Civilization #8: Rat Utopia and the Peloponnesian War

We are starting an overview of Greek history. We remember the story so far: we talked about the Bronze Age, where Mycenaean Greece was trading and fighting with the rest of the world. Then the Bronze Age collapse happened, and Mycenaean Greece came to an end. Because of its destruction, this allowed for massive innovation throughout Greece. We saw the introduction of the polis (the city-state), the beginning of the use of the alphabet (so literacy rates increased radically), and Homer, who gave us The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Today, I'm going to go over the overview of Greek history, mainly focusing on the polis.

Geography is Destiny

One thing to understand about the polis is that geography is destiny. This basically means that your geography will determine the culture, the economy, and the political structure of your society. We see that with the Greek polis. Greek geography is very diverse; there are mountains, rivers, plains, and coastlines. Depending on where you were geographically in Greece, you would have a different type of polis. The two classic examples are Sparta and Athens. Sparta and Athens were the two most dominant poleis in about the year 500 BC.

Sparta: The Conservative, Military State

Sparta is located on the Peloponnese. The land around Sparta is basically plains, which makes it ideal for agriculture. For most of its history, Sparta was an agricultural nation.

Because it is ideal for agriculture, it needs people to work the land. Through its conquest, Sparta developed a slave system. These people were called helots, and helots were just slaves in Sparta that worked the land. They were farmers and people who had been conquered by Sparta. Because there were so many helots—the ratio was about 10 to one, so for every one Spartan, there were 10 helots—Sparta had to become a military society to control them.

It created an education system to train its citizens to be soldiers. The system worked like this: at about age seven, you left your family and were put into a boarding school where you were watched over by kids who were older than you, maybe 11 or 12. Obviously, if you put young kids with older kids, the older kids will beat the crap out of these young kids. This instilled the idea of emotional discipline into the children.

When these children became teenagers, they were paired with a mentor who was maybe 25 to 30, an older adult, and they became lovers. The Spartans did not consider this homosexuality; we would consider it homosexuality, but they themselves did not. They just considered this a way to build emotional cohesion and love among its soldiers.

At about age 18 or 19, the students would graduate, and they would go on to marry and have their own families. But the Spartan soldiers were all required to eat together. Even though they had families, they were still required to train together and eat together. Sparta had no private property; everything, including the helots, belonged to everyone. It was basically communism or proto-communism. They had no money system and no wealth; everything belonged to everyone.

It was a brutal state. The Spartans were notorious for being brutal people. For example, they had a campaign of terror to maintain control over the helots. Young soldiers would often be required to patrol at night. They would lie in the fields because now and then, some helots would break curfew. They would try to sneak out at midnight and have some fun. If you, as a Spartan young man, saw a helot out at night, you would kill them. You would take out a knife and stab them in the neck. This was meant to instill terror in the helots to prevent them from rebelling.

The problem is, because there were so many helots and the Spartans were so brutal, rebellions and revolutions would break out often. This created a society that focused on maintaining control in the Peloponnese. The Spartans were not at all interested in foreign policy. They had absolutely no interest in the world outside Sparta. As a culture, they were very conservative. They liked the way things were and wanted things to stay that way. It was a very conformist culture. Now and then, you had some kings or individuals who tried to change society, and the Spartans would kill those people. You were not allowed to question authority or promote change in Sparta.

The Spartans were also isolationists. Their entire policy was, "If you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone." In many ways, this is very much like China throughout its history. The analogy is that China has always been very conservative and very isolationist. China is just not interested in the outside world because it's focused on maintaining control over its peasantry. There's too much internal chaos, so China is not interested in the outside world.

Athens: The Expansionist, Democratic State

Athens was a completely opposite society to Sparta, and the reason why, again, is geography. Athens is in Attica, and it's by the coast. The countryside is very hilly, so it's bad for growing crops, but Athens has two major advantages. The first is it has a very good harbor. Also, its hilly terrain is actually good for growing olive trees and for pottery. Because of this, Athens, for most of its history, focused on trade. It was a trading nation.

Because they were traders and merchants, they had a very different culture from the Spartans. The first thing is they were very expansionist and aggressive. The Athenians would go and seek out new markets. They also planted new colonies throughout the Aegean Sea to the east and the Mediterranean to the south. They had to encourage their citizens to go out and explore the world to find new markets and bring goods and ideas back to Athens.

Because Athens was expansionist, its cultural belief system was very different from the Spartans'. Whereas the Spartans were very conservative, the Athenians had a belief in the idea of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is a Greek word that means human flourishing. The idea here is to be the best that you can be.

The most famous example of eudaimonia is this: in Homer's Iliad, the main character is Achilles, the best warrior of the Greeks against Troy. Achilles says this in the book:

Before I came to Troy, I saw a prophet, a fortune teller, and he told me my fortune. He said I could choose to not come to Troy and live a very long, healthy life, but I'd be a nobody. If I came to Troy, I would die young, but I would die as a hero. I would be remembered by everyone. Everyone would sing of my glory and my triumph. So that was my choice. I could live for a long time and just be a nobody, or I could be a hero and die young.

He said, "Well, for me, that's not a choice. For me, to be alive means to achieve eudaimonia. I have to be the best I can be, and therefore my only option is to come to Troy and die a hero." That's the mentality in Athens. It is much better to die young as a hero than to live a long time as a nobody, whereas for Spartans, it was the complete opposite.

This idea of eudaimonia made Athens into a very competitive society. If everyone's trying to achieve eudaimonia, you're going to have a lot of competition because there can only be one hero. The example is from Homer's Iliad. When Achilles got into a fight with Agamemnon, Achilles basically said, "I don't like you. You're a dog. I'm not going to fight for you again." Agamemnon said, "I don't need you." What Achilles did was he went to his mother, who was a goddess, and said, "Could you please get the gods to help the Trojans so that Agamemnon would have to come beg for my help again?" He was basically committing treason, and in the Greek world, you're allowed to do that because the most important thing is to achieve eudaimonia. It's an extremely competitive world where everyone's trying to backstab each other to become the hero.

Because of this, Athens created a new system called ostracism. The idea here is because the Athenians were so at each other's throats, if someone was breaking the rules or being too competitive in the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Athenian people could choose to ostracize this person. This meant you would be banished or exiled from Athens for 10 years, and this was considered even worse than death. The reason why is that in the polis system, the only people that mattered were citizens. The Greek world was very chauvinistic, which meant that you could not earn the right to be a citizen; you had to be born to become a citizen. In other words, if you were banished from your polis, you became a nobody. You were basically dead to everyone because only citizens had rights in the Greek world. If you were a slave or a foreigner, you had absolutely no rights. You could not own land; you could not even speak in public.

Athens was a democracy where everyone had the right to speak and to vote. But really, when we talk about democracy in this world, we're not saying that everyone could become president or a leader. Political power could only be held by people of nobility. Democracy usually was a battle between different factions of the nobility, usually between the upper nobility and the lower nobility.

This is a lesson that's true throughout history. Usually, we think the conflict in societies is between the haves and the have-nots, the poor and the rich. This is not true. If you look at history, the conflicts in society are usually between the "have a lot" and the "have some, but want more."

Throughout history, we call these people different names. In this society, these are basically the lower nobility. In the French Revolution, we will call them the petite bourgeoisie, and today we call them the middle class. The poor people do not rebel. They might riot, but they do not revolt. It's usually the middle class or the lower nobility that revolts.

So, Athens is a democracy, and it's usually a conflict between the upper nobility and the lower nobility. Sparta is an oligarchy, which basically means rule by the few, and they hate democracy. These systems and cultures, Sparta and Athens, are diametrically opposed to each other. They hate each other and are always in conflict with each other.

The Persian Wars

Around 500 BC, the Greeks were colonizing the Mediterranean and the Aegean. This territory belonged to Persia. The Persian Empire is considered one of the greatest empires in human history. All you need to know for now is the Persian Empire spread throughout most of the world, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, and what we call Iran today. It was a huge, extremely enlightened empire for its age.

There were Greeks who lived in Anatolia, or what they called Asia Minor back then. The thing about the Persian Empire is if you were a subject city, you could do whatever you want, but you had to pay taxes. These people did not like to pay taxes, so they revolted. In their revolt, they went to Sparta and Athens and sought help. They basically said, "Look, we're all Greeks. We're being oppressed by the Persians. Could you please help us?"

What did the Spartans say? "No, because we don't care. Your problem, not my problem." And what did the Athenians say? "Yeah, sure, let's achieve eudaimonia, man! Let's be Achilles. Let's go over and help them and maybe make a lot of money for ourselves."

Because the Persian Empire was so powerful, they destroyed the rebellion. In 490 BC, the Persians decided to attack Greece to teach the Athenians a lesson. This was the Battle of Marathon. We actually don't know that much about it; the sourcing is very limited. But what they say is that in the Battle of Marathon, there were about 10,000 Athenians versus 25,000 Persians. That's a huge advantage for the Persians. Well, the Athenians destroyed the Persians. The Athenians lost about 192 men; the Persians lost about 5,000. It was a slaughter.

A lot of the reason why is military tactics. The Persian Empire is huge, with lots of flat land. In this geography, your main advantage is cavalry—horse archers. That's what the Persians were known for. The geography of Greece was different; it was hilly, so you didn't really use cavalry. It was mainly infantry fighting each other. What the Greeks did over hundreds of years was develop a new military tactic using hoplites. Hoplite comes from the word hoplon, which is Greek for shield. These were men with large shields and spears. The way they fought was using the phalanx formation. The innovation of the phalanx was that it was basically a moving wall. Men would stand together and behind each other so that they made a wall of shields and spears. The Persians didn't have armor, so when men with armor went to battle with men without armor, armor usually wins.

That made the Persians even more angry. So in about 480 BCE, Persia organized a massive invasion force against Greece. We think it was about half a million soldiers. That's huge. But not only that, you had a huge navy. Basically, Persia called on every nation of its empire to fight against Greece, which included Egypt, the Phoenicians, and also Greeks who lived in the territory of Persia.

Sparta and Athens became allies to resist the Persian invasion, but there were also some Greek poleis that sided with the Persians, including Thebes. The invasion came from the north, from Macedonia. You may have heard of the Battle of Thermopylae, made famous by the movie 300. It was about 300 Spartans and about 5,000 other Greeks who tried to make a stand against the Persian invasion, and they got destroyed.

The Persians came in, and the Greeks decided to retreat back to Sparta. At Corinth, they decided to build a wall to stop the Persian advance. The problem, though, is Athens is here. So the Persians came in and burned down Athens.

What's important to understand is that for the Greeks, the concept of a polis is not a place; it's a community. A polis is wherever the Greeks choose to be. So even though the Persians came to destroy Athens, the Athenians just got into their ships, because Athens was a naval power, and sailed away. The city of Athens was destroyed, but not the community, the polis of Athens.

But now the Greeks were in a lot of trouble. What the Persians could now do is take their ships, sail around, and attack Sparta from behind. This was a huge problem for Sparta because its ultimate weakness is the helots. The helots hate the Spartans because the Spartans have terrorized them for centuries. All that Persia had to do was take their ships, land in Sparta, build forts, and the helots would run to them. Then the king, Xerxes of Persia, could declare the helots to be free people. Now you have a revolution. The helots are now armed by the Persians, and they're going to go kill the Spartans. Game over. The war is over.

The Persians did not do that. The Persian king, Xerxes, had a war council, and a lot of generals said to him, "King, we've won the war. We have half a million men in Greece. There's nothing the Greeks can do about this." The Persians were feeling very confident.

The Greek navy was on an island called Salamis, and everyone was freaking out. The Spartans wanted to take their navy and defend the coastline of Sparta. But one Athenian general, his name is Themistocles, said, "You know what, that's great for you guys, but remember our city, Athens, has been destroyed. We need to take on the Persians head-on. We can't wait." The Spartans were like, "Yeah, that's fine, but they outnumber us three to one. There's no way we can beat them in a naval battle." Themistocles said, "We either fight the Persians now and achieve eudaimonia, or we, Athens, will be like, 'Screw you, Spartans.' We're going to take our ships and sail off west to Sicily or Africa. Who cares? We're going to go away and leave the Persians to kill you guys." So Sparta realized they had no choice but to listen to the Athenians and fight.

Then what Themistocles did was he sent a spy to King Xerxes. The spy said to King Xerxes, "Oh great king, the entire Greek navy is stuck in Salamis, but they want to run away. Now is your chance to attack them and destroy the Greek navy once and for all." At this point, King Xerxes made the decision to send his entire navy to destroy the Greek navy at Salamis. His generals were like, "Don't do that, man. That's a risk you don't have to take." But the king said, "No, I came to defeat the Greeks. I want to defeat them and build a monument to celebrate my great victory. My father, King Darius, sent an army in 490 BC, and the Athenians destroyed his army at Marathon. I'm going to prove I'm a greater king than my father by defeating the Greeks at Salamis. I want one great battle so that history will remember me forever."

So he sent his entire force, about a thousand ships, to Salamis. Salamis is a strait; it's very narrow, so the ships had to line up and attack the Greeks one by one. In a headlong battle, the Greek ships were heavier and were manned by hoplites with armor. In this Battle of Salamis, the Greeks destroyed the Persian navy. The Persian army had won the war, and at Salamis, they lost the war.

Now that the Persian navy had been destroyed, supply lines were in trouble. Greece is a very poor nation; you cannot resupply half a million people in Greece. You need to bring in supplies from Persia, but now your navy has been destroyed. So King Xerxes freaked out and went home. He left his cousin, General Mardonius, to fight the Greeks. Mardonius could have chosen to not fight the Greeks. He was in Thebes. All he had to do was stay in Thebes and wait out the war. This is what we call a war of attrition. But Mardonius chose to fight the Greeks at the Battle of Plataea. Here, it was about equal forces: 100,000 Greeks versus 100,000 Persians. The Greeks destroyed the Persians. The Persians lost five times more men than the Greeks, and General Mardonius was killed in this battle. This war that the Persians should have won very easily, the Persians lost and were completely destroyed.

The Rise of the Athenian Empire

Because of this war, Greece now became extremely wealthy. Persia was forced to retreat from Asia Minor, and the Greeks were able to capture a lot of treasure. After this, Persia switched strategies. Persia never again invaded Greece. But the Greeks didn't know this; they thought the Persians would come back at any point. The Athenians said, "Let's take the battle to Persia." And what did the Spartans say? "No, we're going to go home, and that's it."

To battle against the Persians, Athens created something called the Delian League. The Delian League was a defensive alliance between Athens and the colonies and islands in the Aegean. The idea was if the Persians came back, they would muster their forces and fight the Persians at sea. The problem was that only Athens had a navy. Everyone else said, "We don't have a navy, but we'll contribute money." They agreed that this treasury could only be used against Persia if Persia invaded. They put all this money on an island called Delos, which is why it's called the Delian League.

While this was happening, Athens was the rising power in this world. In 461 BCE, a new political leader called Pericles came into power. Pericles is considered the father of Athenian democracy. He is the one who spread democracy throughout Athens, and historians today worship Pericles. He is considered one of the greatest leaders in Western history.

I want to show you that Pericles was first and foremost a politician who was concerned about amassing and keeping power. He did a lot of wonderful things for Athens, but these things that he did, even though they seemed great, were really about him amassing power for himself.

The first thing he did was he spread democracy to everyone. He basically gave every citizen the right to vote. You're like, "Okay, that's great. Direct democracy." But the reason he did that was to change the balance of power in Athens. He represented the lower nobility versus the upper nobility. The way for the lower nobility to defeat the upper nobility is by aligning itself with the people. You do that by giving people the right to vote. By doing this, Pericles basically made himself king of Athens. In fact, he stayed in power from 461 to 429 BCE.

To please the people even more, he basically made corruption official. He took the money from Delos and brought it to Athens. He said to the Delian League, "You know what, this money in Delos, it's a lot of money. I'm afraid the Persians will come and steal it, so let's take it to Athens." When he brought it to Athens, the next thing he did was he spent all of it. He built a lot of really impressive buildings, including the Parthenon, a great temple to Athena. They made the Athenian statue out of gold. They spent billions of dollars on this temple. The reason why is when you do that, you give people jobs and you give people who support you money. This was basically official corruption.

There were people in the upper nobility who thought what Pericles was doing was terrible for Athens. In meetings, they wanted to ostracize Pericles. They accused him of corruption, of bribing the city of Athens. They said, "You are corrupting our morals. You are hurting our democracy. Therefore, we want to ostracize you." There was a vote against Pericles, and what happened? The people voted to exile Pericles's opponents. Those who criticized Pericles were now exiled from Athens. Therefore, Pericles no longer had any political opponents and could do whatever he wanted.

The two big innovations of Pericles were democracy and empire. After Pericles basically stole the money from the Delian League, the allies were obviously angry. They said, "We are out of this league." Pericles said, "Well, if you leave our league, we're going to come and invade you." So Athens started this expansionist campaign to maintain its empire. The Delian League basically became the Athenian Empire, and now Athens got about 20% of its revenue from its allies.

The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE)

As Athens was expanding and becoming much wealthier, other Greek poleis started to get angry. Athens was basically the big bully. They were afraid of Persia before, but Persia didn't really bother the Greeks, whereas Athens wanted to control all of Greece. They were basically a mafia organization forcing these islands in the Aegean Sea to pay tribute.

In 431 BCE, the Greek poleis united around Sparta and started the Peloponnesian War. What most historians will tell you is this war was started because Sparta was afraid of an emerging Athens. Sparta was the hegemon, the most dominant power in Greece at that time, and now that Athens was rising, Sparta felt threatened. That's not true. The reason why is because Athens was an empire, and it was going around and bullying everyone. You didn't have a choice in the matter. You either had to fight Athens now or wait for Athens to invade you. It was because Athens was an imperial power.

Athens was an imperial power because of its theory of eudaimonia. The great irony here, and you will see this pattern repeat itself throughout history, is the thing—the culture—that allows a nation to rise will also cause it to decline. It's because of the Peloponnesian War, which lasted 27 years, that Athens lost its empire. The culture of eudaimonia that caused Athens to rise would ultimately lead to its decline as well.

Even though Sparta and Athens were now at war, this war should have been pretty easily won by Athens. What could Athens do to destroy Sparta? The helots. The Athenians had ships. They could choose to do what the Persians should have done, which is to take its navy, land it on the coast, and support the helots in a rebellion. If that had happened, Sparta would have been destroyed very quickly. The Athenians didn't do that.

To counter this threat, what should Sparta have done? Its only option was to free the helots and say, "If you fight for us against the Athenians, we will give you your liberty." The helots would have said, "Yeah, let's go fight for the Spartans." Sparta would have increased its army tenfold and could have destroyed Athens. Sparta didn't do this either.

From a military strategy perspective, the Peloponnesian War didn't make any sense. The only way to understand what happened is to understand that the very basis of conflict in society is between the upper nobility and the lower nobility. The upper nobility is only interested in maintaining the status quo. They're very conservative. They don't like wars because you could lose, and also because if you win wars, you have people who are now richer than you are. The lower nobility can only become upper nobility through war or revolution, so they're always looking to upset the status quo.

Even though this war was going on, internally there was still conflict between the upper and lower nobility in both cities. Sparta wasn't really trying to win a war against Athens; Sparta was trying to maintain the status quo in Sparta. Athens wasn't really trying to win a war against Sparta; Athens was trying to maintain the status quo within Athens.

An example is Pericles. The war started in 431 BC, and a lot of people were saying, "Pericles, hey, let's go invade Sparta." What Pericles said instead was, "Oh no, no, no, the Spartans are the greatest warriors in the world. We have no chance against Sparta. So what we'll do is we have these walls. We'll hide behind our walls and let our navy protect us in the sea." That was the defensive strategy of Pericles. So the Spartans could come to Attica and destroy all the farmland, and the Athenians could only watch. This was a disaster because, over time, the Spartans could starve out the Athenians. The other problem is when you have too many people in one place, you get disease. Because of the overpopulation in Athens, they had a plague which killed one-third of the Athenian population, including Pericles, who died along with his two sons. If the Athenians had gone to war against Sparta and lost, they would have at most lost about 10% of their population. But because they chose not to fight, they lost their farmland and a third of their population.

The strategy makes no sense from a military perspective. It only makes sense if you understand there's an internal conflict in Athens. Pericles represented the upper nobility; he wanted to maintain the status quo. He didn't really want to fight this war.

After Pericles died, the lower nobility became ascendant. They proposed an aggressive strategy against the Spartans, led by Cleon, who became the de facto leader of Athens. He was considered a demagogue. If you look at the history, everyone says bad things about this guy, but really, he was lower nobility trying to achieve eudaimonia. Cleon proposed this aggressive strategy, and guess what happened? Athens started destroying Sparta.

Now Sparta was under a lot of pressure. It picked a new general, Brasidas, and said, "Listen, we're losing the war. What can we do?" Brasidas went north and started to win victories against Athens. His policy was, "Listen, we need to change our social structure to win." He told the helots, "If you fight for me, I'm going to give you your freedom." A lot of helots fought for Brasidas, and he won a lot of wars. How did the Spartans feel about this? They were really unhappy. It was changing their social structure. They wanted the helots to be slaves, not free citizens who helped them win wars.

Ultimately, what happened is Cleon and Brasidas got into a battle with each other, and they both died. That's extremely convenient. I'd be very surprised if they actually did both die in battle. My guess is they were both assassinated during the battle. Ultimately, both were bigger threats to the social structure of Sparta and Athens than losing the war itself.

The war kept going, and then Persia got involved and gave Sparta a navy—basically a blank check. But Sparta, being so conservative and insular, didn't really know how to use a navy. Eventually, Persia said to Sparta, "Hey guys, why don't you try a new strategy? If a general is winning against the Athenians, promote the guy." The Spartans weren't concerned about winning the war; they were concerned about maintaining their social order.

There was this Spartan commander, Lysander, and he was really the only Spartan who knew how to win naval battles. The problem with Lysander was he was a half-citizen, which meant his father was a Spartan but not his mother. He was looked down upon in Sparta, but he could win naval battles, so he wasn't promoted. The Persians said to the Spartans, "Listen, this is stupid. Lysander is a great commander. You have to promote him." The Spartans didn't really have a choice. After Lysander was promoted, he single-handedly won the war against Athens. He laid siege to Athens in 404 BCE, and Athens had no choice but to surrender because they were out of food.

For 27 years, Sparta and Athens were at war, killing each other. Now Athens had finally been defeated. What should happen to Athens? Nothing happened to Athens. Usually, if you lose a war in this world, they come and kill all the men and enslave all the women. That's what the Persians and other Greek cities wanted. The Spartans didn't do anything to Athens; they left Athens alone. One explanation is Sparta wanted to maintain a balance of power. If they destroyed Athens, Persia could come back and destroy Sparta. But another explanation is that the upper nobility of Sparta and the upper nobility of Athens were good friends with each other. Rich people tend to marry each other. Athens and Sparta weren't really enemies. They had to fight this war because of internal pressures from the lower nobility, but because this war was killing off so much of the lower nobility, it maintained the status quo.

Rat Utopia: An Analogy for Societal Collapse

I'm going to conclude with evidence for this theory. What I just said—that war is really about killing off internal dissent, not really about beating another enemy—is very controversial. I will give you some evidence for this theory, and it's called Rat Utopia.

In the 1960s and '70s, there was an American scientist named John B. Calhoun. He was interested in the question: what would it be like for humans to live in a world of abundance, a world where everything was perfect, where you didn't have to fight for food? He couldn't experiment on humans, so he decided to experiment on rats instead. He built this universe, basically a big house where food and water were plentiful for rats. Rats could just play all day.

The thing about animals is that they live in a heavily ritualized and rules-based world. We think of animals as chaotic, but if you actually study their societies—ants, monkeys, rats—they live in an extremely rule-based world. For example, rats have a complex mating ritual involving dancing and chasing. They often play-fight with each other. There are lots of rules and rituals in rat society.

But that's out in nature. In the world of John B. Calhoun, he created Rat Utopia. At some point, the society broke down. These rituals and rules all broke down. Male rats, when they started fighting, became very violent. They were no longer playing; they were actually trying to kill each other. The mating ritual broke down. Male rats didn't even try to dance; they just saw a female and raped her. It was gang rape. These gangs of rats would try to break into burrows and rape the mother. At first, the husband would fight off these other rats, but eventually, he would get tired and just run away, abandoning the family. The female rat, now responsible for fighting off the other rats, became so traumatized she started to beat everyone up, including her own children. She kicked her children out of the house. It was a complete social breakdown. After a few more months of this, the entire colony of rats died. The entire society collapsed.

This experiment has been done many times, and each time, this happens. At some point, the society will collapse. This makes no sense to us. Everyone has enough food to eat; everyone should be happy. Why does society collapse?

John Calhoun's argument was that if there's too much food, there's overpopulation, which creates conflict, and the conflict causes the rules to collapse. The problem with this theory is the colony never became overpopulated. There was space for everyone.

This is my theory, and this goes back to the Peloponnesian War. It has to do with the idea of status. In a world of abundance and wealth, who benefits the most? It's the elderly. Old people can live a lot longer in a wealthy and abundant society. But then what happens is that status becomes locked in, which prevents younger people from ascending into power and status.

The metaphor is this: these rats are in a line, waiting to climb a mountain. You're waiting and waiting, and the line is moving along slowly, but you're still moving. Eventually, you will reach the mountaintop. But let's just say, for whatever reason, the line stops moving. Everyone's stuck. You get very anxious, stressed out, and agitated. You're like, "When is it my turn?" And it's never going to come because the people at the top won't leave. So what do you do? You start kicking the people behind you. You start fighting with each other.

This is what we call Rat Utopia. In a world of abundance and extreme wealth, old people do not die. If they do not die, it is impossible for young people to ascend into power and status. They have all this energy, and because they cannot reach their potential, they become violent and start attacking each other.

If you look at the Peloponnesian War and what happened between Athens and Sparta, it's really no different. They were killing each other for no reason—extreme violence which led to nothing. The political world in 431 BCE was no different from 404 BCE. The only difference is a lot of young people died in wars against each other.

My argument to you is if societies become too wealthy, you have a problem of Rat Utopia. If you have Rat Utopia, societies will then engage in wars that will eventually lead to their collapse. That's what happened to Athens.

In the Rat Utopia, why do the mothers start attacking their kids?

Humans are different from rats. Humans have the ability to reason and adapt to new circumstances. Rats don't. There are these rules in place, and if these rules are broken, the rats don't know how to adapt. If you're a rat mother, you have a husband. Your understanding is the husband will protect you from strangers. Your understanding is also that if someone is violent towards you, you should be violent against that person. In a situation where the husband leaves or is dead, the mother does not understand this new order anymore. The mother becomes traumatized. If you're traumatized, you can no longer reason. You're so focused on protecting yourself that you attack everything and everyone, including your own children.