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The podcast episode “Deep Dive Into Rodents” explores how rodents, particularly mice, symbolize human anxieties about existence and meaning. The discussion covers themes like “authorization” (imposed meaning) and “embodiment” (pure existence), using examples from pop culture and real-life experiments, like John Calhoun’s “Mouse Utopia.” The episode delves into how rodents reflect human fears, the desire for control, and even existential crises, suggesting that both humans and rodents need a sense of purpose to thrive.

Generated by Google’s NotepadLM website given these links and the customization:

1) Rodents and the entanglement of authorization and embodiment

2) Calhoun and the Murine Oedipal Crisis of Authorization

3) God = Boo: Big Other as Ignorant Ghost in Fleabag

4) Okay but where is your hamster? (Slavoj Žižek)

Customization:

You have to give contextual info before giving every example. Begin with the fictional rodents and what they symbolize and conclude with the real rodent experiment!

This is part of Numerical Discourses

Note: The guinea pig in Fleabag is not called Boo.

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Welcome everyone to another Deep Dive. Get ready, because today we’re going beyond the cute, the fuzzy, and, let’s be honest, sometimes kind of gross to uncover what rodents really tell us about ourselves.

Now think about it, have you ever noticed how just a tiny little mouse, like in your kitchen, can suddenly make you question the entire order of the universe? It’s wild. These creatures, which we often relegate to the shadows or write off as just annoyances, become these really powerful mirrors. They reflect our deepest anxieties about existence, meaning, and the stories we tell ourselves about why we’re here.

And to really dig into all of that, we’ve got to start with two key ideas from our research stack. Those are authorization and embodiment. They sound kind of complicated, but I promise they’re not. They just get at how we make sense of the world. Think of authorization as the meaning we impose on something, the role we assign it. Like, a dog is a loyal companion, but a wolf, which is its wild cousin, is a fierce predator. Same family, totally different authorizations.

Then embodiment is basically just the thing itself, as it exists. Exactly, just pure existence. It’s the physical reality without any of the extra meaning we like to pile on. But here’s where things get really interesting: rodents.

Because we don’t just see a mouse, do we? We see this whole narrative, this whole story unfolding.

Oh, absolutely. Case in point: the dreaded house mouse. You know that sound, right? That little “skitter skitter” in a silent room where you catch those beady eyes in the dark. It’s practically straight out of a horror movie. And that, my friend, is a perfect example of negative authorization in action.

We’ve collectively decided the house mouse just doesn’t belong. It’s this disruption of order, of hygiene, and bam, instant threat. Suddenly, this tiny creature embodies chaos, invading our nice, clean, controlled world.

It’s like they go beyond unauthorized—they’re anti-authorized, like the opposite of everything we want our homes to be.

Yes, and this authorized rodent thing goes way beyond literal fear too. Think about that giant menacing rat in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It’s not just there for shock value; it’s reflecting the main character’s own feelings of alienation, like he’s being pushed out of society, deemed unworthy in a way.

Wow, a lot to unpack in just one creepy rodent.

It really makes you think though, how often are we just projecting our own anxieties onto these creatures?

All the time! But it’s not always fear or negativity. Let’s change it up a bit. Think about those moments where rodents are just there, not menacing, not even given a cutesy name—just existing as pure embodiment.

You mean like in those nature documentaries where they zoom in on a field mouse just nibbling on a seed, and it’s all like, “Behold the majesty of the circle of life”?

Sure, but what about a scene in the film Blue by Kieślowski? The main character finds newborn mice in her closet, right? Not attacking or anything, but the scene is still unsettling. And that’s because they represent just pure, unfiltered existence.

Okay, I see where you’re going with this—not cute pets, not scary monsters, so they become this blank slate, this void that freaks us out a little.

Exactly. One of the articles called it “brutal meaninglessness,” and that’s exactly what makes it so unsettling for us. We humans, we’re hardwired to assign meaning, to categorize, to understand. But these mice? They resist all that. They just are.

So we’ve gone from terrifying intruders to symbols of our fear of meaninglessness. That’s quite the range for these little guys.

But what about when we do give them meaning, like when we make them pets, for example?

Ah, now that’s where things get even more interesting. So we’ve got these little creatures reflecting our deepest fears or our human need to make sense of the world, but then we’re putting them in tiny sweaters and giving them names like Mr. Nibbles.

It’s like we’re trying to force cuteness on them as a defense mechanism.

Totally. Giving them names, the tiny sweaters—it’s all about authorization. We’re taking something that just exists on its own terms and cramming it into a box we understand.

And there’s so much humor in that, right? Like on Friends when Phoebe’s convinced her pet rat is a boy and names him Bob.

Yeah, it’s funny because it’s just absurd—imposing our human gender norms on something that, you know, couldn’t care less.

Exactly. We’re trying so hard to project meaning, to authorize, and the rodent’s just over there like, “Whatever, dude.”

But this need to give meaning—it’s not always just laughs. Sometimes it gets pretty deep.

You’re going to mention Boo, aren’t you? The guinea pig from Fleabag, because that’s more than just a cute pet, right? It’s practically a symbol of everything the main character is going through.

You got it. She loses her best friend, who is also named Boo, and she just latches onto this guinea pig. And the name itself, Boo, it’s like a ghost, a lingering presence. It’s like she’s literally trying to hold on to a piece of her friend through this animal.

Except it’s also all the stuff she can’t actually say out loud: the guilt, the loneliness, her fear of dealing with the grief.

And that brings us to this idea philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls “the hamster.”

Before you picture a tiny wheel, he’s not talking about literal hamsters here. It’s an analogy for anything we fixate on so we don’t have to face bigger, scarier truths about ourselves.

So Fleabag and the guinea pig—that’s her hamster. It lets her channel all that emotional energy into something real, something she can control, instead of facing the messiness of, you know, actual grief.

Exactly. But our whole deal with rodents isn’t always about individual psychology. Sometimes it says something about society at large. Let’s take lab rats, for instance.

Ah yes, those unsung heroes—or maybe martyrs—of scientific research, right?

But think about how we talk about them: their numbers, data points in these super-controlled experiments. That’s systematic, depersonalized authorization if I’ve ever seen it.

It’s like we’re intentionally taking away any individuality, any embodiment, so they become tools in our quest for knowledge.

Exactly. And there’s this distinction people make between masculine and feminine approaches to knowledge, right?

And the lab rat, viewed through the traditionally masculine lens, becomes just another cog in the machine of progress. It’s about control, objectivity—no room for feelings.

Whereas a more feminine perspective might look at the ethics of it all, emphasizing those individual creatures and acknowledging what they’re sacrificing.

Right. It’s about recognizing that life is messy, that meaning and embodiment are all tangled up. And maybe no experiment shows us this tension more clearly than John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia. Are you familiar with that one?

Oh yeah, now we’re getting into some real-life rodent drama. For those who don’t know, what was this experiment all about?

Imagine a rodent paradise: all the space you could want, endless food and water, perfect nesting spots. Calhoun built this utopia to study how mouse populations would grow in, like, perfect conditions—no predators, nothing to worry about.

Honestly, sounds too good to be true. So there’s a catch, right?

Big time, and it revealed something really profound about not just mice, but maybe even us humans too. This mouse utopia? Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a paradise for long, was it?

Yeah, not exactly. Like, at first the population exploded, just like Calhoun thought it would, but then it got kind of dark. They had everything, right, but they stopped connecting with each other. Reproduction rates tanked, they became withdrawn, some even got aggressive. The whole utopia thing completely fell apart.

Wait, so with all their physical needs met, they just kind of lost the will to be mice? That’s both really sad and kind of terrifying.

It is. Calhoun called it “behavioral sink.” His theory was that they had all this abundance, but they lost something crucial—a sense of purpose, their place in the grand scheme of mouse society. They stopped having litters of baby mice. And if you think about those litters as their purpose, the letters they’re putting out into the world, they lost that drive.

So it’s almost like they had an existential crisis, like these mice were dealing with a crisis of authorization, even though their basic embodiment was totally taken care of.

You got it. And it goes back to how dangerous it is to separate those two things—meaning and existence. Calhoun’s experiment suggests that even with every comfort in the world, if a creature doesn’t have a sense of purpose, they can just lose the will to go on.

Which makes you think about all the rodents we’ve been talking about, right? The ones in our homes, the ones in labs—each one kind of shows us a different side of how we create meaning, how we try to force order on this world that often feels pretty chaotic.

And Calhoun’s experiment, it’s like this stark warning. If mice need a sense of purpose to actually thrive, what does that mean for us?

That’s a really good question. Like, what are our litters? What are we putting out there—the mark we want to leave on the world? Are we doing it on purpose, creating that meaning, or are we all just stuck in some big, overcrowded, totally stressful mouse utopia of our own?

Something to think about, right? And maybe the next time you see a squirrel prepping for winter or you hear those little mouse feet in the walls, you might pause for a second and just think about it—think about how these creatures that we think are so insignificant actually play this really deep role in how we understand ourselves and this whole strange, beautiful, often really unsettling world we’re all living in.

This deep dive has been mind-blowing, to say the least. We hope you’ll keep exploring these ideas, keep asking questions, and keep your mind open to finding wisdom in the most unexpected places. That’s what it’s all about, right? So, until next time, keep diving.