Are urban areas incubators for madness?

Two news stories this week caught our attention, and a staffer pointed out the similarities.

On WTXF-TV, the seemingly random series of attacks by a teenage gang (led by a 14-year-old girl in pink boots!) was reported in Philadelphia. And on a Fox news show, The Donald’s pick for “border czar” said that he agreed with Denver Mayor Mike Johnson on one thing: that he would be breaking the law if Denver fought against federal agents and troops removing border jumpers from the City and County of Denver. This is inexplicable, given the incredible mess in Metro Denver (including places likeAurora and Lakewood) where immigrant gangs and individuals seem to run amok.

Stepping around the morality and constitutionality of federal troops and jack-booted thugs rounding up people, and this bizarre idea of federal “czars” over anything, what goes?

Here at TPOL, we wonder if this sort of crazy behavior – madness or insanity – is really linked with living in the pressure cooker of massive, crowded urban areas? Is living in huge concentrations of human beings – together with enduring the environmental conditions of such communities – driving people to madness?

Readers may be somewhat aware of the “behavioral sink” experiments conducted by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) back in the 1940s and 1950s. You can read about it at this FedGov website. Briefly, the researchers created a series of “rat utopias” – enclosed spaces where rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth. Everything but unlimited space. The result?  A population explosion was followed by a series of “social pathologies”–violence, sexual deviance, and withdrawal. Leading to societal collapse. (Yes, even rats have a society.)

Of course, conspiracy theorists will no doubt point out that traditionally, experiments on rats are a prelude to experiments on humans. So, did the FedGov back 70+ years ago embark on research to determine how to cause societies – human societies – to collapse? And has this research been used to do just that? Perhaps overseas in various “enemy” and “undesirable” countries? And even here in the States?

Crowding, of course, is relative: what we at TPOL as westerners consider overcrowded is very different from what a family from the Netherlands or Taiwan might. But when combined with other social, moral, and economic pressures, crowded living conditions do have severe mental and even physical impacts. We see that in history, in places like Rome and Jerusalem and later in pre-war and wartime ghettos in Europe. Rome in particular is a situation to consider in the first and second centuries: food was virtually unlimited, paid for by the empire to be shipped from Africa and Egypt. In seiges in wartime, of course, food is often in very short supply while injury and death is very common, even before an actual collapse.

It is not just Philadelphia and Denver that feature this seeming insanity on the part of high and low. Consider the mental, moral, and ethical cesspools of Los Angeles and San Francisco in California. The endemic violence of Chicago. The episodes in St. Louis and Minneapolis. The constant meltdowns we see in Baltimore, Rhode Island, and other East Coast venues.

Remember this is even a theme in fiction (and no, not “The Secret of NIMH,” at least not directly). Consider “Escape from New York” or “Escape from Los Angeles” or DC’s Gotham City. And look back in history to places like Paris, Geneva, Mumbai. Consider also such written fiction as Make Room, Make Room and Logan’s Run.

In humans, not every person in an overcrowded, high-pressure urban area goes crazy. But enough do, from homeless to the powers-that-be, to make those places into living hells. Especially when there is little or no ability to escape from the crowding. Or no desire.

And madness takes many forms. Sociopathy, paranoia, unnatural passions, unbelievable cruelty, bloodlust, and more. Including power madness.

Which brings us to one place where madness has been incubated for 160+ years. Yes, Washington City in the District of Columbia. The District of Criminals, if you prefer. Not only is insanity perhaps cultured there, but perhaps it demonstrates that mental aberrations are actually contagious. The more you are around insane people, the more likely you are to “catch” the madness?

The situations in Denver, in Philadelphia, even in LA and SanFran and Chicago, can be seen to be instigated, encouraged, and made worse by the insane decisions made in DC. Truly a cesspool since the War Between The States, DC reeks of insanity, from the pristine offices in the White House and the chambers and lobbies of the Capitol and the Supreme Court, to the back alleys of the Southeast and even the buildings of Georgetown. Spilling over into the Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs and massive FedGov complexes.

How can we avoid this? Nuking the urban cores is probably not a wise option. The insanity of the Khmer Rouge offers nothing but different forms of madness. Fortunately the 2020 and 2021 recommendations of the CDC for concentration camps for the ill and vulnerable to COVID-19 were not taken seriously (except possibly in Australia and China). (Is China another example of a generational behavioral sink?)

Perhaps the response to COVID-19 and the pandemic panic is one way: it is not just federal and state agencies which have abandoned acres and acres of office space in downtown urban areas for “work from home” practices. So have many corporations – including financial institutions and educational businesses. Reducing the crowding may be as much a prophylactic measure as a quarantine for the truly ill – to prevent infection!

For individuals, getting out of urban areas and into rural and frontier places is clearly one way to avoid both going crazy and the results of the madness. Think about it!

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2024/11/26/are-urban-areas-incubators-for-madness/