Red, theory; black, fact.
3-17-2018: In my post "The Pilgrim and the Whale", I propose that much
human conflict sub serves dispersal.
12-28-2017: There
are probably two basic biological uses for human anger, the other one being an
emergency brake on population increase that avoids Malthusian disasters by
triggering wars. This kind of war ends life without being notably efficient in
producing mass migration. This is the use discussed in my post "The Iatrogenic Conflicts of the Twentieth Century." Mention of the
destruction of Coventry was struck out because it looks better suited to
population reduction than to triggering mass migration.
3-12-2018: I have long wondered why
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to include two gentlemen both in
charge of warlike matters. Why the apparent duplication? The above postscript
may give the reason: one (the guy with the bow) represents wars of (absolute) depopulation
and the other (the guy with the sword) represents wars of displacement (relative depopulation).
The Coventry Blitz did, however, produce so much mass migration
into the countryside surrounding that city that it was an embarrassment for the
British government, calling into question Britain’s willingness to fight. This
got me thinking: was Coventry some kind of watershed, before which the conflict
was of the displacement type, and afterward, of the depopulation type?
The facts bear this out, considering Nazi treatment of the
Jews as a litmus test of the zeitgeist of that time. After coming to power in
1933, the Nazis aimed at forcing the Jews to emigrate, and by the outbreak of
hostilities in September, 1939, 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had done so. The Coventry
Blitz was in November, 1940. The Holocaust began, in terms of men, women, and
children all being targeted for execution, in August, 1941, nine months later. The German zeitgeist, and perhaps that of the world, seems to
have shifted gears in the fall of 1940, aiming at depopulation rather than displacement. I am obviously assuming that the evolutionary, selectionist justification of the Holocaust given at the time, in forums such as the 1942 Wannsee conference, was a rationalization.
I conjecture that wars brought on by
population pressure begin as the displacement type, and if this does not result
in sufficient local reduction in population pressure after a certain time, the
hostilities shift gears to the depopulation type of conflict. If human
population is under PID [proportional-integral-differential] control by the
subconscious, the event causing the shift could be the amount of signal
accumulated on the integrator rising above some threshold. This may actually be a second
threshold, with the first and lower threshold controlling the outbreak of a war
of displacement.
A paradoxical outcome of Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents can be explained in terms of such an integrator. By providing unlimited food and water to a founder population of rats or mice, with regular bedding changes and exclusion of predators and parasites, the rodents were allowed to increase their population to fabulous numbers. However, the rodents were given no extra space. As the population soared to incredible densities, all kinds of pathological behaviors appeared along with a great deal of violence. Birth rates plummeted after a "behavioral sink" developed, and remained low, never recovering, as the population decreased all the way to zero.
My interpretation of the behavioral sink is that it is integrator windup, a pathology of humanly engineered PID controllers, and possibly natural ones too. The signal accumulated on the integrator has been building for so long, and the population crash is so sudden, that not enough time is spent at population densities below set point to cancel the "control debt" on the integrator, so it continues to insanely command a zero birth rate even as the population is heading for zero.
George Santayana wrote that "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 06-11-2018] Sounds like integrator windup to me.
3-17-2018: To clean up some loose ends, let us postulate a third and highest threshold of the control debt, which, if crossed, leads to the human behavioral sink and the possible destruction of the human race due to essentially psychological causes. In the behavioral sink, I postulate that everyone would be a ZPG fanatic and unable to change without pharmacological help. (Good old booze? May not be that simple.)
I myself may be a "ZPG fanatic", and produced in exactly this way, because I was born in 1953, just before suburbia became important, and may represent what most people in this country would now be had suburbia not been invented to take down the population pressure. At only 2 months from retirement age, I continue to be a virgin with no plans to change my ways, and I may be a straw in the wind, a harbinger of worse to come.
11-26-2019: I can testify from my own experience that the human behavioral sink is more like passive-aggressive personality disorder than anything else, but with particular attention to punishing the opposite sex by ignoring them.
3-22-2018: Correction: the modern suburbs were invented in London 200 years ago, but underwent explosive growth in North America after WWII. By 1950, half the American population was suburban.
