Mouse Utopia and the Blackest Pill – #PropagandaWatch
Directed by James Corbett 2020
Film Review
The main purpose of this documentary is to debunk the fear of overpopulation popularized by British East Indian Company agent Thomas Malthus in 1798 and Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Corbett begins by examining a series of “Mouse Utopia” experiments researcher John B Calhoun conducted for the National Institutes of Mental Health in the 1960s. In Calhoun’s experiments, colonies of mice enjoyed immediate gratification of all their physical needs except for living space. As colonies got more and more overcrowded, the mice became increasing self-focused. They eventually ceased all social interaction, including reproduction, and eventually died out.
Corbett first learned about the Mouse Utopia experiments from a Grant Theft World, a new research resource on propaganda. According to Grand Theft World, the primary funder of Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments was the Rockefeller Foundation. The same foundation produced Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, the original source of the novel proposal to use lockdowns* to control pandemics. (See https://evolveconsciousness.org/rockefeller-authoritarian-lockdown-document-from-2010-for-world-pandemic-response/).
The film goes on to explore how numerous researchers and foundations have subsequently applied Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia findings to human culture, to help promulgate the myth that the world is hopelessly overpopulated. Many of these ideas found their way into fictional books and films apocalypse driven by overcrowding in the sixties and seventies.**
Corbett also links the 1972 Club of Rome report Limits to Growth to overpopulation mania, but I’m not sure I agree with him. In addition to addressing population growth, Limits to Growth also raises concerns about depletion of non-renewable resources and environmental degradation.***
*2020 was the first time in history lockdowns (ie quarantining healthy people) were used to control the spread of contagious illness.
**Corbett gives the example of the 1973 Soylent Green an ecological dystopian thriller about the year 2022, in which the cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution and some apparent climate catastrophe have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water and housing.
***The Club of Rome is an elite roundtable group consisting current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders. According to the abstract, rapid population growth was only one of five parameters (along with accelerating industrialization, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources and a deteriorating environment) MIT scientists commissioned by the Club of Rome considered in their complex system modeling experiments. See https://www.isprambiente.gov.it/files/agenda21/1972-the-limits-to-growth.pdf
The Most Revolutionary Act 