John B Calhoun Quotes

The need for challenge and exploration arises mostly out of the blockage of fulfillment of lower level needs, giving rise to a pervading restlessness. Out of this restlessness there arises much pathology as searchers collide with established structuring and functioning of the environment. Out of this restlessness there also arises a small cadre of creative deviants whose insights and inventions have provided the leverage which has enabled man to increase his standard of living and his compassionate concern for his fellows. Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing has always gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from whom alone will come the conceptualizations of an evolutionary designing process which can assure us an open ended future -- toward whose realization we can all participate.

And though David never mentioned it in his writing, his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946. Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit “frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of them.

But I was simultaneously able to be friends with Ted and still walk into my sophomore American history class and cite Abraham Lincoln as my authority for defending racial segregation in the South. I could read about the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 and, a few short months later, write my comment about the whipping of John C. Calhoun’s slave in Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition. I wish I could explain this, but it mystifies me even now.