[Derpdiherp]

The mice utopia experiment.. There are a surprising amount of small parallels between it and some of our recent cultural phenomenon.

Interesting thought.

[thechao]

Would you mind elaborating? My great grandmother used to laugh at the moral majority's antics---she said that people have been complaining about the moral degeneration of society since she was a small child---in the 1890s.

[Derpdiherp]

"Newer generations born in the now dysfunctional mouse utopia became withdrawn, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating , drinking and sleeping. This generation, for all the emphasis they placed on grooming, would not reproduce. Moreover, these mice were noted to be unintelligent compared to previous generations."

Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.

Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.

Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.

This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.

[projektir]

I think calling that a utopia is quite a stretch. We humans still have some definitions to work out if we think that a utopia out of ignorance and lack of power is valid.