Sunday 8 April 2018

RATS...

The following is the unedited version of an exposé originally featured in the 1996 edition of  V.H.Ironside, The Willers of the Will - now out of print. What is of increasing relevance to the arguments raised in this book is that Ratlike behaviour blueprints are also applicable to human organizations, the stock market, criminal patterns and the spread of ‘domestic’ violence.


“The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man but does not make him ‘better’.”   Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

"I am in favour of war, hanging and Church Establishment!"  Macaulay



The State, said Milton, can keep the peace but it can never make men good or wise. Hence, perhaps the real lesson is that a society which possesses cathedrals and episcopal palaces, parliaments and constitutions, criminal and civil jurisdiction, courts and juries, equity and benevolence, also sins and trespasses with greater sophistication, effort and skill, adding nothing but fatuous moral criticism to the substance of the jungle laws that have retained great vitality everywhere in the civilized world. 
What has indeed remained archaic about it is that between constraining and being constrained it has caught men in the grip of an invisible rage and entangled them in some decidedly psychotic forces, unimpeded by any law. Forces which, like the grim ambivalence of lust and cruelty, are themselves the peculiar increment of paradoxical self-contradiction and which, almost like something alien, something not human, makes men strive compulsively and determinedly towards paranoid and deadly self-destruction. What is not really disputable, in support of the last, scarcely exaggerated point is,
that if unacceptable demographic densities are at the root of social tensions, almost certainly they are the sort of tensions which are at the root of the peculiarly anti-social aggressiveness which, in much the same way, has been found in laboratory experiments with different species of animals. This point has been handled well by Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, who found that “aggressiveness can be increased by raising the density of a group of children. Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity.” He also points out “this is significant when one remembers that in other animals fighting is uses not only to sort out dominance disputes, but also to increase the spacing-out of the members of the species.”[1]

Another clue, no less certain, is that intense conflicts between group members is an inevitable social response among communities of rats in confined circumstances of uncontrolled overbreeding. The older ones destroy the younger, the stronger mutilate the weaker. Indeed, it passes as a fact that rats will mutilate themselves. The motive behind this savagery is no longer economic. Nor is the impulse predatory. The explanation seems to be – and this may be taken as proof of our own abnormality – that they are no longer capable of distinguishing between natural and unnatural instincts. Interestingly, and no doubt quite consistently, if demographic imbalance helps to account for the behavioural idiosyncrasies which, in this type of social organization, are merely another example of absolute growth imposing drastic measures of Malthusian redress, it is on this account by no means inappropriate to the peculiar circumstances of some of our own overcrowded communities.
Perhaps the point can be confirmed briefly by reference to a German kindergarden survey on rising levels of infant aggressiveness. Violence amongst the youngest, it states, is directed not only against others but increasingly also against themselves, i.e. ‘gegen den eigenen Körper’.[2] Nor are we perhaps sufficiently alert to the fact that the conventional sociology of crime is unlikely to settle the ambiguities surrounding what has meanwhile developed into the gravest forensic crisis the West has experience, combining as it does, carnal with homicidal impulses and taking the whole subject out of the strictly criminological frame of reference by placing it into a psychologically entirely different category, making it ominous, alien and universal: a most unpropitious preliminary for a homicidal process of Malthusian attrition. Which is exactly what would be expected if highly unstable demographic conditions were at the basis of social tensions. In saying this, of course, I am alluding to the mass psychotic acid-and-knife-crime epidemic currently gripping the London ghettos. But whatever forensic arguments may be advanced for or against it, rather than making improbable or ill-informed suggestions, as an analogy one can certainly say that far more significant and conclusive – to lay down the law on a very deadly subject – was the insane and senseless killing of a seven-year old girl who died, stabbed seventy times, as if under the teeth of an enormous rat...




[1] Morris, D., The Naked Ape. Triad/Mayflower, 1977 p 111
[2] Deutsche Presse Agentur, June 1993

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