the combination of “care” and restrictions on moving out turned the refugee camps into “a space of radicalism and a space that contributes to perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than resolving it.”
He looked into why the violence erupted in the Lebanese camps, and concluded that for 60 years, “the space of the refugee camps in Lebanon was treated as an experimental laboratory for control and surveillance.” He blamed the countries hosting these camps, UNRWA and Islamist groups for the dire circumstances in which they found themselves.
The concluding section was titled “Camps as Laboratories.” Indeed, the UN mandated the UNRWA camps-welfare-experiment in 1948 to last just two years and assist to resettle few hundred thousand people.
The camps still exist, more than 70 years later, assisting millions of descendants, all having “refugee status” and, rather than having been resettled, living in increasingly crowded camps permeated by violence and glorifying “martyrdom” – a rationalized infanticide, subsidized in this case by a “pay for kill” scheme for the surviving family.
It appears that when humans are subjected to drastic “laboratory experiments” confining them to “care” and restricted places for generations, they display symptoms of mental illness not dissimilar to those of Calhoun’s rats. Only humans rationalize with academic jargon.
The solution President Trump has now floated of dispersing people and expecting them to have normal lives has precedents. Whereas Europe after WWII had 70 million refugees roaming the continent in 1945, they were all absorbed within a few years.
Among them were some 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe where they lived for centuries, most settled between 1945-48 in what became West Germany. With then-German Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard radically lowering taxes, deregulating and carrying out a currency reform in 1948, these migrants “disappeared” within the de-radicalized German miracle rather than being a burden – with the Marshall Plan playing only a minuscule role.
Societies around the world made an observation: Whereas offering care for people finding themselves in unfortunate circumstances is a must (and not just because people may have a morals but because they know that desperate people can be dangerouss), offering too much care, with no obligations, leads to a dissolute lifestyle even when crowding is not an issue.
Ancient sayings, confirmed now by evidence, such as “Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” have been common around the world. In Japan, the saying has been “Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generations.” The Scottish said, “The Father buys, the son builds, the grandchild sells and his son begs.” And in China: “Wealth never survives three generations.”
A recent 20-year Williams Group study covering 3,200 families confirmed the sayings, finding that seven out of 10 families tend to lose their fortunes by the second generation and nine out 10 by the 3rd generation.
The second generation’s over-indulgence is the culprit – as Polybius observed already in his Histories about the Ancient World, when shedding light on how not just families, but normal, prosperous societies spiral into violence and wars and die out.
Kingdoms become corrupt because the kings’ offspring grow up in power and affluence and spend extravagantly. Democracy is not immune to such declines, unless disciplined by a maze of institutions based on moral and religious foundations drawing on the Ten Commandments.
Otherwise, the new generation inherits the hard-working, disciplined ancestors’ riches without effort and overlooks what brought about privileged lives. This generation weakens the disciplining institutions and creates instead not fully thought-through new ones, generations of heavily subsidized youth in academic “laboratories” among them and, as Europe’s main political debates reveal, granting generations of immigrants instant rights to welfare.
In France, where this debate now dominates, the January 2025 Statista found the following: Among non-immigrants, the unemployment rate (as measured by people looking for jobs) has been in the 6.5% range since 2015; among immigrants, it has varied between 11 and 18 percent; among descendants of immigrants it has varied between 10 and 14 percent.
In a decent approximation of a laboratory experiment, Dutch researchers found that when the Dutch government in 1993 reformed the Dutch Disability Insurance (DI), which tightened significantly DI eligibility for existing and future claimants, it induced recipients to work and learn skills.Briefly: As recipients in welfare experiment received less care, some abandoned the “confined places” they lived in, and started normal lives.
As to the US and Europe: Eric Hoffer observed in the 1970s that the hippie generation, increasingly being taken care of by the state, started to behave like “the spoiled children of the rich,” living an easy life. Now, 50 years later, that’s made even easier with student debts forgiven (even though the Supreme Court declared such forgiveness to be illegal).
Hoffer attributed this to an “ordeal of affluence,” which threatened social stability, transferring wealth without requiring discipline, “creating a climate of disintegrating values with its fallout of anarchy,” as he put it.
Perhaps not “anarchy”, but spiraling into weakness when perceived from an even broader perspective has been the “care” the US has given to Europe, as David Goldman and Uwe Parpart note in a recent piece:
The Europeans’ “sense of entitlement derives from their status as clients of the Washington foreign and security policy establishment, which paid billions of dollars a year through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and prominent private foundations to keep complaisant Europeans on the payroll.”
Europe’s younger generation took their freedoms and well-being for granted: “No one will fight and die for “Europe.”
The amorphous supranational bureaucracy sitting in Brussels has dispsersed the various European tribes’ tax money with questionable accountability.
Whereas in the US the threats Hoffer alluded appear to having been contained, and the pendulum toward common sense is swinging back, elsewhere the political experiments of being “taking care” of at various levels continue, potentially turning into a lethal combination.
The article draws on Brenner’s books, History – the Human Gamble and Force of Finance, and series of articles in American Affairs and Law & Liberty.
