Try a thought experiment.
Place 100 people behind walls. Provide plenty of food, water, sanitary services, comfortable living quarters and physical security against outside threats, but no challenge, and no ability to leave. Some individuals will feel a need to dominate others. It is inevitable with humans. Others will try to avoid domination.
Both types will attempt to satisfy their needs by social aggregation, forming crowds, perhaps at food courts, a natural place for humans to gather. Prey seek safety in numbers. Predators must be where their prey is. Every so often, an apparently normal male will attack a female, a juvenile, or an individual of lower status without preamble or provocation.
Most such will be beaten and expelled from the crowd, but, with nowhere to go, they will linger on the margins, cultivate their resentment, and fight among themselves. In darkness, they will prowl the tenements, seeking weak prey, especially the young. Their attacks will eventually saturate the defenses of the normal males, some of whom will abandon their posts and abdicate their responsibilities.
Families will dissolve. The young will be killed, sometimes by their stressed and distraught mothers, who will subsequently shrink to the most remote apartments they can find and abandon all normal reproductive activity. The weaker males who have given up will find solace in incessant grooming and will also abandon family life.
Because external dangers have been minimized, and comfortable living conditions are maintained, death will be rare except among the young. Over a few generations, perhaps only three or four, the population’s age distribution will drift into senescence, consisting of many older individuals and only a few young ones. Extinction will follow in short order.
This experiment has never been performed in a controlled way with human beings, although history does record similar collapses that are said to have occurred for multiple and vague reasons (see Jared Diamond’s book Collapse). The trouble with human experiments is that complete enclosure and support of beings like ourselves over generations is not an acceptable option. It is considered cruel and unusual. There have been short-term experiments (see Jayne Poynter’s The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2). However, as we are not so picky about animals, experiments using small rodents have been performed with the results described above (see John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology”, Scientific American, February 1962, and Wray Herbert, “The (Real) Secret of NIMH”, Science News, August 7, 1982).
The difference between enclosure and population density is not trifling. All living things instinctively fear a cage. A crowd is generally not a problem unless one fears the worst, that the doors will be shut and barred. Although social psychologists typically ignore the difference, they should not.
No need for giant rocks from space on a collision course with Earth to wipe us out. We are already in the grip of enclosure, a global version of the more familiar isolated confined environment syndrome, and we are already taking damage.
To remain healthy, don’t hide from it. Think of it as temporary. Think of it as a problem for the rational mind. Think of it as a reason to engineer a breakout. Think of it as a litmus test, useful in identifying real sources of danger: Only one group will actively, even aggressively, resist the proposition of escape, and they are the predators.
