The Rat Race

A yuppie's vision of escaping the rat race.

Today, the term “rat race” came up in a lesson. A bit of a jog to the memory. You used, I think, to hear it a lot more in the 60s. That was what the 60s were all about, really: the idea of “escaping the rat race.” Back to the land, and all that. “I’ll never take any nine-to-five job”; “plastics”—remember?

That was before we all “sold out,” of course.

What exactly is a “rat race,” though? And what’s the problem with it? Why was the image so horrifying?

According to Wikipedia—and I think this is right—the idiom refers to a lab rat “running around a maze or in a wheel.” As Paul Simon wrote in the 60s, in one of his less original moments, “Like a rat/In a maze/The path before me lies./And the pattern never alters/Until/The rat dies.”

I think the maze allusion is also and necessarily a reference to behaviourism. Who else put rats in mazes? In the 60s, this was the dominant concept of psychology and education. If “the rat race” is a less common image now, it is because the behaviourists have now followed the social Darwinists and the young earthers into the dustbin of academic history. This has made the image lose a lot of its resonance. We may have lost touch with the original meaning as a result.

It came up in a lesson on “Stress.” “The rat race” supposedly speaks to the stresses of modern life.

I think that is right. But why? Ironically, BF Skinner and the behaviourists, in their experiments with rats, were in part trying to reduce the stresses of life. In Skinner’s imaginary “Walden Two,” “happiness of the citizens is far in advance of that in the outside world because of their practice of scientific social planning and use of operant conditioning in the raising of children.” Sounds good when you put it that way. But we all, at the time, took a very different message from the image of the struggling rat. Why? What does the rat in the maze have to do with stress?

The current lesson explains more specifically that “the rat race” means working too hard. It means a lack of “work-life balance.” A lot of “yuppies” seem to have had the same idea, and resolved the dilemma of the Sixties simply by taking longer vacations. But that is not actually implied in the original rat race in any way. In an exercise wheel, the rat is free to go as slowly as he likes. He is also free to spend as much time with his family as he likes. In fact, for the rat, the wheel is itself entirely recreational—like all that jogging the yuppies love to do. In the maze analogy, a rat race could be any particular degree of challenging. Mazes can be hard or easy. Skinner and the behaviourists wanted it all to be carefully calibrated not to be too easy or too difficult. They were not interested in exhausting the rats. What would be the point of that?

So it’s not really about working too hard.

Another interpretation of the “rat race,” given in the lesson, is that modern life is too competitive. That’s the Marxist takeaway from the 60s, I guess. But this does not work either, for the original image. The rat on the exercise wheel is competing with no one. And in the lab, nobody races rats competitively. And Skinner and the behaviourists actually themselves condemned competitiveness. Conversely, if competition was the problem, why is there no negative connotation to the term “a horse race”?

So let’s consider another possibility: is the problem with the rate race a lack of control? That does seem in some ways to work. Certainly for Skinner and the behaviourists, it was all about controlling the rat, in defiance, as he himself put it, of any concept of “freedom and dignity.” That really ought to make us gag, and some folks seem to have taken that as the lesson of the “rat race.” That’s the Libertarian takeaway from the 60s. But that doesn’t quite fit either. The rat on his wheel is actually in complete control, if he only realizes it. While the shadowy scientists are trying to control the maze rat, from his own perspective, he seems to be in complete control. If one wanted a clear image of loss of control, that would be the simple cage, not the maze or the exercise wheel.

On any sober analysis, the idea of control was always wrong, and we always knew it. As Pogo put it, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” “The Prisoner,” that essential intellectual product of the 60s, came to the same conclusion: number 1 turned out to be number 6 himself. The people who are loudest in their opposition to “the establishment” are invariably teachers, professors, lawyers, and politicians—the establishment personified. As they move up the ladder, and do not encounter the enemy, their paranoia only grows: obviously, if it is not yet apparent, this conspiracy is much bigger, better concealed, and more powerful than they could ever have imagined.

Which it is, in a certain sense. It is closer to them than their jugular vein.

Boredom also looks like a part of the problem: a rat running in a wheel looks as if he is bored, and behaviourist mazes are repetitive. But that is not a perfect hit either. To the rat, running in the wheel is probably not boring. It is fun, or he would not do it. Similarly, the operant conditioning boxes are probably relatively challenging if you are a rat.

Nah; the problem with being a rat in an exercise wheel is that you are not getting anywhere. The essence of a maze is the dead end.

In other words, the problem with modern life, that we felt so keenly in the Sixties, and that made the image of the “rat race” so compelling to us then, was meaninglessness, pointlessness.

This fits was a general critique of behaviourism: it held that humans had no free will, were just little machines. There was no question of moral choice or of transcendence. We were just reacting to stimuli, seeking material rewards and avoiding punishments. In which case, of course, there is no meaning to life.

I maintain that the sense of a lack of meaning is also the core experience of depression. The lack of meaning in modern life is why rates of depression have risen steadily since the Second World War. Nothing is a better image of the experience of depression than the rat on a wheel, or in the maze.

So what is the solution? How does one really escape this “rat race”? Drugs were the preferred method in the day. LSD was an obvious if wrongheaded search for meaning. The proper response and ancient prescription is religion: worship. Worth-ship—being able to discern and discriminate where true worth, which is to say meaning, lies.

It was the Jesus Freaks, the Moonies, and the Hare Krishnas who got the Sixties right. For the rest of us, it was just a tragically missed opportunity.