Rats In A Too-Small Cage
What happens when you put two rats in cage, with plenty of food and water, but not enough space for the two of them to move around without frequently bumping into each other?
They start to fight. Why? Because each rat becomes miserable when the other rat is always bumping into it, and so it attacks the other rat as the cause of its misery.
It is easy, from the human perspective, to view this rat behavior as dumb, simple, animalistic, or something like that. “That rat isn’t smart enough to see that the other rat isn’t the cause of the problem. The other rat is actually in the same predicament.”
But is that analysis correct?
I submit that the rats’ behavior actually makes eminent sense, irrespective of intelligence. Yes, humans are much smarter than rats, but in this particular scenario, rat intelligence is sufficient to correctly analyze the situation.
You are a rat. You are miserable because you keep bumping into another rat. You’re also bumping into the walls of the cage, but you know that attacking the cage bars does nothing but hurt your own teeth. Attacking the other rat, on the other hand, can accomplish something. With the other rat destroyed, you will have twice as much room to move around, and your life won’t be so miserable.
It’s not your fault that the cage is so small — apparently, whoever put you and the other rat into this tiny cage wants you to fight. So why not do it? Which is better — a world in which two rats both live miserable lives, or a world in which one rat is relieved (via death) from a lifetime of chronic misery, and another rat lives a reasonably comfortable life?
And if you hadn’t guessed by now, I’m also talking about humans in this universe. The creators of this universe, and of humans, purposely gave us wants that cannot be universally satisfied within the capabilities of this universe, and so we must fight to get what will make our lives worthwhile.
It’s what we’ve been put here to do.
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