The Human Locusts

This from John D MacDonald’s novel „Bright Orange for the Shroud“ written in 1965. It could have been written today.

„The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob. Life gets cheaper. Cops, on a per capita basis, get fewer. And the imponderables of the bomb, of automation, of accelerating social change create a kind of urban despair that wants to break loose and crack heads.

All the barroom sociologists were orating about national fiber while, every minute and every hour, the most incredible population explosion in history was rendering their views, their judgments, even their very lives more obsolete. 

They should hark to the locust. When there is only a density of X per acre, he is a plain old grasshopper, munching circumspectly, content with his home ground. Raise it to 2X and an actual physical change begins to occur. His color changes, his jaw gets bigger, and the wing muscles begin to grow. 

At 3X they take off in great hungry clouds, each cloud a single herd instinct, chomping everything bare in its path. There is no decline in the moral fiber of the grasshopper. There is just a mass pressure canceling out all individual decisions.“