hy an artist and not an athlete or an actor (or a singer or a...?) Well, I'll tell you why. Artists are special. Especially painters. Shelley once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, but he was wrong. Painters are.

You are most likely reading this on a computer screen or your telephone. At the heart of both technology and telecommunications are the twin founding inventions of the 19th century: Morse Code (telegraphy) and the practical steam engine. Without those two innovations, you would be reading this screed by a lamp lit with whale oil. And funny thing about both those innovations: they were both invented by artists (in fact, painters). I'm not talking about wannabe jack-of-all-trades repaint-your-furniture artists, I'm talking established, successful painters who dabbled in steam engines and telegraphy as a sideline. Robert Fulton, inventor of the first practical steam engine, was a noted portrait miniaturist.

Watercolorist. Galileo's training in artistic techniques gave him the conceptual understanding to correctly interpret what she saw through his telescope lens.  His art background gave him the conceptual foundations that lead directly to the scientific method.

Then there Leonardo. Leonardo's accomplishments stretch across so many fields—anatomy, mathematics, avionics, hydrodynamics, civil engineering, optics, military science, mechanical engineering—it's hard to find a subject in which Leonardo didn't make a seminal contribution. Scratch an innovation and find an artist. More specifically, find a painter. I'd go so far as to suggest that the conceptual leap that led to agriculture—the idea that nature could be made subject to human control—arises from the magical aspects of cave painting.

But this is all circumstantial. How can we test this hypothesis? Well, let's look at cultures that have actually rejected artistic expression, cultures like the Hasidim, or the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Why Does Everything Suck?

Everything sucks because Western civilization is coming to an end. The old Christian West will be gone by 2100. I mean this literally: everyone will be dead in 80 years. This is the end, my friends. Sic transit gloria Occidentis.

To understand what is happening we must examine the work of John B. Calhoun.

In the 1950’s-60’s ethologist John Calhoun performed a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH—this is the basis for the movie “The Secret of NIMH”) in which mice and rats were placed in conditions of severe overcrowding while still having all their basic needs taken care of. The result was catastrophic societal collapse, what Calhoun referred to as the “behavioral sink.”

"Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. ...

"The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result, extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.

"... In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population."

-- Population Density and Social Pathology, Calhoun

Things are starting to look suspiciously similar to overcrowded rats around here. We're seeing a lot of self-destructive behavior that could be attributable to the behavioral sink. The example par excellence of humans accommodating severe overcrowding is Japan, where an exquisite cultural aesthetic makes cheek-by-jowl living that would be unsupportable in the West a possibility. And what is happening there?

Hikikomori

We are witnessing the beginning of a huge, lemming-like die-off in Japan. In 20 years, when today's 60 year olds become infirm, an entire generation of the elderly is going to die of neglect.

The Japanese recluse problem is reflected to a degree in Western gamer culture, the men’s rights movement and the “incel” phenomenon. I’d say we too are well on our way to a NIMH-like hell.

Incidentally, once you look up hikikomori, you will find yourself down a rabbit hole of herbivore men, otaku, and parasite singles. Fair warning!you need to examine the work of John B. Calhoun.

In ther 1960s and Why indeed? We artists have left the world in your hands, and you non-artists have botched it. Enough all ready! If you can't clean up this mess, we have to. It's our reponsibility; see "Why an Artist?" below.

What's the Solution?