Quote explainer

“The Malthu­sian trap, at least at its ex­tremely pure the­o­ret­i­cal lim­its. Sup­pose you are one of the first rats in­tro­duced onto a pris­tine is­land. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyl­lic life loung­ing about, eat­ing, and com­pos­ing great works of art.

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen chil­dren. All of them have a dozen chil­dren, and so on. In a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions, the is­land has ten thou­sand rats and has reached its car­ry­ing ca­pac­ity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a cer­tain per­cent of each new gen­er­a­tion dies in order to keep the pop­u­la­tion steady at ten thou­sand.

A cer­tain sect of rats aban­dons art in order to de­vote more of their time to scroung­ing for sur­vival. Each gen­er­a­tion, a bit less of this sect dies than mem­bers of the main­stream, until after a while, no rat com­poses any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go ex­tinct within a few gen­er­a­tions.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more sur­vival­ist than the main­stream will even­tu­ally take over. If one sect of rats al­tru­is­ti­cally de­cides to limit its off­spring to two per cou­ple in order to de­crease over­pop­u­la­tion, that sect will die out, swarmed out of ex­is­tence by its more nu­mer­ous en­e­mies. If one sect of rats starts prac­tic­ing can­ni­bal­ism, and finds it gives them an ad­van­tage over their fel­lows, it will even­tu­ally take over and reach fix­a­tion.

If some rat sci­en­tists pre­dict that de­ple­tion of the is­land’s nut stores is ac­cel­er­at­ing at a dan­ger­ous rate and they will soon be ex­hausted com­pletely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut con­sump­tion to a sus­tain­able level. Those rats will be out­com­peted by their more self­ish cousins. Even­tu­ally the nuts will be ex­hausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats ad­vo­cat­ing some ac­tion to stop the cycle will be out­com­peted by their cousins for whom ad­vo­cat­ing any­thing is a waste of time that could be used to com­pete and con­sume.

For a bunch of rea­sons evo­lu­tion is not quite as Malthu­sian as the ideal case, but it pro­vides the pro­to­type ex­am­ple we can apply to other things to see the un­der­ly­ing mech­a­nism. From a god’s- eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should main­tain a com­fort­ably low pop­u­la­tion. From within the sys­tem, each in­di­vid­ual rat will fol­low its ge­netic im­per­a­tive and the is­land will end up in an end­less boom- bust cycle."

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch