What Does "Mysteries For Rats" Mean? (Part 2)

Ants and friends and chain link fences

The Ant Mill

In my computer science classes, I learned a little bit about Ant Colony Optimization. This is a fascinating intersection between computer science and biology where computer scientists take their cues from ants. Ants provide great inspiration for algorithm optimization because they behave as discreet, identical units with austere memory capabilities that enable recursion (pheromones), and they all behave according to a shared procedure in order to get things done as a whole. Ants are able to show us efficient, practical solutions to problems we struggle with as humans, such as the Traveling Salesman Problem.¹

But recursion is a fickle bitch. You experience this already, in your internal world, in your social world, through your computer, and at the hands of the terrible sound a speaker makes when the microphone gets too close to it. You have almost certainly witnessed the awful power of a feedback loop.

Ants bear witness too. The very same trick that allows ants to efficiently traverse complicated landscapes can also lead to a phenomenon called the Ant Mill. This happens when their pheromone trails get crossed in a certain way, and instead of collectively seeking out a food source, ants begin following each other and themselves in a loop. The more they walk, the more pheromones they leave, which causes more ants to follow the path, which leaves more pheromones, and your ears are ringing and the sound is getting louder and we all know how that feels. Sometimes these Ant Mills dissipate, but sometimes they do not, and the ants begin to die of exhaustion.

“Why didn’t you break the loop?” says a rat to an ant, “Didn’t you want to live? Don’t you want what’s best for the hive?”

“What is a loop?” says the ant, “Of course I wanted what was best. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

They want to live, they try to live, and they cannot solve the maze. They cannot solve the maze that they collectively create with their own bodies, using the very same tools that otherwise allow them to thrive.

A scientist stands watching the ants, taking careful notes to bring back to his supervisor so that we humans can make efficient technology that creatively solves problems. And when the scientist gets back to his supervisor, at a university or a company or a government agency, his research may be implemented in any number of technologies that are hostile to human life, that diminish our enjoyment or limit our creativity, that scorch the earth we live on. We find clever solutions, and we take careful notes, and our needs are rarely met.

“Why didn’t you change the structure?” says an ant to a scientist, “Didn’t you want your needs to be met? Didn’t you want your community to thrive?”

“I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do,” says the scientist, “I thought I was being good. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

He wants to be good, he tries to be good, and he cannot solve the maze.

And just like with the Ant Mill, it’s not just that we humans cannot solve an unsolvable maze. It is also true that we create the maze we cannot solve, and we cannot solve it for the same reason that we continue to create it - the unsolvable maze emerges at the biological limits of our minds. The prisoner’s dilemma, the fundamental contradictions of Capitalism – we create mazes we can’t solve because we can’t solve them. That is how the Mysteries work.

If we were biologically capable of solving our Mysteries, we wouldn’t have the mazes that we have. If the ants did not have the particular biological blindspot that they have with regard to pheromone trail feedback loops, they wouldn’t have Ant Mills. They wouldn’t create them, so they wouldn’t encounter them. They might have some other problematic organization, some other self-made nightmare that pops up from time to time, but they wouldn’t have that one. They have that one because it is in their blindspot, because it follows from their construction. It’s a Mystery-for-Ants. So, it doesn’t make any sense to pluck certain ants out of the Ant Mill and reprimand them for their inadequacies, to chastise them as if it’s within their control what they can and cannot fathom. Instead, if you really wanted a world where Ant Mills would not kill ants, you would need to come up with some kind of practical, morally neutral solution to the problem of Ant Mills (not to the problem of bad ants.) And, if you want a world where man-made nightmare structures rooted in Mysteries-for-Humans do not harm humans, I think the same is probably true.

This whole “Ethics of Mysteries” doesn’t mean that nothing can ever get better, or that people can’t make meaningful changes, or that free will doesn’t exist, or that you can’t pass moral judgment on others when they act in ways you think are wrong. It just means that some structures are beyond our biological mental limits, and that we may participate in these structures even when they are not in our best interest (individually or collectively) precisely because they are beyond our biological mental limits. You might believe this and disagree with me about other stuff, but I feel that this core principle lends itself well both to anarchy and to widespread compassion.

The Reframe

So, if I am an ant or a rat and I find myself in an unfathomable maze, how can I begin to fathom it? How can I begin to map the borders of something I can’t understand, something that is functionally invisible to me? 

Reframe step 1: 

I cannot solve this maze -> The maze is a Mystery

I think the first step is to realize that the maze is a Mystery. To realize that you are working inside a maze that is a “Mystery” is to disabuse yourself of the notion that you should be able to solve it alone. You can’t be punished into solving a mystery. You can’t be beaten into changing your mental biological limitations. So, the urgency and the weight and the pain associated with not solving something that is important to you, the ruthless picking at your hidden subconscious, second-guessing your “true” values? That can all be put away once you realize you are facing a hard limit. I would argue that it should be put away, because it makes the predicament worse and not better.

Reframe step 2: 

We are making our own Hell together -> We are here together

The second step for an ant or a rat who is inside a Mystery is to collaborate with the others in the maze. In a laboratory there may be no others in the maze, but in an Ant Mill there are, and in fact, there have to be. Without the others, there would be no Ant Mill. In a collectively-made Mystery where you all make your own Hell, the frustration lies in the presence of the others. You are not alone, you are working together to create the Ant Mill. The second step, then, is to turn to the ant next to you and start a conversation. This is incredibly vulnerable, but I see no other way. 

In order to sketch out the borders of the maze, you must be able to speak honestly about what you cannot do. You have to be able to tell the other rats that you’ve hit a wall, and to be able to clearly articulate where that wall is and what it felt like to hit it. You also have to be able to hear this information from the other rats, and you can’t abandon each other for hitting those walls. You can’t tell the other rats that their inability to solve the maze demonstrates that they’re selfish, or that they’re lazy, or that they actually don’t want to solve the maze. You especially can’t do that and then expect to be believed when you hit a wall of your own. So the second step here is building trust with the other animals, and taking two huge leaps of faith: 1) I will tell you where my limits are, and 2) I will hear your limits and do my very best to believe you. By acting as a network instead of a single unit, you may begin to “see” the structure of the Mystery.

Reframe step 3: 

I see the pattern I am stuck in -> I can change my behavior

The third step is to take stock of the Mystery’s structure, predict your blindspots, and make a revised plan. The best analogy I can think of here isn’t an ant one or a rat one, but a small-scale human one. 

Feedback loops are a common refrain in psychology, particularly in trauma and addiction, and I know about them through the OCD world. Generally with compulsive and/or maladaptive behavior the process goes like this: 

There is discomfort -> person does behavior -> discomfort is temporarily alleviated -> discomfort returns. 

Because discomfort can strike at any time, and because avoiding discomfort does not build tolerance for it, this general pattern leads to all kinds of unpleasant compulsive shit in various people’s lives. The maladaptive/compulsive behavior can be anything from drugs to themed compulsions to porn to video games to doom-scrolling to excessive sleep to violent outbursts to general avoidance itself. And while these behaviors have varying effects on a person’s life, they all share the harmful effect of weakening a person’s tolerance for discomfort.

So when you encounter this kind of thing in your life, a small mystery inside your own psyche, you can’t just will yourself to be constructed differently. You also don’t generally benefit from giving up on changing the pattern. Instead, what’s required is usually some version of recognizing the pattern, taking stock of what the pattern is in its entirety, and forming a new pattern on purpose. So with the OCD people, our ERP therapy stands for Exposure Response Prevention. What this means is that we intentionally expose ourselves to something that makes us uncomfortable, then we choose not to respond with the compulsive behavior we usually respond with, and we wait until the discomfort goes down on its own. For most of us this is effective, albeit unpleasant. It teaches your mind and your body that 1) You can survive discomfort, and 2) discomfort often dissipates on its own regardless of your behavior. You consciously change your behavior to interrupt the feedback loop, and as you follow your new path, the pull of your old path weakens.

I’ll be real with you right now and tell you that there is an element of magic here. What gives you the strength to make a change today that you didn’t make yesterday? Why might I do the therapy homework today when yesterday I was too unmotivated to do it? Is it really me making the change, or is some higher power giving me new strength that I misinterpret as being my own? These questions are neat for pondering, but in my experience they don’t lead you anywhere interesting. In my experience, it’s best to respond to quandaries like this with a powerful metaheuristic that goes like this:

“So what? What am I reasonably going to do about any of that? Sure, maybe I’m not truly in possession of my life. Maybe the sun won’t come up tomorrow. Maybe all my friends are actually robots. Fucking, what about it? I need to touch grass.”

So back to the ants and the rats and the Mystery mazes. If step 1 is to recognize that you are inside a Mystery, and step 2 is to collaborate with your community members to sketch out the shape of the particular Mystery you are in, then step 3 is to consciously change your behavior. As with ERP it may need to begin very gradually. It is important that the new behavior is sustainable. However, an ant may try these gradual changes with bravery and self-assuredness if it is 1) aware that it is inside an Ant Mill, 2) building community with the ants around it, and 3) acting intentionally with an understanding of what new direction it wants to move in. So on this revolution in the Ant Mill, the ant drifts slightly to the left, begins to walk a little tiny bit straighter, and maybe a few of the other ants do the same, and on the next revolution the Ant Mill’s pheromone trails are slightly weaker and the ants may be slightly more willing to depart from the loop. God willing, and fickle bitch that she is, recursion may start to work for the ants instead of against them, against the Ant Mill instead of for it, and eventually one of the ants may walk straight and forge a pheromone path that frees the hive from the loop.

Wrapping up

With our human proclivities, we might personify that ant in front as being some kind of great man. Oh Great Ant Formicidae, hero of the meek, he who marched his desperate colony to freedom when no other ant could muster the strength! See his indomitable patriotic spirit! That’s okay. But it’s important to remember that the process doesn’t really work like that. One ant can’t truly lead the charge because it’s not a charge and there is no leader. There will be ants closer to the front of the line and there will be ants closer to the back, but before the loop becomes a line there are no leaders at all, no front and no back, because everyone is walking the same loop. There are only ants stuck in an Ant Mill, wondering if the pheromone trail will ever change, wondering why their needs aren’t met, maybe blaming themselves and others for the shape of the trail. That is, in my parable where ants and rats have the same feelings that we do.

I can’t tell you if The Reframe is really possible to carry out on purpose as a group (as rats, ants, or humans), or if a given group of people will be able to do it, or how exactly this model maps on to our specific realities. This is the land where theory has no teeth. If I could predict this for you definitively, it wouldn’t be a Mystery, and if I could completely separate all this from the scientific world, it would just be a story. I feel like this is something in between, so

I just offer you this portion of thought and the rest is up to you.

If all the little animals could work together to solve the Mysteries that torment them, and if they all went to the dive bar afterwards to debrief, they might have all sorts of ideas about what they had just been through and what to make of it.

“It was the power of reason,” says the scientist.

“It was fate,” says the rat.

“It was because we are a good and kind community,” says the ant.

They might all be right. Who’s to say? Once you’re out and have the time and space to assign meaning to your struggles, it can really be whatever you want it to be. My interest here isn’t really in what the Ant Mill “means”. It’s more about how other living things already die and survive, suffer and prevail, and what we might have in common with them. Are we really so different? Maybe today is a good day to take a very small step out of the ant mill, or to start a conversation with one of the other rats, or to put a few seconds of distance between your discomfort and your maladaptive response. Maybe your small step outward will be so small that nobody else could possibly see it. But if you take it, just for a second, just to yourself, recursion might bless the animal that you are and make it just a little bit easier tomorrow. With love and humility, I offer this idea to you. This is the meaning behind Mysteries for Rats.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem