Of Mice and Men, Heaven and Hell
Happiness comes from doing something, not from being handed something
Humans (and mice, it seems) thrive when imbued with purpose and decay in its absence. Reflect on the lonely destitution of Arthur Brooks’s lottery winners and the inexplicably lucky miscreants on The Twilight Zone and The Good Place. Consider J.B. Calhoun’s self-centered, celibate, cannibalistic mice. Contrast John Adams’s multigenerational aspirations and Eric Hoffer’s rhapsody on a scrap of bread with the degeneracy of Osama bin Laden and his present-day TikTok admirers. Contemplate the fey twits of H.G. Welles’s The Time Machine, and ponder whether that vision has implications for the notion of Universal Basic Income.
Fulfillment dwelled in the exhausting work of the Brooklyn pushcart vendors memorialized in my wife’s painting atop this essay. And it was renewed purpose, I believe, that saved my mother’s life at 80 and allowed her to entertain scores (hundreds?) with her performance of Gershwin music the day before her 92nd birthday (video below).
A NICE PLACE TO VISIT
Arthur Brooks, former president of AEI, has written extensively on the misery of lottery winners whose windfall gains detach them from any sense of purpose:
“People always imagine all the nice things that would happen to them if they won the lottery: They would travel more, buy a beautiful home, start a foundation or quit a tiresome job. Rarely do people say, "If I won the lottery, I'd marry somebody who doesn't love me, buy a bunch of things I don't really want, and then start an ugly alcoholic spiral." … But hitting the jackpot generally leads to unhappiness. … While earned success facilitates the pursuit of happiness, unearned transfers generally impede it.”
In 1960, TV’s Twilight Zone offered a classic take on unearned bounty in the episode, “A Nice Place to Visit.” Rocky Valentine, a small-time thug, ends up in an afterlife that offers him all his needs and all his desires. This five-minute clip is a shortened version of the full episode. The behavior of his guide (Sebastian Cabot) is worth the watch.
The NBC series The Good Place explored similar themes for four seasons and managed to be simultaneously hilarious and profound. It is worth watching the whole series to reach the end, where it turns poignant. The final episodes are an elegy to humanity’s need for purpose and challenge—and the beauty that lies in our imperfections and finiteness.
A MICE PLACE TO VISIT
Apparently, humanity isn’t the only species that needs purpose. From The Scientist:
“June 22, 1972. John Calhoun stood over the abandoned husk of what had once been a thriving metropolis of thousands. Now, the population had dwindled to just 122, and soon, even these inhabitants would be dead.
Calhoun wasn’t the survivor of a natural disaster or nuclear meltdown; rather, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health conducting an experiment into the effects of overcrowding on mouse behavior. The results, laid bare at his feet, had taken years to play out.
In 1968, Calhoun had started the experiment by introducing four mouse couples into a specially designed pen—a veritable rodent Garden of Eden—with numerous ‘apartments,’ abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space, and Calhoun suspected that it was only a matter of time before this caused trouble in paradise.”
While Calhoun investigated the effects of crowding, an alternative explanation lay in relentless boredom and lack of individual challenge. The mice behaved like Gen Z’s self-absorbed Instagram/TikTok influencers and their bored, boring, aimless followers:
“Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became ‘trapped in an infantile state of early development,’ even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to ‘normal’ mice.”
In related experiments, mice flourished when they were able to engage in creative endeavors such as “innovative tunneling behavior.” From IFL Science:
“Perhaps a civilisation collapse might be caused by a lack of need for people to do anything useful rather than widespread wars. … Many of the mice weren't interested in breeding and retired to the upper decks of the enclosure, while others formed into violent gangs which would attack and cannibalise others. The low birth rate and high infant mortality combined with the violence, and soon the entire colony was extinct. … [F]ood remained ample, and their every need completely met. … Calhoun termed what he saw as the cause of the collapse "behavioural sink.” … He believed that the mouse experiment may also apply to humans, and warned of a day where—god forbid—all our needs are met.”
To me, Universe 25’s “rodent Garden of Eden” sounds suspiciously like the sterile urban hellscapes that urban planners like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses saw as ideal living environments (for other people, of course). I would venture that the key variable for humans and rodents alike is not crowding but, rather, purposelessness and environments that foster it. (To be fair, I haven’t read Calhoun’s original work, so I don’t know to what extent he explored such explanations.)
POLITICS TO PHILOSOPHY TO PORCELAIN
In a 2023 essay (“Growth as Mother of Life, Health, and Contentment”), I quoted John Adams, on the virtues of rising wealth:
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
Adams presumed that future generations (at least future Adamses) would use their rising fortunes to fill their newly liberated hours with beauty. But, alas, affluence and leisure don’t necessarily lead to painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. Saudi Arabia’s bin Laden family made billions in construction, but their listless, underachieving son Osama turned his attention to terrorism. In October, as the beheaded corpses of murdered babies smoldered in Southern Israel, journalist Nellie Bowles wrote:
“[L]eftist American kids are discovering Osama bin Laden’s manifesto, ‘Letter to America.’ And oh boy, do they love it! Oh, how misunderstood bin Laden was. Oh, how beautiful his message is. And why, they’re now asking, have they been so thoroughly lied to about the emir of al-Qaeda? You have to watch this compilation of these people, and then you have to pour yourself a stiff drink.”
Around that time, in “Intellectual Tyrants Beget True Believers,” I discussed how the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer foresaw this phenomenon emerging from the dark side of leisure and means:
“[A] fanatical movement seeks bored underachievers, offers purpose for their aimless lives, and discourages questioning. In many ways, an alarming proportion of Generation Z, which includes today’s college cohort, has been primed since infancy for such recruitment—by professors, by K-12 teachers, and by their parents.”
Hoffer’s view of such people is encapsulated in two quotes from his The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
and
“Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility.”
From the 1890s to the 1920s, my father’s father went from penniless immigrant to wealthy businessman and, as the Great Depression unfolded, back into poverty. To a lesser extent, my mother’s family followed the same path. After World War II, my parents fought their way back to comfort, and the memories of their struggle gave them serenity. As Hoffer said elsewhere in his book:
“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle. What need could they have for ‘an inspiring super-individual goal which would give meaning and dignity to their lives?’ They are immune to the appeal of a mass movement.”
This dichotomy—impoverished strivers versus feckless heirs—brings two related literary works to mind. First is Edward Arlington Robinson’s devastating poem, “Richard Cory,” which inspired Simon and Garfunkel’s song, also called “Richard Cory.” I won’t explain Cory’s significance, as doing so would spoil the explosive impact of both poem and song. Both works are worth the time.
ELOI & MORLOCKS, AI & UBI
In H.G. Welles’s The Time Machine, a Time Traveler ventures 800,000 years into the future and meets up with a world divided into two distinct human species: the delicate Eloi and the apelike Morlocks. The Eloi live aboveground and consume a vegetarian diet in the manner of incurious sheep. The Morlocks slave away underground, supplying the Eloi with all their material needs—and consume the Eloi as food.
Much has been written on the potential for automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to shred society’s fabric—and on the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a way to bribe away this dark vision. The fear is that a great deal of work will soon be transferred from human laborers to intelligent machines, along with a massive shift of income from the now-redundant laborers to the small cadre of plutocrats who own and control the wealth-producing technologies. This, it has been speculated, is a recipe for extreme social turmoil—with wealth and income going to a small, immensely wealthy class and income opportunities vanishing for the large percentage outside that privileged class. UBI, then is the proposed corrective—with the tech titans paying a high level of taxes to support unconditional transfer payments to the entire population.
In its most extreme version, AI+UBI is an inversion of Welles’s dystopian future. With Elois and Morlocks, an active underclass produces everything of value, and passive elites are mere consumers—beneficiaries of upward transfer payments. With AI and UBI, the active elites produce everything of value, and the passive underclasseses are mere consumers—beneficiaries of downward transfer payments.
In such a world, would UBI beneficiaries, shorn of purposeful work and opportunities for self-betterment, turn their attention to the beauties that John Adams hoped for, or would they emulate bin Laden and his TikTok fans? My guess—my fear—is that the latter case would dominate. More pillage and pandemonium than porcelain and paintings.
My peace of mind comes from observing just how inept smart technologies (and their creators) can be. Of late, AI has given us multiracial Nazis and Confederates, fake medical and legal citations, and suicidal autonomous cars. I suspect that inverted-H.G. Welles is still a ways off.
WORK AS SALVATION
My 2022 essay, “Mom at 100” celebrated the centenary of my mother’s birth and noted that on that date, her birth lay halfway back to America’s Founding Fathers. Hers would have been three or four generations after the painters and architects that John Adams imagined.
2012 marked Mom’s 10th year as an historical tour guide, and at her well-attended 90th birthday party, she recalled her mother’s thoughts on her impending engagement to Dad in 1944. My grandmother told her, “He’s the dearest man I’ve ever met, but you know he’s a soldier without a penny to his name. If you marry him, you’ll be working till the day you die.” After that recollection, Mom told the revelers, “I’m 90 years old, and I’m still working. My mother was right!”
The ensuing laughter reflected what all those present knew—Mom wasn’t working primarily to pay the bills but, rather, to reinfuse her life with meaning and to give herself reason to live. In 1945, she and my father, whose families had both been thrashed by the Great Depression and War, took their life savings—$500 ($8,500 in today’s money)—and opened a children’s clothing store in Petersburg, Virginia. Never rich, but always comfortable, their store thrived for 23 years, after which, they opened a small real estate brokerage. When Dad was around 80 and Mom was in her mid-70s, they finally took their well-earned retirements. When Mom was 76, Dad died, and she entered a dark period of anger, loneliness, and frustration. She was not prone to self-criticism, but four years later, she sat me down and said, “I think I’ve become insufferable.” I told her that, with regret, I agreed. She said, “I need to do something other than stare at four walls all day long.”
So, at age 80, she filled out the first job application form of her life and was immediately hired to tote tourists across Civil War battlefields, cemeteries, and museums. Despite my father’s much-lamented absence, this work kept her alive and gave her eleven of the happiest years of her life—and made her once again a pleasure to be around. At 91, moving 25 miles required her to retire for good, though pride in the memories of her work and family carried her triumphantly through her two remaining years—dressed to the nines, socializing relentlessly, tending to family, offering endless advice (usually unsolicited), and giving piano performances. A life filled with purpose led to the above video, recorded the day before her 92nd birthday.
I can’t agree about “The Good Place,” which I found shallow and facile.
Listening to your mom gave me so much joy. Thank you. That's what I want to do and be as I age - a source of help but also of enjoyment.