I’ve always loved rat-related anecdotes.
I love how rats try to free one another from a trap.
I’ve heard something about the rat who would pull a lever to administer drugs over and over and over until it died.
And I went, “well, fuck, that’s kind of bleak.”
I didn’t know the other part of the story about Rat City, where they took the same rats and gave them a space that was 200 times larger than their previous cage.
They were given toys to play with and plenty of treats and food and other rats to socialize and places to nest and raise their young.
Only 5% or so of the rats continued to pull the lever after that.
Given the choice between regular water and drug laced water, most chose the regular water after that.
I was like “how have I never heard this?”
One of my classmates snorted and said “too expensive, no one wants to hear about this or come up with the money for it. It got buried and that’s all anyone ever heard about Rat City.”
I got to thinking the chatroom’s kind of like Rat City: Take a bunch of neurotic and isolated rats sitting at home and yanking on their dope levers and give them others to socialize with.. and a hunt game and some macros to play with, and bam. Some of them stopped yanking on the lever.
Some of them remain behind and continue to try to free the other rats from their traps.
It’s a far cry from addressing other psychosocial needs or getting people out of survival mode though.
I wish we had a version of Rat City that wasn’t wedded with NA kool-aid and abusive fucked up steppers.
Because I don’t think Rat City would have been so successful if you had introduced the aforementioned rat into a cage full of other rats that were bullies.
Update 9/20/2022: I’m going to leave that bullshit as-is but here, two anons dish on the real ”rat city” / “rat utopia” story:
