by Dylan Evans
‘Don’t worry,’ Agric reassured me. ‘We’ll be completely self-sufficient soon. And anyway,’ he added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I think you’ll find things will change substantially within a month or two.’
I was puzzled by this remark, but I didn’t press Agric for an explanation. I was grateful for his vague expression of optimism, and for now that was enough. But over the following days, as I returned to the topic of money in other furtive conversations with him, I began to probe the mysterious source of his confidence. Did he, perhaps, believe that we would find some wealthy philanthropist who would fund the experiment when my money ran out? Would we be able to turn Utopia into a profitable enterprise when the experiment was over, by running courses in post-apocalyptic survival skills, for example, or in permaculture?
But as I eliminated each of these hypotheses in turn, it gradually dawned on me that Agric’s confidence was inspired by nothing so banal as the appearance of another funding source. It was, in fact, driven by his overwhelming certainty that civilization would collapse that very year. ‘The world turns,’ he confided to me one evening, with a glint in his eye. ‘Within six months I expect it to look significantly different from now. I don’t think people will like it so much . . .’ And then he quoted Shakespeare:
‘By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.’
Far from being consoling, Agric’s certainty unnerved me, for I realized I did not share it. Although the estimate I’d given Nick – that I thought there was a 50 per cent chance that civilization would collapse in the next few years – had seemed ridiculously high to him, it was probably quite low by Agric’s standards. For it meant that I believed there was still a 50 per cent chance that civilization would not collapse within the next few years. And that, to Agric, would have seemed like overweening optimism.
One afternoon, I noticed some broken plates, a rusty horseshoe and a few pieces of cutlery lying around on the grass down by the river. It made me very angry to see such carelessness, such mess. The Utopia Experiment was supposed to be about living in harmony with nature, not polluting it like the industrial civilization that we had left behind. Were we just repeating the same mistakes, screwing up our environment like every other society in human history? Or was this yet another sign of my deepening depression, leading me to notice the slightest evidence of dirt and decay? I gathered together the pieces in a pile, and as I did I noticed more rubbish lying around under the platform of the cooking area we had built by the yurts.
There could only be one person responsible for this mess – Adam. I flung aside the canvas flap and peered inside his yurt. He wasn’t there, but there was a pile of tools that had gone missing from the Barn, and some food that he had obviously squirrelled away for his own private consumption. I gathered up the tools and the food and stuffed everything in a wooden potato crate along with the cutlery and broken plates, and marched up to the Barn.
Half an hour later, Adam stormed in.
‘Who cleared away my shrine?’ he bellowed.
‘What fucking shrine?’ I shouted back. ‘Do you mean those broken plates you left lying around by the river? It was a mess!’
‘It was perfect,’ said Adam. ‘You had no right to clear that away. If you can’t see the beauty in it, that’s your problem. Those pieces were just perfect the way they were.’
Adam was staking a claim to his part of Utopia. He had already hinted, on a number of occasions, that he expected the volunteers to split into two groups – a sinful group of meat-eaters, under my command, and a pure group of vegetarians, under Adam’s spiritual guidance. The meat-eaters would live in the Barn, a straight-walled stone building, while the vegetarians would live down by the stream in the small round blue yurts. At first I had just dismissed these suggestions as flights of fancy, but as it became clear that Adam was serious, I realized I would have to confront him.
That night, I woke from my sleep to hear two voices whispering outside the yurt. I wasn’t sure who it was, and I didn’t catch all the words, but it was clear they were talking about Adam.
‘He’s stealing food from the Barn and hiding it in his yurt, for fuck’s sake!’
‘I know, and he keeps some of the tools down there too. I was looking for the saw yesterday and I couldn’t find the bloody thing.’
‘We should hold some kind of trial.’
‘What would the punishment be, if we find him guilty?’
At that moment, the wind began to howl, and I didn’t catch the whole reply, but I fancied I heard something about cutting off Adam’s hands.
‘We can’t do that, you crazy fucker!’
‘Why not? It’s not as if the police exist any more is it?’
Again, the noise of the wind obscured the reply. But the last remark puzzled me. Did the mystery speaker simply mean that, in the fictional scenario we were acting out, there would be no police force? Or did he somehow believe that civilization had actually collapsed, and there really were no police any more? The second possibility seemed far-fetched, but some of the volunteers were beginning to take it all very seriously, and this wasn’t the first time I had wondered whether the slim line between fantasy and reality might be fading away.
I should have known this was likely to happen. I had long been aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but some blind spot had prevented me from perceiving the obvious parallels with Utopia, and drawing some potentially illuminating lessons. In 1971 a psychology professor called Philip Zimbardo had created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Twenty-four male students volunteered to live there for a couple of weeks, with half taking on the role of prisoners, and the other half the role of guards.
On the second day of the experiment some of the prisoners blockaded their cell door with their beds and refused to come out or follow the guards’ instructions. The guards then set up a privilege cell in which prisoners who were not involved in the riot were given better meals. But the privileged inmates chose not to eat the better meals as a gesture of solidarity with their less fortunate companions, and the conflict escalated. Soon, one prisoner began, as Zimbardo put it, ‘to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control’.
The guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment went on. They placed buckets in the cells and wouldn’t let the prisoners urinate or defecate anywhere else. They wouldn’t let the prisoners empty the buckets, which filled up with faeces, and the cells began to smell. The guards would punish the prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on the concrete floor. By the sixth day Zimbardo decided things had gone too far, and cut the experiment short.
It may once have been possible to interpret Zimbardo’s experiment as revealing some kind of innate sadism, some evil that is intrinsic to human nature. But that interpretation seems to have been undermined by a later attempt to replicate the experiment. When the BBC recreated Zimbardo’s set-up in 2002, the guards did not degenerate into sadistic tyrants, and some even felt guilty about having power over the prisoners.
The real meaning of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that people very easily identify with the roles they play. The actual behaviour that results from taking on a given role will depend on a whole variety of factors, but the role itself will soon feel natural. This is in fact no more than what Plato pointed out over two thousand years before Zimbardo, when he warned against the dangers of acting. ‘Have you not noticed,’ he wrote in The Republic, ‘how dramatic representations, if indulgence in them is prolonged into adult life, establish habits of physical poise, intonation and thought which become second nature?’ The face takes on the shape of the mask it wears. Indeed our word personality is derived from the Latin persona, which referred to a theatrical mask.
I should have known, then, that the volunteers would likely become captivated by the roles they were playing, that what started out as a simulation would eventually become somewhat more than that, and take on an air
of increasing realism. But once again something that should have been obvious took me by surprise, and I only recalled the Stanford Prison Experiment when it was too late.
Over the course of the next two weeks, Adam kept threatening to leave Utopia and take one of the small yurts with him.
‘It’s not your yurt to take, Adam,’ I said, on one such occasion. ‘It belongs to the experiment. And it’s not your experiment either.’
‘I’m doing a different experiment,’ he replied, changing tack. ‘You can do yours up here, in the Barn area. I’ll do mine down there, by the river. That will be Adamland. I don’t believe in all this stuff about civilization collapsing anyway. I just want to live in accordance with the wishes of the Great Spirit.’
‘That’s not going to happen. And unless you can join in properly, and stop messing everything up, you’ll have to leave.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Adam snarled. ‘I already got your message. Clear out! That’s what you were telling me when you removed my shrine. Don’t worry, I’m going.’
Then he went back to his yurt and slept for the rest of the day.
The next day, he was gone.
I never saw Adam again. And though there was much less dissension in Utopia after he had gone, I came to miss him and his bizarre antics. And I realized that, of all the volunteers, I liked him the most. In fact, he was the only one for whom I really felt any affection at all – apart from Angus, who was an old friend, and technically not a ‘volunteer’ at all.
This made no sense. Adam could be disruptive, selfish and uncooperative. His constant references to the Great Spirit were transparently self-serving, and usually justified him taking a long nap while everyone else was working, or cultivating his heart-shaped herb garden instead of tending to staple crops.
But I found him fascinating. And more than that, there was something about him that resonated with me, something I felt drawn to. He was infuriating at times, but he could also be extremely funny, and very caring. And he was there right from the beginning, building the first yurts with me, cooking the first meals, chopping wood, when there was nobody else there, just the two of us.
I don’t think anyone else felt like this about him. Perhaps they saw him more accurately. ‘The ultimate paradox: a grumpy hippie,’ Ross had remarked. Angus put it more bluntly: ‘A fucking chancer,’ he grumbled. Everybody else seemed relieved to get rid of him. But for me, Utopia wasn’t quite so colourful without him. It began, in fact, to seem increasingly bleak.
12. SURVIVAL
In May, my growing doubts and fears finally coalesced into the biting, shattering conclusion that the whole experiment had been a huge mistake. I recall waking up one night, my heart beating rapidly, as if icy fingers were clawing at my chest. In the dim light I could just make out the shape of a bird’s skull suspended on a thread from the ceiling, twisting gently in the breeze from a crack in the canvas. The smell of damp socks mingled with the odour of stale wood smoke. On the other side of the yurt, Adam was snoring loudly. I sat up in my sleeping bag and tried to calm down, but as I shivered in the cold I wished I were back in my cottage in the Cotswolds, with a normal job and a regular income. I no longer understood why I had sold my house and given up my job and moved to Scotland to spend all my money on this madcap scheme. I was sure I had completely fucked up my whole life. When the experiment was over I would be destitute and homeless.
Everything seemed different compared to when I had first arrived, in July. When I looked around me in the Barn, it no longer felt like a cosy place to bake bread and eat supper. It was a fucking mess. Dark, musty and shabby, piled high with the remnants of my former life – a plate here, a cup there – it was a grotesque reminder of my craziness. This cup once sat on a beautiful pine shelf in my kitchen. This plate was once part of a set that I used when I had friends over to dinner in the long Cotswold summer evenings. None of the volunteers saw it this way, of course. These objects held no emotional connotations for them. And the gap between their perception and mine made me feel incredibly alone.
The whole experiment now struck me as a farce. It was taking much longer to become self-sufficient than I had anticipated, so we were still making regular runs to the supermarket to buy food to supplement our meagre crop. At first I had justified these shopping trips in terms of our scenario by arguing that in the immediate aftermath of a global catastrophe, the survivors would be able to scavenge supplies from local houses and abandoned shops. But the grace period offered by the leftovers of civilization would only last so long, and the survivors would have to make sure they could grow or catch all their own food by the time the packaged stuff ran out. Now, almost a year into the experiment, every trip to the supermarket felt like a betrayal. How valuable a simulation of life after the collapse of civilization could it be, if we were still popping down to Tesco every week?
To address this problem, and recover some sort of equilibrium, I came up with the concept of Post-Apocalyptic rating, or PA rating for short. If some activity or thing had a PA rating of 100 per cent it meant that it could be done, or could exist, in exactly the same way after the crash. Baked potatoes, for example, would have a PA rating of 100 per cent because we could grow our own potatoes, and bake them, without the need for any complex equipment that would eventually break and be impossible to repair. But a recipe that contained ingredients that could not be grown locally would have a lower PA rating. Lemon juice and olive oil, for example, would be unavailable in Scotland once modern transport links had broken down.
When we went shopping we would try not to buy anything with a PA rating of less than 100 per cent, so that even if we didn’t in fact grow it or make it ourselves, we could at least have done so in theory. But even when we stuck to this plan, the very fact that we were going shopping felt to me like cheating. The whole experiment began to seem like a sham, an extended camping trip, a bunch of soft-skinned Westerners kidding themselves that they were hardy backwoodsmen while all around them lay the trappings of urban life.
Apparently, the Unabomber fared no better. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, remarks that the Unabomber’s story collapses into the same ironic conclusion: even in his lonely Montana log cabin, he too lived off the fat of civilization:
The Unabomber’s shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine: snowshoes, boots, sweat shirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etc. – all things that he could have made himself, but did not. After 25 years on the job, why did he not make his own tools separate from the system? It looks like he shopped at Wal-Mart. The food he scavenged from the wild was minimal. Instead he regularly rode his bike to town and there rented an old car to drive to the big city to restock his food and supplies from supermarkets. He was either incapable of supporting himself without civilization, or unwilling to.
The trips to the supermarket didn’t seem to worry the volunteers, however, or dent their faith in the realism of the simulation. They went about their daily tasks with undimmed enthusiasm, as I watched in silent horror, unable or unwilling to tell them that the emperor was naked.
As I lost faith in the experiment, everyone else seemed to become even more committed. Agric was more convinced than ever that the first signs of global collapse were imminent. Pete and Tommy began to question the time-limited nature of the experiment. Why shut it all down after eighteen months, when we had put so much work into cultivating the land and building the yurts? Why not stay here indefinitely? It wouldn’t be long until civilization really did collapse anyway. And when it did, this would be a pretty good place to be, if we wanted to survive.
Just when I had ensnared them all in my delusion, I found I no longer believed in it myself. And it had slipped away as mysteriously as it had first taken root. But this liberation was not pleasant. On the contrary, it left me feeling deflated and broken.
‘We do not adopt a belief because it is true,’ wrote E. M. Cioran, ‘but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power
leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tête-à-tête with what is left of ourselves.’ Some obscure power had impelled me to believe in the imminent collapse of civilization, and that power had now left me as mysteriously as it had arrived. And the result was just as Cioran described; I suffered prostration and collapse. Mad though it may have been, that belief had kept me going for a year and a half. It had given me a reason to live, an energy that at times bordered on the manic, and a feeling of invincibility. It had carried me up to Scotland and protected me throughout the cold winter months. And now, in springtime, it had deserted me. I could still accept that civilization might collapse some time in the next hundred years or so, but it certainly wasn’t going to come crashing down in the next year or two. Hell, it might even last another millennium.
I now think of that realization as the start of my recovery, but at the time it seemed like the beginning of my madness. From then on I began to sink deeper and deeper into the darkest depression of my life, and to those around me I looked increasingly pathetic and incompetent, like someone who had suddenly lost his way in life. But the way I had lost was a road to oblivion, and though I was now off-road, and wandering around in the wilderness, at least I wasn’t heading directly towards the apocalypse any longer. The route out of the wilderness would take me through a dark valley, and even into a psychiatric hospital, but that was part of the recovery, and it would eventually lead me out of the woods and back into the bright daylight of sanity. The real madness was already over.
Now that Adam had gone, Agric began to assume a more dominant role, coordinating our efforts to grow vegetables, ensuring the header tank that fed the back boiler on the Rayburn was always topped up, and directing preparations for the evening meal. He was constantly on his feet, scampering around with a nervous energy that was by turns amusing and exasperating – exasperating because sometimes it seemed like activity for activity’s sake.