Concilium Rattorum

We live in “rat utopias”. You’ve probably come across the experiment before. For those not so aware, a bunch of rats are thrown into a large enough enclosed metal space with unlimited food and water. Let enough time pass and all the rats go insane basically. All the rats retreat to their personal havens, if they can, or amp up in aggressiveness, cannibalism. Grooming, too, as one could liken to going to the gym. Preserving a little rat body that’ll never be used properly.

We live in this. You see it plain as day. If the rats had access to fentanyl they’d stray in the middle of the enclosed space. It’s called “behavioral sink” when the expected relationships and roles fall apart despite the perceived prosperity. Sure, the economy is straining, but you still have a place to rest, food and water. You’re a rat the same as me.

If we follow along the rats, well, we know what happens next. Perhaps you already start to see the twitching as you look in the mirror. And the fact is, as long as we sit about, the sure destination of despondency, reclusion unto death, will swallow you in due time. Before complete population collapse.

To be a rat, and as you look up toward the spotless fluorescents, you could wonder how to break out of this. It’s peculiar, isn’t it? To have six degrees of freedom, and yet the metal enclosure presses down upon every mountain range and other scenery.

In any case, as the rat, you have a few options. If you don’t want to succumb to the rest of the experiment.

The first is the most obvious, which is to escape the cage. What makes our “rat replica” a little hard to fathom is how it’s all in your head. You have to escape the cage in your head. To unravel all of the implicit agreements you’ve made since birth. More concretely, to escape the cage is to not rely on it. To do the work it has “completed” on your behalf, even though Nature obviously doesn’t agree with that (otherwise you wouldn’t be sentenced to nuclear mental death). So maybe you find a different way to get food, a different source of water, however metaphorical or literal you want to take it, along your own quarters.

Though that’s what’s so funny about this “replica” we’re in, is how powerful the mental cage is. The population has been so subdued, or demoralized, that it is absurd to ever contemplate “starting from fresh beginnings”. Even now my own mind says, “well, don’t you end up at the same point anyway?” You got your good food through your good coin, so “all is well” even if you’re inches from punching walls.

Foucault calls this “normalizing power”. It’s the other side of “power” and the one not often depicted. Instead of despots and rifles in your face it is the pervasive and goliath hand grabbing at your brain and shaping its very range of thought. Takes the light out of some parts. Occludes the paths with the most effective programming of dismissal and laughing gas. Watch any “late night show” and they time the laugh tracks for the same reason: to train you into this submission. In short, this ludicrous form of power shapes your goldfish bowl with invisible walls, and how those in “real power” operate the world today. Like a pop quiz, these forms of power shaping your sense of normalcy provides both the questions and answers. For example, you don’t ask, “how can I build a home” but rather “how can I get one” and in the multi-choice you can choose home, apartment, duplex or van-living. To build one rises the same in absurdity as walking outside naked: why are we even talking about this? You wouldn’t do that.

But the rat experiment continues. Besides, it’s not like you have to pridefully cut out all of transnational capital systems out of one’s life. It’s about reasserting one’s control over one’s essentials of living, that’s all. Life’s vigor is found in chores, essentially. Because from my travels of any city, the ominous part I’ve experienced, in a most asinine and banal confession but still relevant, is how vacuous it is. You go on subways to get off them to go to holy sites, holy consumer sites, malls, quick food, more moving around and some views, and then you have nothing else to do. Nothing to do is the seed to the despondency unless you’re the zen master:

cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Chores that viscerally affect your physical reality are needed. But if you find the thought of being a gardener, woodworker, stonemason and carpenter insulting or impossible to entertain suffocating under the bent of soft power molding, you can do the next option.

If not escape the cage, you join the generals and commanders or other frontiersmen continuing to build it, subsist off it, at its edges, at its five year planned developments, some bootstrapping into the stratosphere and accelerationism into raving madness. You’ll have to find some thread toward some outlandish future infused with tech, in the forming chokepoints future wars take in, whether AI or mutual robot war destruction, or biological immortality, however absurd, nevertheless by positioning yourself next to the vanguard of the transnational capital leviathan, the next fields of interest, to place your hand upon the goldfish bowl of the rest of the populace and shape their reality, so you give yourself work and joy by expanding the system.

The next choice is expand the system, and thus join the gatekeepers. What parts are missing in this constant dance of power dynamics, and wedge yourself in its bloom. Distinct from the paperpusher, which already resides in part of the cage built 50 years ago. You get your “chores” while still dodging the “monotony” of “basics” that seem too absurd to tend to.

Now, if you find both the “chores” of one’s ancestors pointless and the “chores” of the future unraveling either inaccessible or ridiculous, you have one more option.

The last option, in the rat utopia, is to understand the formula. Infinite food, infinite water, prebuilt and unchangeable quarters, with a rat placed in it, equals mental system failure. By forgoing the “simples” path or the “frontier” path, we have accepted the food, water, room. The only other part in the equation left to change is “rat”.

What does it mean to no longer be a rat? Well, what does it mean to no longer be a human? As you curl about in your corner, you’ll have to learn to accept the mutations. Whether you’ll grow different mental thumbs, or a fourth section of the mind, or dissolve how you perceive the world currently, anchor of indifference as emblem. When you stare at your concrete corner wall, you’ll learn how to see animations yet drawn, orchestras to the symphony that follows you along while the rest of them rage. Passing by them picking at the stray’s ribcage, you can morph the scene to the Last Supper with some apples instead, and realize you’re going to have to say goodbye to Christ and Plato, Confucius because you are going to venture into the mental realm so deeply that all prior Canon and parable will seal itself away.

The autist shall inherit the earth, along with the psychopath, and other parts of the DSM-5 index. However you pass through this dark night of history, our zenith into less than godlesssness, into this eternal midnight with hyenas and ghouls possessing friends and neighbors. Everything you understand about humanity, as you keep roaming this cage, and as the sun indeed sets surely, while the night fills sweetly with shrieks and pilfering, you’ll have to unlearn the parts of whatever it meant to be human, which previously was anchored in the behavior now sinking. From its fragments you’ll build an island that puts to shame the joke of whatever “individualism” labelled prior. Your inner world will rival the riches of moguls, because the desolation outward, the zombie walkers and empty street, hollow eyes, suspicion and twitching, will need to find its redemption in your imaginative kindling, salvation.

We live in rat utopia. The clock is ticking. You have three choices ahead of you. Technically a fourth choice is to do nothing and double down on the drugs and give into the behavior spiraling. Who knows, maybe it could be a winning play, in some ways.

We live in strange times. We use the word “we” as it flitters about in the wind. Let’s shake hands as playacting before all social graces scatter. Though who knows… maybe you’ll bring such customs into the future.

As one of the survivors.