John B. Calhoun’s laboratory research, conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health and summarized in 1962 in the , Scientific American, are a , textbook , case  , of how to , induce , disastrous , behavior , in a given community.
Calhoun isolated animals in a sealed area, protecting them from illness and animals, and fed them.  , The rabbits bred swiftly, but Calhoun did not increase the animals ‘ living room.  , The animals became violent, devoted eating and infanticide.  , The men became possibly sexual, transgender or homosexual.  , Fertility declined and the rodent population tended toward death.  , When Calhoun introduced the several surviving animals into the “wild”, they remained heterosexual, isolated –” morally disabled” – and quickly died out.  ,
 , The experiments were significant, but their lessons were applied only for cases of squeezing, be it in poultry farms or, for humans, in prisons, and shedding light on industrial violence, and affect on people rise and the environment.  ,
I did not get any follow-up study noting that the “rat community” disappeared because it , was being taken care , of for years, without having had to make the slightest work, just adjusting to the confined area as DNA dictated.
Rats ‘ decline into obscurity was attributed in large part to their inability to expand their living spaces, but none of it was due to the fact that they were accustomed to manna from scientific heavens ( a case of an eternal-counting-on-Godot “rat welfare state” or the lethal combination of such a state with confinement.  ,  ,
 , Does this experiment shed light on political laboratory-type experiments with people? Although people are very good at coming up with new jargons and rationalizations, the facts suggest that is the case, in different societies, at different times.  , After all, the ability , to invent , words, new vocabularies, languages is a , main distinguishing features of humans.  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,
In a 2008 study titled” Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon as a Space of Exception,” former president of the International Sociological Association Sari Hanafi examined in-depth how the refugee camps were transformed into” a space of radicalism and a space that contributes to perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than resolving it.”
He looked into why , the violence , erupted in the Lebanese camps, and concluded that for 60 years,” the space of the refugee camps in Lebanon was treated as an , experimental laboratory for control and surveillance”. He attributed the dire circumstances in which these camps were located to UNRWA and Islamist organizations.
The concluding section was titled” Camps as Laboratories” . , Indeed, the UN mandated the UNRWA camps-welfare-experiment in 1948 to last just two years and assist to resettle , few , hundred thousand people.
The camps still , exist, more than 70 years later, assisting millions of descendants, all having “refugee status” and, rather than having been resettled, living in increasingly crowded camps permeated by violence and glorifying “martyrdom” – a rationalized infanticide, subsidized in this case by a “pay for kill” scheme for the surviving family.
It appears that when humans are subjected to drastic “laboratory experiments” confining them to” care” and restricted places for generations, they display symptoms of mental illness not dissimilar to those of Calhoun’s rats.  , Only humans rationalize with academic jargon.
 , The solution , President , Trump , has now floated of dispersing people and expecting them to have normal lives has precedents.  , Whereas Europe after WWII had 70 million refugees roaming the continent in 1945, they were all absorbed within , a few , years.
Among them were some 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe where they lived for centuries,  , most settled between 1945-48 in what became West Germany. These immigrants “disappeared” within the de-radicalized German miracle rather than as a burden, with the Marshall Plan playing only a minuscule role as the then-German Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard radically lowering taxes, deregulating, and carrying out a currency reform in 1948.  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,
Societies around the world made the observation that while providing care for those who find themselves in difficult circumstances is a requirement ( and not just because people may have morals but because they are aware that desperate people can be dangerouss ), providing too much care without obligations leads to a déssolute lifestyle, even when crowding is not an issue.
Ancient sayings, confirmed now by evidence, such as” Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” have been common around the world.  , In Japan, the saying has been” Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generations” . , The Scottish , said,  ,” The Father buys, the son builds, the grandchild sells and his son begs”. And in China:” Wealth never survives three generations”.
A recent , 20-year Williams Group study covering 3, 200 families , confirmed the sayings, finding that seven out of 10 families tend to lose their fortunes by the second generation and nine out 10 by the 3rd generation.
The second generation’s over-indulgence is the culprit – as Polybius observed already in his , Histories , about the Ancient World, when shedding light on how not just families, but normal, prosperous societies spiral into violence and wars and die out.  ,
Because the kings ‘ children develop wealth, power, and wealth, and spend a lot of money, kingdoms become corrupt. A maze of institutions built on moral and religious foundations drawing on the Ten Commandments is not antiquated by democracy to prevent such declines.
Otherwise, the new generation inherits the hard-working, disciplined ancestors ‘ riches without effort and overlooks what brought about privileged lives.  , This generation weakens the disciplining institutions and creates instead not fully thought-through new ones, generations of heavily subsidized youth in academic “laboratories” among them and, as Europe’s main political debates reveal, granting generations of , immigrants , instant rights to welfare.  ,
In France, where this debate now dominates, the January 2025 Statista found the following: Among , non-immigrants, the unemployment rate ( as measured by people looking for jobs ) has been in the 6.5 % range since 2015, among immigrants, it has varied between 11 and 18 percent, among descendants of , immigrants , it has varied between 10 and 14 percent.
Dutch researchers discovered that when the Dutch government in , 1993 tightened significantly the eligibility for current and future claimants, it induced recipients to work and learn skills in a decent approximation of a laboratory experiment. Briefly: As recipients in welfare experiment received less care, some abandoned the” confined places” they lived in, and started normal lives.  ,  ,
 , As to the US and Europe: Eric Hoffer observed in the 1970s that the hippie generation, increasingly being taken care of by the state, started to behave like” the spoiled children of the rich”, living an easy life. Now, 50 years later, that’s made even easier with student debts forgiven ( even though the Supreme Court declared such forgiveness to be illegal ).  ,
Hoffer attributed this to an “ordeal of affluence”, which threatened social stability, transferring wealth without requiring discipline,” creating a climate of disintegrating values with its fallout of anarchy”, as he put it.
Perhaps not “anarchy”, but spiraling into weakness when , perceived from an even broader perspective has been the” care” the US has given to Europe, as David Goldman and Uwe Parpart note in a recent piece:
The Europeans ‘” sense of entitlement derives from their status as clients of the Washington foreign , and security , policy establishment, which paid billions of dollars a year through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy , ( NED ) and prominent private foundations to keep complaisant Europeans on the payroll”.
Europe’s younger generation took their freedoms and well-being for granted:” No one will fight and die for” Europe.”
The amorphous supranational bureaucracy in Brussels has dissipated the tax money of the various European tribes and held to be questionable accountable.  ,  ,  ,
Whereas in the US the threats Hoffer alluded appear to having been contained, and the pendulum toward common sense , is swinging , back, elsewhere the political experiments of being” taking care” of at various levels , continue, potentially turning into a lethal combination.  ,  ,  ,
The article draws on Brenner’s books, History – the Human Gamble and Force of Finance, and series of articles in American Affairs and Law &, Liberty.