Are We Headed for Collapse?

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced to RSVPing members closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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For this event, we’ll be asking questions about widespread demoralisation, dysfunction, and depopulation in the West from the starting point of John Calhoun’s famous ‘mouse utopia’ experiment.

Here’s an excerpt from the article about the experiment that we’ll use as the basis for our discussion:

“Calhoun constructed an elaborate, enclosed habitat for mice, which he called Universe 25. This wasn’t just a cage — it was an engineered paradise…

At the start, the results were exactly as expected. The mice thrived… But as numbers grew past a certain point, subtle changes began to emerge…

By Day 1,580, the last mouse died. Not from starvation, disease, or predation—but from the collapse of the social structure that made survival possible…

The Universe 25 experiment has often been used as a cautionary tale about overcrowding, urban decay, and the dangers of population growth. But Calhoun himself believed the core lesson was deeper.

For him, the tragedy wasn’t just that the mice ran out of space—it was that they ran out of social meaning.”

The experiment offers food for thought on what is happening in our own societies. Are Western nations experiencing a ‘meaning crisis’ that is, in different ways, leading to decline? Has material and social prosperity brought us—strangely perhaps—to a point of decadence, dysfunction, and despair?

Here’s a link to the article (along with a few supplemental links):

https://drmutura.substack.com/p/the-collapse-of-universe-25-what

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ReBJfxHjFU&t=5s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SH6fRSeqg4

Please join us!

C&S

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Please note that this will be a joint event with the New Culture Forum Edinburgh Meetup group (https://www.meetup.com/newcultureforumedinburgh), with an invitation extended to members of the NCF Locals platform as well.